Richard Dooling
Bet Your Life
Pbk published February 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099448947
Umberto Eco
The Name Of The Rose
Pbk published February 2004 by Vintage at £7.99
ISBN: 0099466031Who is killing monks in a great medieval abbey famed for its library - and why? Brother William of Baskerville is sent to find out, taking with him the assistant who later tells the tale of his investigations. Eco's celebrated story combines elements of detective fiction, metaphysical thriller, post-modernist puzzle and historical novel in one of the few twentieth-century books, which can be described as genuinely unique. "The Name of the Rose" was made into a film in 1986, starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Beautifully bound, hardback edition of Umberto Eco's masterpiece. Introduced by David Lodge; Novelist and critic. His novels include Nice Work, Changing Places and The British Museum Is Falling Down, and his critical works include The Language of Fiction and The Novelist at the Crossroads
Umberto Eco is the author of four bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and, most recently, Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. A Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco lives in Italy.
Juan Marse
Lizard Tails
Pbk published February 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 009945517X Artwork by: Cover photograph: Herbert List/Magnum Photos
Joseph O'Connor
The Star of the Sea
Pbk published January 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099469626
Chuck Palahniuk
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk Through Portland,Oregon
Pbk published March 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099464675
In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America’s "fugitives and refugees." Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots," as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to "a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should’ve kept their mouths shut."
Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers’ sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe’s famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo.
Oh, the list goes on and on.
Matthew Pearl
The Dante Club
Pbk published January 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099465981
Pernille Rygg
The Butterfly Effect
Pbk published January 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099449269
It is a cold, dark, windy night in Oslo and Igi Heitmann pores over the debris in her dead father’s office, trying to piece together the last days of his life as a failed private eye. She discovers a curious butterfly medallion in his desk – which in turn leads to the discovery of a young woman in a snow-drift, two bullets in her head and a gun in her hand. Igi’s father and the young woman died within hours of each other – is the same person responsible for both their deaths?
Igi soon finds herself in the role of detective, on a trail that leads to the city’s underworld of corruption, sadism and child abuse. Caught amongst the shards of a dozen shattered lives, she must tread carefully if she is to reconstruct the violent and tragic truth, and not be killed in the process.
The Butterfly Effect is a fast-paced, unconventional story of present-day Oslo, with a fast-thinking, unconventional heroine who must decide if the events confronting her have come about through accident or sinister human design.
Chad Taylor
Electric
Pbk published January 2004 by Vintage at £6.99
ISBN: 0099445123
See Review by
Ian Morson
Author of Falconer books and short listed for 1999 Ellis Peters Historical Crime Dagger
'People with tired faces have always interested me.'
It's the middle of February and all over Auckland the lights are going out. The power lines are down, traffic's gridlocked - the hottest summer on record's going to be too much for a city that's reaching the end of the line. Samuel Usher has already been there. Now he's a data-retrieval specialist: a broken man working on broken machines, resurrecting other people's pasts while he tries to forget his own. He's drinking too much, taking too many drugs - trying to lead a normal life. Until he meets Candy and Jules, two drifting mathematicians who make their livings playing games with reality. Each is after a Holy Grail, the one perfect theory that will make their worlds complete. They've been together for five years now, but neither is getting any closer to their goal. Things are simpler for Sam - he just wants Candy, and her perfect skin. And for a while, it looks as if he may have what he wants. Then Jules is found in a coma, and Candy disappears. All Sam's left with is a strange list of numbers and three words: ANYWAY FREEDOM GOODBYE.
In Chad Taylor's remarkable new novel, Sam's pursuit of the truth will lead him into an underworld of chaos and turbulence, where numbers rule and love and friendship collides. Intense, poetic, darkly funny.
Electric is the perfect noir for a new generation.
Chad Taylor was born in 1964. He is the author of three novels and two collections of short stones. His second novel, Heaven, was made into a Miramax feature film for which he wrote the screenplay. Shirker (Canongate 2000), his first book to be published outside New Zealand, has been translated into five languages. He lives and works m New Zealand.