Классика - скачать книги или читать онлайн. Страница 177

A ribald tale from Britain’s best-love Science Fiction writer.Available for the first time in eBook.The Cretan Teat is a bawdy novel, telling the extraordinary tale a Byzantine painting of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the infant Jesus.This false icon gets adopted by the people – and so becomes instrumental in the downfall of mankind.This is a story where the narrator – the author – is regularly caught with his trousers down.It is at once funny and important, a post-modern text reminiscent of Pirandello, where sexcapades brush shoulders with the end of the world.

A darkly comic novel about the fall and rise of a TV presenter. Written by an insider, it’s a page-turning account of life on the sofa and in front of the cameras.When Katie Fisher, morning TV presenter, returns from holiday it's to discover that she's literally yesterday's news. Publicly sacked from her job as anchor of Hello Britain! and replaced by a pert young thing, she does what any self-respecting thirty something would in these circumstances – she makes a dash for her parents and hits the bottle.But Katie, sooner or later, has to face the world, the photographers, and the backstage intrigue of morning television: the cut-throat, lecherous producers, the ambitious but vacant Keera, and Mike, her co-host, a trustworthy friend or just another one of the many back-stabbers? Humour is Katie's only weapon and, as things hit rock-bottom, it could provide a perfect solution to life after the sofa.Knowing, insightful and darkly comic, Penny Smith's novel is the insider's view of TV.

A study of a man beyond the verge of a nervous breakdown, this is a brilliant and disturbing novel by Doris Lessing, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.Penniless, rambling and incoherent, a man is found wandering at night on London’s Embankment. Taken to hospital and heavily sedated, he tells the doctors of his incredible fantastical voyage, adrift on the ocean, landing on unknown shores, flying on the back of a huge white bird.Identified as Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics professor, he is visited by family and friends, each revealing clues to the nature of his breakdown. As the doctors try to cure him, Watkins begins a fierce battle to hold on to his magnificent inner world, as it gradually acquires a greater reality than the everyday…‘Briefing for a Descent into Hell’ is one of Doris Lessing’s most brilliantly achieved novels, linking her early work, which explored the nature of subjectivity, with her later experiments in science fiction. Its indictment of the tyranny of society is powerful, disturbing and, as always, magnificently rendered.

A striking novel of truth and soul-searching.Returning from a visit to her daughter in Iraq, Joan Scudamore finds herself unexpectedly alone and stranded in an isolated rest house by flooding of the railway tracks.Looking back over the years, Joan painfully re-examines her attitudes, relationships and actions and becomes increasingly uneasy about the person who is revealed to her…Famous for her ingenious crime books and plays, Agatha Christie also wrote about crimes of the heart, six bittersweet and very personal novels, as compelling and memorable as the best of her work.

For the ultimate in glamour, it has to be Tilly Bagshawe. Perfect escapism for fans of Penny Vincenzi and Jilly Cooper.For the ultimate in glamour, it has to be Tilly Bagshawe. Perfect escapism for fans of Penny Vincenzi and Jilly Cooper.Plucked from obscurity at the age of seventeen, Sabrina Leon is the new darling of the film scene, bagging lead roles in the hottest Hollywood movies. But a Youtube sensation on the web is about to destroy everything she's fought for…After a bitter feud with a rival producer, hotshot movie producer Dorian Razmirez has had the plug pulled on every project he goes near. Casting the disgraced Hollywood diva Sabrina Leon in Wuthering Heights is a risk that might cost him what remains of his career.Newcomer Viorel Hudson, with his jet-black hair and high, slanting cheekbones has scored the role that every A-lister in Hollywood auditioned for – Heathcliff in Dorian Razmirez's Wuthering Heights. But is he ready for his latest role? For a five million pound pay cheque, it's a risk he's willing to take.Set against the backdrop of a sumptuous English country house, the filmmakers are desperate for some on-screen chemistry – but it’s off-camera that the sparks are really going to fly….