Alexander Pushkin's epic magic-realist tale is brought vividly to life in this superb translation by D. M. Thomas. Drawing on the Russian folklore of Pushkin's childhood, the poem recounts the abduction of Princess Ludmila by the evil wizard Chernomor and the attempt by the brave knight Ruslan to rescue his bride. Ruslan must embark on a perilous quest, encountering an intriguing cast of characters - including a hermit, a witch and a pugnacious floating head - before he can be reunited with his love. Ruslan and Ludmila is a vibrantly colourful blend of traditional chivalry, outrageous humour and exciting escapades: a gorgeous display of the poet's astonishing imagination.

'There aren't many poets in England as good as Thomas' - Guardian. 'It is Thomas' achievement to give us a clear if uncomfortable picture of both the loving and the brutalising fantasies on which our hearts continue to feed.' - TLS. 'He is a first-rate poet... a clear and sensuously impressive writer.' - Gavin Ewart. 'Thomas' move towards being an internationally important prose writer has not adversely affected his poetry. In fact, quite the opposite has occurred and he is going from strength to strength.' - Martin Booth, Tribune.

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of searing eroticism and sensuality set against the broad sweep of twentieth-century history. Now a BBC radio play starring Anne-Marie Duff and Bill Paterson, dramatised by Dennis Potter. 'A novel of blazing imaginative and intellectual force' Salman Rushdie It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of our century and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, THE WHITE HOTEL is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate. 'A remarkable and original novel . . . there is no novel to my knowledge which resembles this in technique or ideas. It stands alone' Graham Greene 'Astonishing . . . A forthright sensuality mixed with a fine historical feeling for the nightmare moments in modern history, a dreamlike fluidity and quickness' John Updike 'I quickly came to feel that I had found that book, that mythical book, that would explain us to ourselves' Leslie Epstein, New York Times

From her appearance in a small magazine in 1906 to her death in 1965, Anna Akhmatova was a dominant presence in Russian literary life. But this friend of Pasternak and Mandelstam was a poet in a country where poetry was literally a matter of life and death, as she found when Mandelstam and her own husband, Gumilyev, were executed, and her son imprisoned for many years in the Gulag. Akhmatova's first collection, Evening, appeared in 1912. Rosary (1914) made her a household name. After the Revolution she went in and out of favour with the authorities, who sometimes allowed her to publish, sometimes banned her work. She is now most celebrated in the West for Poem Without A Hero and Requiem, a sequencemourning the victims of Stalin's Terror which was only published (and then outside Russia) in 1963.

A legend in her own time both for her brilliant poetry and for her resistance to oppression, Anna Akhmatova--denounced by the Soviet regime for her "eroticism, mysticism, and political indifference"--is one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century.
Before the revolution, Akhmatova was a wildly popular young poet who lived a bohemian life. She was one of the leaders of a movement of poets whose ideal was "beautiful clarity"--in her deeply personal work, themes of love and mourning are conveyed with passionate intensity and economy, her voice by turns tender and fierce. A vocal critic of Stalinism, she saw her work banned for many years and was expelled from the Writers' Union--condemned as "half nun, half harlot." Despite this censorship, her reputation continued to flourish underground, and she is still among Russia's most beloved poets.
Here are poems from all her major works--including the magnificent "Requiem" commemorating the victims of Stalin's terror--and some that have been newly translated for this edition.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) had a life that spanned prerevolution Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism. Throughout it all, she maintained a restrained, graceful, yet muscular style that could grab a reader by the throat, or the heart, at a moment's notice. Her themes include romantic yearning and frustration, the pull of the sensory, the emotional power of the mundane, and her belief that a Russian poet could only produce poetry in Russia. By reputation, both Akhmatova's poems and the poet herself are defined by tragedy and beauty in equal measure, and she is for many the quintessential twentieth-century Russian poet. You Will Hear Thunder spans Akhmatova's very early career into the early 1960s. These poems were written through her bohemian prerevolution days, her many marriages, the terror and privation of life under Stalin, and her later years, during which she saw her work once again recognized by the Soviet state. Intricately observed and unwavering in their emotional immediacy, these strikingly modern poems represent one of the twentieth century's most powerful voices.