Böcker utgivna av Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

A fascinating look at how pigments were created, used, and revered in the Middle Ages.

A darkly comic first novel combining satire with absurdly uncool characters.

Contemporary erotic fiction has a new notable book--where Islam meets sexual and cultural taboos.

An essential, highly illustrated guide to cookery, entertaining, and home table design.

Rhidian Brook and family travel through devastated 'AIDS-lands' including India, Africa, and the Far East.

Jake Horsley seems to arrive from out of nowhere, yet here he is--an almost fully developed and only slightly stoned sensibility. . . He's a marvellous critic.--Pauline Kael

The 14th novel from a veteran writers' writer, now in her 86th year, who has for almost a half-century been lavishly praised for her verbal ingenuity and peevishly damned for her baroque fiction's frequent obscurity. The eponymous protagonist (and partial narrator) here is a 40ish nomad, on her own in New York City 20 years after being imprisoned for her complicity in a lethal bombing incident engineered by student revolutionaries. She has spent the ensuing years in and out of drug therapy and psychiatric hospitals. Almost immediately, Calisher ups the rhetorical ante, mingling first-person and omniscient narration and juxtaposing Carol's conversations with the exhausted "SW" (social worker) who visits her cold-water flat against verbal sparring with her street-person comrade Alphonse, an indigent actor. Her escape to a condemned storefront populated by homeless dropouts suits Carol's need to belong somewhere. Beyond this (early) point, little happens. Memories of her student days and of her childhood in Dedham, Massachusetts (raised by two aunts - one of whom, she guesses, was her mother), jostle against her infatuation, friendship, and disillusionment with a handsome South African actor who has his own demons to confront, off in a far different world. This inconclusive, almost inchoate novel lacks both development and tension, but is worth reading nonetheless for its knowledgeability (Calisher brilliantly describes the staging of a pompous piece of theatrical agitprop), really rather remarkable empathy with the city's festering downside, and the assured cadences of its precise, witty prose ("The virtue of the street is that you do not expect") One expects more from Calisher, but is grateful for even this otherwise flawed display of her unique, often haunting mastery of language. (Kirkus Reviews)

Danish writer Stangerup completes a trilogy here - a set of works based on Kierkegaard's understanding of the Tripartite Man. The Road to Lagoa Santa (1984) represented, with its main character Peter Lund, the "ethical man"; Peter Moiler in The Seducer (1990) stood in for the "aesthetical man"; and now Stangerup comes to the "religious man" - choosing not Kierkegaard himself (too daunting) but the 16th-century Franciscan Brother Jacob, son of Queen Christine and King Hans of Denmark. When Lutheranism topples the Catholic monarchy, the monasteries are closed and the monks go underground or leave the country. Jacob, an especially independent-minded man, can't see himself yoked to the sterility of the monastic orders in Italy or Spain yet can't abide the Reformation either - and so, in search of Utopia, he goes to Mexico. There, his kindness to and deep understanding of the Taraskan Indians makes him a saint in their eyes; when he dies, he's spirited away by the Indians, his burial place to this day a carefully guarded secret. Stangerup is a sedulous historical writer, with every i dotted and every t crossed authentically, but he is overgiven to summary and flatness. These three books make an unassailable case for Danish identity in history, but their good intentions (the Kierkegaard scheme) are never quite realized into fiction of special immediacy or high relief. (Kirkus Reviews)

The first American release of a 1974 British novel offering a strangely impressionistic, and not altogether satisfying, coming-of-age love story. Helen Wykham is the ugly duckling teenage daughter of the glamorous and outrageous Monica, who's on the lookout for her next husband. While searching, Monica sends her two daughters, Helen and the older, sophisticated Stephanie, to a country house party in their native Ireland. An assemblage of bright, beautiful people and eccentric hosts makes for odd anecdotal fun, but Helen is certain she'll think only of her secret love, a fellow schoolgirl called Lyn who ran away with a man. Then, unexpectedly, she falls in love with the man her sister is having a fling with. Dominic, the centerpiece of the story, is a shadowy, Gatsby-like character, all glamour and mystery and unbearable magnetism - he is related to most of the house guests and seems to have slept with many of them. He is also dying of some unnamed illness. But Dominic is not just dying: He's also nursing a broken heart, having been rejected by a certain schoolgirl, the one and same Lyn. Narrated by an older Helen to her current lover, Wykham (both character and author) has an engaging, self-deprecating style, though it doesn't quite make up for the fact that little goes on, and little known about all the generally charmingly vague and superficial guests. When Helen discovers that it was Dominic who stole Lyn away from her, she immediately declares him to be her mortal enemy, though very soon afterward she falls in love with his cousin, his virtual female twin (sharing even the same name), and all is resolved. With the feel of a prose-poem, the novel shimmers, though ultimately seeming more surface than substance. (Kirkus Reviews)

Rupert is an honored American poet; Gemma a retired architect. They live happily and comfortably in a Greenwich Village apartment; the setting, for over thirty years, of their married life. Each with a previous marriage behind them - which left her with two daughters and him with the promise of greatness - they are now facing the challenge of old age together. Both, in their own way, defy the inevitability of death, and yet both are busy preparing for it. The alternating entries of their private journals, which make up the body of Calisher's text, tell a story of familiarity and the fear of loss, love and uncertainty of the future, meanings and habits. With rare verve and panache, Hortense Calisher has confronted a difficult and often neglected subject - and has triumphed magnificently.

A dramatic and original biography of a married couple, each violated in different ways but bound together by their suffering, their mutual understanding and love, and a desperate struggle for renewal. These twin biographies are brought to life by an imaginary exchange of letters in which, nevertheless, the events described are completely factual. Dita was an inmate of Auschwitz as a young girl - she and her father were the only surviving members of her Czech-Hungarian family. Ronald, a Londoner, was the victim of a dangerous and unnecessary prefrontal leucotomy, against his will, in the knife-happy days when this operation was common and left a pathetic trail of zombies vegetating in the asylums. To say simply that Ronald 'survived', to become a composer and scholar of international repute, is to gloss over the long and painful path of recovery he describes. Dita trod a parallel path, although the trauma each suffered was of a different nature. Auschwitz does not ever relinquish its victims: it remained a perpetual assassin in the wings, and even Dita's death from cancer, nearly forty years later, was perhaps its final victory. This imaginary correspondence is remarkable for the vivid picture it paints of a living death inside Auschwitz as well as the fearful existence of a patient inside a mental hospital in mid-century Britain. Above all, the intimate letters reveal a deep commitment and compassion between two people, a love-story intertwined with the horrific historical events of our time.