Книги, похожие на «Hilary Mantel, Learning to Talk: Short stories»

‘A wonderfully warm tale of weddings, funerals, marathon sauna contests – and the incomparable thrill of your first kiss, from “the Nick Hornby of the Arctic”.’ Marina Warner, Sunday TimesIts the 1960s, and pop records are gradually finding their way into the eager hands of teenagers in the far north of Sweden. Young Matti dreams of being a rock star – but in the tiny ice-bound village of Pajala, a boy should really spend his time cultivating more manly pursuits, such as hunting elk, drinking moonshine and fighting on dancefloors…‘Popular Music’ is one of the freshest, funniest debuts of recent years, and winner of the August prize, Sweden’s equivalent of the Man Booker. So wrap up warm and join Matti and the unforgettable community of Pajala in a wonderful tale of weddings, funerals and marathon sauna contests, the incomparable thrill of your first kiss – and of finally hearing the Beatles.

A novel for those who loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Poisonwood Bible and The Lovely Bones.Raped then murdered in Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is 12-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family’s web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable ‘Hungry Ghosts’ have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.The Hungy Ghosts is a remarkable tour-de-force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.