Книги, похожие на «Antoni Libera, Madame»

From Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, this is the second instalment in the visionary novel cycle ‘Canopus in Argos: Archives’.This is the story of the kindly Queen of Zone Three, who rules a land free of all harshness, and her forced marriage with the soldier-king of Zone Four, which is hierarchic, disciplined, inflexible, dutiful. This apparently difficult marriage, unwanted by both, requires a compromise between impulse and reason, between instinct and logic.Ben Ata learns to accept and then to love the ruler of Zone Three and her alien ways; and she learns to love and to need him. But when the Queen is commanded by the Providers to return to her own realm, she must obey, shattering though it is to leave her husband and child. Ben Ata, in turn, is ordered to marry the savage beauty who rules Zone Five, a land that both unites and reverses the other two Zones.In ‘The Marriages …’ Doris Lessing uses science-fiction brilliantly to investigate the conflict between men and women. Once again, invented planets allow her to deploy her unillusioned knowledge of the real world of the reader.

‘My Secret Life’ is a dark work of Victorian erotica, and an explicit memoir of unspoken desires in the English class system – encapsulating the joy of hidden sins in an age of moral fervour.Would you undress with the curtains open?A champagne-drinking Victorian traveller, Walter is lascivious, obnoxious and possessed of an insatiable sexual appetite. Through a bawdy catalogue of indecent scenarios with maids, widows and wenches, he solicits an indulgent exploration of the flesh. His obsessions, fantasies and voyeuristic tendencies are explored and revealed within this diary – one of the most famous examples of Victorian erotic literature from the decadent era.Only six copies of ‘My Secret Life’ were initially printed in 1888. Attempts to republish the book resulted in the novel being repeatedly banned.