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Books > Fiction > Special features
'Already it looked as if the police were up against a carefully
planned and cleverly executed murder, and, what was more, a murder
without a corpse!' Two brothers, John and William Rother, live
together at Chalklands Farm in the beautiful Sussex Downs. Their
peaceful rural life is shattered when John Rother disappears and
his abandoned car is found. Has he been kidnapped? Or is his
disappearance more sinister - connected, perhaps, to his growing
rather too friendly with his brother's wife? Superintendent
Meredith is called to investigate - and begins to suspect the worst
when human bones are discovered on Chalklands farmland. His
patient, careful detective method begins slowly to untangle the
clues as suspicion shifts from one character to the next. This
classic detective novel from the 1930s is now republished for the
first time, with an introduction by the award-winning crime writer
Martin Edwards.
The 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction returns with a
collection of 14 short stories, rife with characters who will stay
with you well beyond the last page Edward P. Jones, the bestselling
and prize-winning author of 'The Known World', returns to the form
that first inspired him - the short story In this collection, Jones
returns to the city that inspired his first book, 'Lost in the
City'. This is the story of Washington DC, a city full of bustling
life, bursting forth from the banks of the swampy Potomac. These
are the stories of the city's ordinary inhabitants, its labourers
and lawyers, sailors and nuns, children and pensioners - people who
in Jones's masterful hands emerge as fully human and morally
complex. Casting his net wide, Jones explores the American Dream on
an epic canvas, from the dawn of the twentieth century until modern
times. His memorable cast of characters find themselves caught
between the old ways of the agricultural America of their past and
the temptations of the big city, struggling against the inequities
locked within slavery's legacy. Both witty and poignant, touching
and shocking, this collection is sure to make a lasting impression
and further confirm Jones as one of the masters of the genre.
One more journey to the universe of Roberto Bolano, an essential
voice of contemporary Latin American literature Cowboy Graves is an
unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent.
Roberto Bolano's boundless imagination and seemingly inexhaustible
gift for shaping the chaos of his reality into fiction is
unmistakable in these three novellas. In "Cowboy Graves," Arturo
Belano--Bolano's alter ego--returns to Chile after the coup to
fight with his comrades for socialism. "French Comedy of Horrors"
takes the reader to French Guiana on the night after an eclipse
where a seventeen year old answers a pay phone and finds himself
recruited into the Clandestine Surrealist Group, a secret society
of artists based in the sewers of Paris. And in "Fatherland," a
young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as
the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence
and a Third Reich fighter plane mysteriously writes her poetry in
the sky overhead. These three fiercely original tales bear the
signatures of Bolano's extraordinary body of work, echoing the
strange characters and uncanny scenes of his triumphs, while
deepening our reverence for his gifts.
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