Recommendations based on "A Time of Gifts"

By the bestselling, prize-winning author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood… and the ghost of E.M. Forster.We just need to know what the heart’s capable of, Evelyn.And do you know what it’s capable of?I do. Grace and fury.It’s 1944 and in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allied troops advance and bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening together.Ulysses Temper is a young British solider and one-time globe-maker, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view.These two unlikely people find kindred spirits in each other and Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses mind that will shape the trajectory of his life – and of those who love him – for the next four decades.Moving from the Tuscan Hills, to the smog of the East End and the piazzas of Florence, Still Life is a sweeping, mischievous, richly-peopled novel about beauty, love, family and fate.

A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. It is his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s, filled with irreverent portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft. It is a literary feast, brilliantly evoking the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the youthful spirit, unbridled creativity, and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERIlja Leonard Pfeijffer’s moving and addictive masterpiece of European identity, nostalgia and the end of an era.‘A masterpiece: grandiose style, brilliant and rich. It will defy the ages’ Trouw (The Netherlands)‘The love of my life lives in my past. That is, despite the alliteration, a terrible sentence to write. I do not want to come to the conclusion that, as it is the case for the hotel where I am staying and the continent after which it is named, the best time is behind me and that I have little more to expect from the future than to live on my past.’A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time. All the while, globalisation seems to be grabbing hold even on this place frozen in time.Grand Hotel Europa is Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s masterly novel on the old continent, where so much history resides that there is no place left for a future and where the most realistic future perspectives are offered in the form of exploiting the past in the shape of tourism.

First edition thus. Originally published in Mademoiselle. An autobiographical story of Capote's childhood. 10 , 45+ 1 pages. quarter blue cloth, tan cloth-covered boards, paper label with photograph.. 8vo..

paperback, fine

A magnificent epic of love, war and Russia from the international bestselling author of TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE Leningrad 1941: the white nights of summer illuminate a city of fallen grandeur whose palaces and avenues speak of a different age, when Leningrad was known as St Petersburg. Two sisters, Tatiana and Dasha, share the same bed, living in one room with their brother and parents. The routine of their hard impoverished life is shattered on 22 June 1941 when Hitler invades Russia. For the Metanov family, for Leningrad and particularly for Tatiana, life will never be the same again. On that fateful day, Tatiana meets a brash young man named Alexander. The family suffers as Hitler's army advances on Leningrad, and the Russian winter closes in. With bombs falling and the city under siege, Tatiana and Alexander are drawn inexorably to each other, but theirs is a love that could tear Tatiana's family apart, and at its heart lies a secret that could mean death to anyone who hears it. Confronted on the one hand by Hitler's vast war machine, and on the other by a Soviet system determined to crush the human spirit, Tatiana and Alexander are pitted against the very tide of history, at a turning point in the century that made the modern world.

Completed in 1914, this novel is a condemnation of the repressive attitudes of British society and a plea for emotional and sexual honesty. Aware that its publication would cause a furore, Forster ensured that it did not appear until after his death in 1970.

It is 1941 and Captain Antonio Corelli, a young Italian officer, is posted to the Greek island of Cephallonia as part of the occupying forces. Ostracised at first, he proves in time to be peace-loving, humorous - and a consummate musician. A burgeoning love with the local doctor's daughter, whose letters to her fiance - and members of the underground - go unanswered, seems inevitable. But can it survive as a war of bestial savagery gets closer and the lines are drawn between invader and defender?

WAUGH, E.: BRIDESHEAD REVISITED. THE SACRED AND PROFANE MEMORIES OF CAPTAIN CHARLES RYDER. , 1962, 331 p. Encuadernacion original. Nuevo.

“A masterpiece that can compare with Steinbeck’s East of Eden. … Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince of Tides is a rarity: It does all three.” — Detroit Free Press A modern American classic and a family saga that spans decades, this is the story of the volatile Tom Wingo, his brilliant but troubled twin sister, Savannah, and the complex and damaging family legacy they share. Moving between the sparkling glamour of New York City and the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low country, The Prince of Tides is Pat Conroy’s masterwork. “A big, sprawling saga of a novel…the kind you hole up with and spend some days with and put down feeling you have emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A literary gem . . . The Prince of Tides is in the best tradition of novel writing. It is an engrossing story of unforgettable characters.” —The Pittsburgh Press