Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios for Bloomsbury" in World Literature

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet yet published.

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.

Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act alters the course of her life forever. Taking along her younger sister, she flees their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. But in a capital city awash with change, a black woman is still treated as a second-class citizen. From a room in a boarding house and a job at a supply store, Gloria finds her way to a house of ill repute on the edge of the city, intrigued by the glamorous, financially independent women within.

As a young boy, Pao comes to Jamaica in the wake of the Chinese Civil War and rises to become the Godfather of Kingston's bustling Chinatown. Pao needs to take care of some dirty business, but he is no Don Corleone. The rackets he runs are small-time, and the protection he provides necessary, given the minority status of the Chinese in Jamaica. Pao, in fact, is a sensitive guy in a wise guy role that doesn't quite fit. Often mystified by all that he must take care of, Pao invariably turns to Sun Tzu's Art of War.

As comic as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles several months in the lives of an estranged family of colourful eccentrics. Harry Rosenmerck is an ageing Jewish cardiologist who has left his thriving medical practice in New York - to raise pigs in Israel. His ex-wife, Monique, ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly battles an aggressive illness. Their son, David, an earnest and successful playwright, has vowed to reconnect with his father since coming out. Annabelle, their daughter, finds herself unmoored in Paris in the aftermath of a breakup.

Tanya Tania is a story about two young women coming of age in two countries that are coming of age. Tanya Talati in Karachi and Tania Ghosh in Bombay, daughters of college best friends, write to each other of what cannot be said to anyone else: a mother who has gone from quiet to silent, sex that has become a weapon, a servant with unforgettably soft hands and a country beginning to play with religion.

The author of the immortal Lolita and Pale Fire, born to an eminent Russian family, conjures the apotheosis of the high modernist artist: cultured, refined - as European as they come. But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land.

A Colombian writer is witness to a murder that will mark him forever. A woman sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return, while he lies in another woman's bed 20 kilometers away. Through blood-soaked betrayal, a love affair, murder, and long-meditated revenge, Vasquez achieves an extraordinary unity of emotion, morality, and landscape with these fragmented lives.

Kirpal Singh is riding the slow train to Kashmir. With India passing by his window, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for 14 years. Kirpal, called Kip, is shy and not yet 20 when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar’s camp, nestled in the shadow of the Siachen Glacier. At 20,000 feet, the glacier makes a forbidding battlefield; its crevasses claimed the body of Kip’s father. Kip becomes an apprentice under the camp’s chef, Kishen, a fiery mentor....

In 1953, Winston Churchill received the Nobel Prize - for Literature. In fact, Churchill was a professional writer before he was a politician, and published a stream of books and articles over the course of two intertwined careers. Now historian Peter Clarke traces the writing of the magisterial work that occupied Churchill for a quarter century, his four-volume History of the English-Speaking Peoples. As an author, Churchill faced woes familiar to many others - chronically short of funds, late on deadlines, scrambling to sell new projects....