Böcker utgivna av Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

Illich suggests radical reforms for the education system to stop its headlong rush towards frustrated expectations and inequalities.

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.

"An imaginary memoir" - with jazz-great Jelly Roll chattily reviewing his life and career one night in 1940, after-hours at Washington's Jungle Inn, shortly before his Los Angeles death. In understated, reasonably authentic language (slang, repetitions, digressions), the Creole pianist recalls his childhood in racially tense 1890s New Orleans, his attraction to all-black honky-tonks (where "you didn't have to act like no damned nigger"), his early keyboard triumphs in Florida, his pride and ambition: "I was always looking for someplace that was big enough for me and I'm still looking today." He tells anecdotes about rival piano-players, about a trip to color-blind Mexico, about his many girls and life on the road. (Contrary to rumor, however, he never pimped: "I never took nothing of what they made.") He touches on career-highlights - recordings, songwriting, brief appearances in N.Y., longer stints in L.A. and Chicago. And he occasionally goes into a little musical detail, distinguishing himself from other, more celebrated jazz giants - while proclaiming himself "the man who knew more about how jazz music was supposed to be played than anybody else in the world." Finally, however, though Charters is a veteran jazz-writer, this chronological monologue offers no clear projection of the musical history involved. Nor, on the other hand, despite the bits of romance and comedy, does the mock-testimony provide any novelistic shape or drama. Despite the conscientious, affectionate crafting here, then: a flat, unfocused slice of bio-fiction - marginally informative, mildly colorful. (Kirkus Reviews)

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)