Harvill Press – serie

In the Bosnian town of Visegrad, a stone bridge commissioned in the sixteenth century becomes the centre of three centuries of Balkan history.Built under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the bridge at Visegrad at first unites a divided town. Generations gather on its arches: traders, soldiers, children, lovers, and gamblers, each leaving their mark as empires rise and fall.As Ottoman rule gives way to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, daily life shifts under new laws, new loyalties and growing nationalist tensions. Through characters such as Radisav, who resists the bridge’s construction, and Fata, who leaps from its parapet rather than submit to marriage, The Bridge Over the Drina traces the intimate dramas that unfold against imperial control.When the collision of forces in the Balkans ignites the First World War in 1914, the bridge that has endured centuries of occupation and upheaval finally faces destruction.The Bridge Over the Drina reveals how ordinary lives are shaped, divided, and bound together by the pressures of empire.

'I look at all of Carver's work as just one story, for his stories are all occurences, all about things that just happen to people and cause their lives to take a turn... In formulating the mosaic of the film Short Cuts, which is based on these nine stories and a poem, 'Lemonade', I've tried to do the same thing- to give the audience one look... But it all began here. I was a reader turning these pages. Trying on these lives' - Robert Altman in his introduction.

‘A book for children from 8 to 80. I love the humanity of this story and how one man’s efforts can change the future for so many. It’s a real message of hope.’ Michael MorpurgoDiscover this beloved masterpiece of nature writing that is a hymn to creation and to the power of the individual to do their bit to change the world for the better.In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again and sees the young forest he has created spreading slowly over the valley. Elzéard’s solitary, silent work continues and the narrator returns year after year to see the miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man’s creative instinct.A beautiful story of hope, survival and selflessness, The Man Who Planted Trees resonates as strongly with readers today as when it was first published.Featuring an introduction from award-winning naturalist Richard Mabey, author of Nature Cure.

Raymond Carver, who became a master-storyteller of his generation and was hailed in Europe as 'the American Chekhov', wrote of himself: "I began as a poet. My first publication was a poem. So I suppose on my tombstone I'd be very pleased if they put 'Poet and short-story writer - and occasional essayist', in that order." This complete edition allows readers to experience the range and overwhelming power of Carver's poetry for the first time. It brings together in the order of their American publication the poems of Fires (1985), Where Water Comes Together with Other Water (1986), Ultramarine (1988), A New Path to the Waterfall (1989) and No Heroics, Please (1991). For readers who know Carver's middle period only through his selected poems, In a Marine Light (1988), it includes the windfall of 51 poems not previously published in Britain. All of Us is edited by Professor William L. Stull of the University of Hartford, and introduced with an essay on Raymond Carver's methods of composition by his widow, the poet Tess Gallagher.

Timo von Bock's release by the Czar from nine years' incarceration does not spell the end of the Baron's troubles: he is confined to his Livonian estate to live under the constant eye of police informers planted among his own household, and is subjected to endless humiliations. It is claimed that he is a madman and in need of 'protection': a man would need to be insane, after all, to have taken a Czar at his word when asked for a candid appraisal of the state's infirmities.From the year of his release from prison and return to his wife Eeva, a woman of peasant stock to whom, with her brother Jakob, he has given a solid education, the Baron's life is recorded in a secret journal by this same Jakob, a shrewd and observant house-guest.Reconstructing the events leading up to the Baron's incarceration in 1818 and subsequent to his release in 1827, Jakob little by little brings to light mysteries surrounding the 'Czar's madman'. Was his madness genuine? What was the secret understanding between him and his boon companion Czar Alexander I, who committed him to prison?In The Czar's Madman Jaan Kross weaves together the elements of intrigue surrounding those historical characters who survived in post-Napoleonic Russia, and by a skillful shifting of chronology and viewpoints, creates a superbly rich and moving narrative.Winner of France's Best Foreign Book Award.