** From the author of Golden Hill ** ''Glorious.'' Evening Standard ''Exhilarating.'' TLS ''Brilliant.'' Observer ''Dazzling.'' The Times ''Extraordinary.'' Financial Times ''Superb.'' Guardian ''My god he can write. One of the best opening chapters and closing chapters you''ll ever read.'' Richard Osman November 1944. A German rocket strikes London and five young children are atomised in an instant. Here are the futures they might have known, had they experienced the unimaginable changes of the twentieth century - futures that illuminate the miraculous in the everyday, and the preciousness of life itself.
New York, 1746.
Richard Smith débarque d'un bateau. Seulement armé d'une note réclamant le paiement de mille livres à son porteur, le jeune inconnu frappe à la porte de la maison de change de Monsieur Lovell. Celui-ci ne se doute pas alors qu'il vient de mettre en branle une série d'événements qui vont bouleverser la tranquillité de la pointe de Manhattan. Dès le lendemain, la rumeur est sur toutes les lèvres. Doit-on faire confiance à cet homme si secret ? Que vient-il faire de ces mille livres de ce côté de l'Atlantique ? Les questions agitent toute la ville, dont l'intelligente et acerbe Tabitha, la fille aînée des Lovell, et Septimus Oakeshott, l'intègre secrétaire et agent du renseignement du gouverneur. Mais dans ce jeu de dupes, Richard Smith n'est pas le seul à garder jalousement des secrets dont la révélation ferait vaciller le fragile équilibre d'un New York encore provincial...
Roman aux multiples rebondissements, hommage spirituel aux grands romanciers du 18e siècle, Golden Hill emporte le lecteur dans un New York plein d'esprit et de retournements de situation, où pointent déjà les prémisses de la révolution.
Strange as it may seem, the grey, oppressive USSR was founded on a fairytale. It was built on the 20th-century magic called 'the planned economy', which was going to gush forth an abundance of good things that the lands of capitalism could never match. And just for a little while, in the heady years of the late 1950s, the magic seemed to be working.
Red Plenty is about that moment in history, and how it came, and how it went away; about the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche. It's about the scientists who did their genuinely brilliant best to make the dream come true, to give the tyranny its happy ending. It's history, it's fiction. It's a comedy of ideas, and a novel about the cost of ideas.
By the award-winning (and famously unpredictable) author of The Child That Books Built and Backroom Boys, Red Plenty is as ambitious as Sputnik, as uncompromising as an Aeroflot flight attendant - and as different from what you were expecting as a glass of Soviet champagne.
Industrie ! Progrès ! Abondance !
Nous sommes en 1959. L'URSS est sur le point de réaliser l'utopie communiste qu'elle défend.
A travers le regard de différents personnages - réels ou fictifs - et de situations à la fois historiques et imaginaires, Francis Spufford donne vie au moment où le rêve soviétique semblait être à même d'éclipser son homologue américain. Abordant avec une intelligence remarquable les domaines politiques, économiques, technologiques et scientifiques, ce texte est servi par une qualité littéraire indéniable, tant dans l'écriture que dans la construction du récit.
Capital rouge a été publié au Royaume-Uni et aux Etats- Unis avant d'être traduit en néerlandais, espagnol, estonien, polonais, allemand, russe, italien et turc.
A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently -- from the best-selling author of Golden Hill.
In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.
It''s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. But in this 1922, things are a little different. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia has lived on. It is now a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week of drama that will spill the secrets of this altered world, and bring it, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.
The multiple award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly-created, richly pleasure-giving, epically-scaled, wise-cracking, bone-breaking novel set in a golden age of wicked entertainments.
Winner of the Costa First Novel Award 2016 Winner of the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2017 Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2017 Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2017 Shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2017 Shortlisted for the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year 2017 A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY New York, a small town on the tip of Manhattan Island, 1746. One rainy evening, a charming and handsome young stranger fresh off the boat from England pitches up to a counting house on Golden Hill Street, with a suspicious yet compelling proposition -- he has an order for a thousand pounds in his pocket that he wishes to cash. But can he be trusted? This is New York in its infancy, a place where a young man with a fast tongue can invent himself afresh, fall in love, and find a world of trouble . . .
