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Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY, tel: +44(0)20 7494 2111, fax: +44 (0)20 7434 0151 |
Book division successes 2001 |
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A Cooks Tour by Anthony
Bourdain I wanted the perfect meal. I also wanted Col. Walter E. Kurtz, Lord Jim, Lawrence of Arabia, Kim Philby, the Consul, Fowler, Tony Po, Christopher Walken ... I wanted to find — no, I wanted to be — one of those debauched heroes and villains out of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Francis Coppola and Michael Cimino. I wanted to wander the world in a dirty seersucker suit, getting into trouble. |
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Nelson by Frank Hurley Nelson was a paramount naval genius and a natural born predator, and those who look to find a saint besides will miss the man. The strength of mind is everywhere obvious. He knew he was right and in action daring and direct. His originality asserts itself again and again, and so does his quixotic generosity. But in private life, as in war he was ruthless whenever he had to be, and he could be pitiless. He was a fanatic for duty, at times beyond all sense, and a royalist so infatuated with the divine right of kings that he began to see himself, in revolutionary times as the instrument of God. This made him a good hater. He hated the American rebels of the thirteen colonies, and the harmless liberal rebels against the Bourbon king of Naples, as unforgivingly as he hated the revolutionary French and then Napoleon. |
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South with Endurance
by Frank Hurley The story told here through Frank Hurley’s lens began in the summer of 1914, when Shackleton and his crew set sail from England with the intention of being the first to cross Antarctica from one coast to the other, passing through the South Pole on the way. After five months they reached the freezing Weddell Sea and were within sight of land when the Endurance became trapped in the pack ice. Nine months later the ship was finally crushed, leaving the crew stranded on drifting floes at the end of the earth. |
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The Adversary by Emmanuel Carrère Who could have imagined Romand as a murderer? He was, after all, a noted doctor at the World Health Organisation, a groundbreaking researcher with connections to international humanitarian figures, a financial wizard entrusted with his in-laws' life savings and a loving son who called his parents every evening to say good-night. In truth Romand had no medical degree; no job; he knew no one of any influence, he had spent his in-laws' money. And when a relative went to break the terrible news of the murder of his wife and children to Romand's parents, they too were dead -murdered by the stranger who had been their son. |
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Dangerous Parking by Stuart Browne Noah Arkwright has experienced too much. A filmmaker and now a dry alcoholic, he's lived life to the full - with sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll as his relentless backdrop - but now the stakes are even higher. In his struggle to survive, Noah's cancer forces him to evaluate his chequered past life, and as a picture builds of a brave and incredibly foolish man, gradually it becomes clear that he is a modern-day hero of truly epic proportions. |
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Deliver Us From Evil by William Shawcross We have all seen press and television pictures of winding lines of refugees in Africa or on mountain passes in Europe and felt that 'something must be done'. In this urgent new book William Shawcross reveals what lies behind decisions by the 'international community' to intervene in a situation on humanitarian grounds, and what happens when the troops and aid agencies move in. It is a story of noble aspirations and often ignoble real politik. |
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Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman Goldman has even more secrets to tell. He shares behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the sets of such movies as The Princess Bride, Misery, Maverick and Absolute Power. He fills us in on what it's like to work with Mel Gibson, Michael Douglas, Clint Eastwood, and many other Hollywood players. He tells us what does and doesn't work on film and why, conducting a virtual writer's clinic on classic moments in great screenplays, among them the crop-dusting scene in North By Northwest and the zipper scene in There's Something About Mary. |
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Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain After twenty-five years of 'sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine', chef and novelist Anthony Bourdain has decided to tell all. From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown (where he first experiences the real delights of being a chef); through the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, to Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain's tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny. |
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Polly's Running Away Book by Frances Thomas Illustrated by Sally Gardner Polly is not happy. Her mother is pregnant and can't stop talking about 'the new baby'. Her little sister is exceptionally annoying. Her hamster has gone missing AND she is no longer best friends with her best friend! So Polly decides to follow Shakespeare's example and run away from home, recording all her plans in a hilarious diary. |
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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Paperback by J.K. Rowling It is Harry Potter's fourth year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and there are spells to be learnt and (unluckily) Potions and Divination lessons to be attended. But Harry can't know that the atmosphere is darkening around him, and his worst enemy is preparing a fate that seems inescapable ... |
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The Fourth Hand by John Irving While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant; meanwhile, in the distracting aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, the surgeon is seduced by his housekeeper. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand - that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young and healthy. |
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The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart Characters in Jane Urquhart's magnificent new novel seem to strive for the impossible. Father Archangel Gstir, a Bavarian priest, is sent by God and King Ludwig to the wilds of Canada to set up a new parish. Recruiting Joseph Becker, an old-world trained carver, to create a crucifix, Archangel whips up enough local pageantry, including drumming Orangemen, to rally a congregation, and eventually to build a huge stone church and to install a bell. |
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll Unavailable in any edition since 1978, Mervyn Peake's extraordinary illustrations, many of which were drawn on poor-quality wartime paper, have been restored to their former clarity and crispness by a combination of old-fashioned craft and the latest computer technology. They are now meticulously reproduced, for the first time, as they were meant to be seen. This exquisite two-volume set is the first edition to do justice to a rare combination of two great English eccentrics. |
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30 Days in Sydney:A wildly distorted account by Peter Carey After living in New York for ten years novelist Peter Carey returned home to Sydney with the idea of capturing its ebullient character via the four elements. 'I would never seek to define Manhattan by asking my New York friends for stories of Earth and Air and Fire and Water,' he writes, 'but that is exactly what was in my mind as I walked through immigration at Kingsford Smith International Airport.' |
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Aberystwyth Mon Amour by Malcolm Pryce Schoolboys are being murdered all over Aberystwyth and nobody knows why. Louie Knight, the town's private investigator, soon realizes that it is going to take more than a double ripple from Solsan, the philosopher cum ice-cream seller, to help him find out what is happening to the boys. |
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Witch Child by Celia Rees 'I am Mary. I am a witch. Or so some would call me. 'Spawn of the Devil,' 'Witch Child,' they hiss on the street …' So begins the journal kept by a fourteen-year-old girl in the 1650s, which lay hidden for centuries in a quilt until finally falling loose when the quilt is cleaned. Mary sees her grandmother, the woman who brought her up, executed as a witch and she knows that the healing skills and abilities that saw her grandmother condemned may well be her own undoing. So she runs away and joins a group of pilgrims travelling to the New World. But when Mary eventually arrives in Massachusetts, she once again becomes the target of superstition. Can she avoid her grandmother’s fate? |
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The Battersea Park Road to Enlightenment by Isabel Losada Beginning with an Insight seminar where 100 people with name badges learn to 'share', Isabel Losada journeys through a course of 'rolfing', nude Goddess workshops, a weekend of tantric sex, a reincarnation session, and a spot of colonic irrigation in her 'quest' for enlightenment. |
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The death of Vishnu by Manil Suri An extraordinary debut novel which is being acclaimed
around the world. Manil Suri turns a single Bombay apartment
block into a vibrant portrait of India in microcosm.
Vishnu, the odd-job man lies dying on the apartments'
staircase. Slipping in an out of consciousness, he replays
scenes from his life - lovemaking with the luscious
Padmini, his mother brewing tea, the smile of a lovely
young woman. As Vishnu's soul begins its final journey,
Suri explores the lives of the residents, recounting
their all too human desires and preoccupations. |
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The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris by Edmund White The first volume in Bloomsbury's 'The Writer and the
City Series', in which it aims to commission 'some of
the finest writers if our time to reveal the secrets
of the city they know best'. White certainly knows his
Paris, a city full of charm and incident, but also one
stuck in a dream of it own past glories. He is a splendid
guide, delivering fascinating insights into the familiar
aspects of the City of Light, and intriguing details
about the darker corners. |
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