Bethan Roberts: My Policeman

UK 2012, 342 pp., brochure, € 11.95
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
Vintage
It is in the 1950s' Brighton - at a time when homosexuality in the UK was still illegal - that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He's her best friend's hunky brother. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier and Marion is absolutely smitten - determined her love will be enough for both of them. A few years later in Brighton Museum Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is the suave museum curator. He, at once, is besotted with Tom and opens his eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world. Tom is Patrick's and Marion's policeman. In these times it is safer for Tom to marry Marion. The two lovers must share him. The result is a very awkward love triangle that could have worked but doesn't because one of them breaks and their three lives are destroyed by that unreasonable move.

Joseph Lelyveld: Great Soul

Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India. USA 2012, 426 pp. with b/w photographs, brochure, € 16.95
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
Vintage
When this biography on the »Father of the Indian Nation«, Mahatma Gandhi, was released a big storm of protest in the Indian media broke loose. What was it all about? The biographer claimed that Gandhi has never been very much interested in women because the real love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. He draws on the correspondence between the two to come to this conclusion. He is able to detail a passionate love affair between Gandhi and his lover. The knowledge of this gay affair in public was buried under an overall ideal of an ascetic asexuality. Now that the new sight on this central figure of Indian history was out several states of the Indian Union advanced in forbidding the sales of this biography on their territory.

Jeanette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

UK 2012, 230 pp., brochure, € 11.40
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
Vintage
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, »Oranges Are not the Only Fruit«, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival. This book is that story's silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a real mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.

James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption

Uncollected Writings. USA 2011, 365 pp., brochure, € 14.89
Kostenloser Versand ab 20 Euro Bestellwert.
Vintage
A revelation of an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. In »The Cross of Redemption« Baldwin discourses on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African American president and what it might mean, the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism, the black church in America, balck nationalism, anti-Semitism, the blues and boxing, Russian literary masters, and the role of the writer in modern society. Prophetic and bracing, »The Cross of Redemption« is an addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity.