For more than seventeen years, Lin Kong, a devoted & ambitious doctor, has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young. Every year he visits her in order to ask, again & again, for a divorce. In a culture in which the ancient ties of tradition & family still hold sway & where adultery discovered by the Party can ruin lives forever, Lin's passionate love is stretched ever more taut by the passing years. Every summer, his compliant wife agrees to a divorce but then backs out. This time, Lin promises, will be different WAITING charms & startles with its depiction of a China that remains hidden to Western eyes even as it moves with its piercing vision of the universal complications of love. ...

The Jehovahs have always been a tight-knit family & one of the biggest names in universal property development. The driving force behind them is the old boy, God, although in recent millennia he has ceased to play an active role & has become something of a recluse.

Now tragedy has struck the House of Jehovah. God has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving his beloved planet earth to his youngest son, Colin, which seems deeply suspicious, as everyone felt certain that the meek were supposed to inherit it. Colin is all for flogging off the planet to the highest bidder, & this looks like being the Jehovahs

...

It is September 1944; the war is going badly for the Germans, & they are in a hurry to complete their 'final solution'. Compromises are being made on all sides, conditions are unspeakable, rumours are rife, but nothing definite is known of the Nazis' intentions. On the outskirts of a concentration camp in northern Bohemia three people
- two eighteen-year-old men & a desperately lost young woman, Leah
- are thrown together, sharing their precarious existence in an attic room. While the world disintegrates around them their relationships are charged with passion, their days filled with erotic & spiritual attraction. Caught in the web of their relationships, their futures are uncertain & any choices they have left to make will be made in the face of almost certain death...

...

Mid-winter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold & in the darkest days of the war. It is six months before D-Day & the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe.

RAF officer Martin Paget is returning home for Christmas He has been on covert operations in France & knows he has to return there. While in Engl&, he rediscovers a passion that he thought was long over.

In a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, Sergeant Harris's mind is occupied by questions of just how his young & ebullient wife is coping with their separation. His troops are training for landing on the shores of Normandy.

US officer Harry Miller arrives in Somerset where his American division has set up its headquarters. His affair with an Englishwoman is both bittersweet & potentially dangerous.

Enjoying fishing off the coast of occupied Jersey is German cook sergeant Fred Weber. He believes he has found a sort of peace in the midst of the terrible conflict. But his calm is soon to be shattered as his war takes on a violent twist...

Each man is heading inexorably towards the beaches of France where the great battle will begin...









...

Mid-winter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold & in the darkest days of the war. It is six months before D-Day & the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe.

RAF officer Martin Paget is returning home for Christmas He has been on covert operations in France & knows he has to return there. While in Engl&, he rediscovers a passion that he thought was long over.

In a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, Sergeant Harris's mind is occupied by questions of just how his young & ebullient wife is coping with their separation. His troops are training for landing on the shores of Normandy.

US officer Harry Miller arrives in Somerset where his American division has set up its headquarters. His affair with an Englishwoman is both bittersweet & potentially dangerous.

Enjoying fishing off the coast of occupied Jersey is German cook sergeant Fred Weber. He believes he has found a sort of peace in the midst of the terrible conflict. But his calm is soon to be shattered as his war takes on a violent twist...

Each man is heading inexorably towards the beaches of France where the great battle will begin...









...

The first that indolent young Sriram knows about Mahatma Ghandi's visit to Malgudi is when a collection box is waved beneath his nose by the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. The vision's name is Bharato. Capable & quick-witted, her scorn for her gauche but ardent admirer is almost equal to her devotion to the Mahatma. Yet that is how Sriram leaves Malgudi to become a passionate apostle of the Quit India campaign
- only to find his convictions tested by the rigours of a prison cell.
...

Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora
- storyteller & king's fool. Over the course of
...

Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora
- storyteller & king's fool. Over the course of
...