This is a science fiction book. Except that it's not. A great combination of understandable science and human emotions. Not my usual reading material, but I was hooked within a few pages.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.
All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.
His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through…
This is a book that readers and authors can both learn from. The quality of the writing is exceptional. Plot and characterisation of a very high order. The story is complex, with many twists and turns, but well worth the effort of concentrating and persevering!
Auster's tale of obsession from the author of contemporary classic The New York Trilogy: 'a literary voice for the ages' (Guardian)
The Book of Illusions, written with breath-taking urgency and precision, plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, and the violent and the tender dissolve into one another.
One man's obsession with the mysterious life of a silent film star takes him on a journey into a shadow-world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love. After losing his wife and young sons in a plane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer…
This is an account of the challenges of building the first lighthouses around the coast of Great Britain. But it is so much more than that. "Buildings in the sea, where they shouldn't be." It is about the life of designers, architects, carpenters, stonemasons, sailors and lighthouse keepers. Fantastic descriptions that take you to the lighthouses in the depth of a storm, and to the impossibility of building lighthouses.
'A thrilling celebration of lighthouses' i newspaper
An enthralling history of Britain's rock lighthouses, and the people who built and inhabited them
Lighthouses are enduring monuments to our relationship with the sea. They encapsulate a romantic vision of solitary homes amongst the waves, but their original purpose was much more noble, conceived as navigational gifts for the safety of all. Still today, we depend upon their guiding lights for the safe passage of ships. Nowhere is this truer than in the rock lighthouses of Great Britain and Ireland: twenty towers built between 1811 and 1904, so-called because they were constructed…
1858. The first Lunacy Commissioners are appointed in Scotland. These 'insanity inspectors' travel the country, deciding who can stay at home and who needs to be committed to an asylum. Their task is a difficult one, for not every lunatic can be classified as insane and not everyone who is insane is a lunatic. Lennox Cameron, a new inspector, splits his time between Edinburgh's polite society and inspecting the conditions of shocking suffering and cruelty in which many lunatics live in the Scottish Highlands. As the search for the causes and cures for insanity become more desperate, Lennox finds that the lines between what is right and what needs to be done become blurred. He is forced to make decisions about his own sanity and his future. It is the price he will pay for being an honourable man. Lennox has chosen purpose over achievement in his work as a physician. Dr Peter Baird has darker motives for treating the insane. He has found a way to profit from lunacy. In the end he will pay a very different price. This story is based on real cases and real events.
