Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in World Literature

In Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, one of our very best writers brings the opulent world of the Tudors to bloody, glittering life. It is the backdrop to the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell: lowborn boy, charmer, bully, master of deadly intrigue, and, finally, most powerful of Henry VIII's courtiers. But the bloody theatre of Cromwell's ascension will leave no one unscathed. This collection includes expertly adapted versions of Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light alongside The World of Wolf Hall.

In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, one of our very best writers brings the opulent world of the Tudors to bloody, glittering life. It is the backdrop to the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell: lowborn boy, charmer, bully, master of deadly intrigue, and, finally, most powerful of Henry VIII’s coutiers. But the bloody theatre of Cromwell’s ascension will leave no one unscathed.

Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely liveable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination — even as it is watched live. This is an extraordinary and arrestingly whimsical book, that brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.

This is a minute-by-minute depiction of a typical night at a legendary monthly house party known as 'The Wickedest'. Here, we meet a vivid cast of characters, young and old, all surfing a revelry steeped in camaraderie, community, desire and a spirit of jubilant defiance. A modern epic, The Wickedest explores the institution of shoobs or house parties and their vital role within working-class communities. The poems range from classical English sonnets to experimental forms and are immersively interwoven with text messages and ephemera.

One night, not long after the last American troops leave Vietnam, siblings Anh, Thanh and Minh flee their village and embark on a perilous boat journey to Hong Kong. Their parents and four younger siblings make the crossing in another vessel but as weeks go by it becomes clear that only one party has survived the voyage. Anh, Thanh and Minh suddenly find themselves alone in the world, without family or home. They travel on, navigating refugee camps and resettlement centres until, by a twist of fate, they arrive in Thatcher’s Britain.

Èkó, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion Tatafo weave trouble through the streets of Lagos and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the queer, the displaced and the footloose. With Tatafo as our guide we meet these people in the shadows. Among them are a driver for a debauched politician, a lesbian couple whose tender relationship sheds unexpected light on their experience with underground sex work, a mother who attends a secret spiritual gathering that shifts her reality.

The pale-skinned, black-eyed baby is a bad omen. That’s one thing the people on the old plantation are sure of. The other is that Miss Rue - midwife, healer, crafter of curses - will know what to do. But for once Rue doesn’t know. Times have changed since her mother, Miss May Belle, held the power to influence the life and death of her fellow slaves. Freedom has come. The master’s Big House lies in ruins. But this new world brings new dangers, and Rue’s old magic may be no match for them.

Magnificent in scope, internationally lauded and transcendent, the novel in verse that inspired the sensational West End and Off-Broadway play of the same name. The Lehman Trilogy follows the epic rise and fall of three generations of that infamous family and through them tells the story of American ambition and hubris.

Based on a true story, Strandloper tells the extraordinary tale of a nineteenth-century Englishman, William Buckley, who was convicted and transported to Australia. Refusing to accept his fate he escaped and lived among the Aborigines for thirty years. In this visionary novel, Alan Garner is as true to William the Cheshire bricklayer and William the Aboriginal spiritual leader, as William is true to his fate. The result is extraordinary.

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

AD 500. An island in the Thames. Isla has a secret: she has learned her father’s sophisticated sword-making skills at a time when even entering a forge is forbidden to women. Her sister, Blue, has a secret, too: at low tide on the night of each new moon, she visits the bones of the mud woman, drowned by the elders of her tribe who wanted to make a lesson of someone who wouldn’t hold her tongue. When the local Seax overlord discovers Isla's secret, there is nowhere for the sisters to hide, except across the water to the walled ghost city Londinium.

This is an audiobook about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This an audiobook about a poet, W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

When Jozef is commissioned to paint a portrait of the younger daughter of Krakow's grand Oderfeldt family, it is only his desperate need for money that drives him to accept. He has no wish to indulge a pampered child-princess or her haughty, condescending parents - and almost doesn't notice Alicia's bookish older sister, Karolina. But when he is ushered by a servant into their house on Krakow's fashionable Bernadynska street in the winter of 1937, he has no inkling of the way his life will become entangled with the Oderfelts.

Weaving together fragments of artists’ stories across time and place, Philip Hoare embarks on a Sebaldian exploration of the enduring legacy of William Blake. A poet, painter and printmaker who was unappreciated and considered mad in his own time, Blake was eventually lauded as a key pillar of the Romantic movement. His posthumous influence reverberates endlessly, from the films of Derek Jarman to our ongoing fear of technological advancement.

In the wake of first heartbreak, Nur somehow meets his perfect woman. Yasmina is bright, beautiful and, what’s most remarkable, she’s into him too. Before long, they are inseparable. But no relationship is perfect. For Yasmina, the complexities of family and cultural expectation are something she wants to navigate with Nur by her side. For Nur, the pressures of being the ‘good son’ are suffocating, and soon threaten everything he wants for his future with Yasmina. Can he find a way to offer her everything she deserves?

It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable. Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.

In 1933, after Hitler and the Nazi Party consolidated power in Germany, Immanuel Birnbaum, a German-Jewish journalist based in Warsaw, is forbidden from writing for newspapers in his homeland. Six years later, just months before the German invasion of Poland that ignites World War II, Immanuel escapes to Sweden with his wife and two young sons.

1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion, greeting him with the puzzled question ‘What are you?’ Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equalled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it. As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path they find themselves increasingly pitted against one another.

Meet the women of the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they're nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone in a shabby apartment except when she is visited by Niaz, her young, Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose, and somehow manages to survive. Across the ocean in America, Elizabeth’s daughters have built new lives for themselves.