"A Penguin Book."

In Regency London, the only way for a woman to succeed is to beat men at their own game. So when Mary Anne Clarke seeks an escape from her squalid surroundings in Bowling Inn Alley, she ventures first into the scurrilous world of the pamphleteers. Her personal charms are such, however, that before long she comes to the notice of the Duke of York. With her taste for luxury and power, Mary Anne, now a royal mistress, must aim higher. Her lofty connections allow her to establish a thriving trade in military commissions, provoking a scandal that rocks the government - and brings personal disgrace.

Set in a bleak Yorkshire hamlet, this is a tale of treason and romance. Anthony Lammas, Professor of Logic at St Andrews University, becomes entangled in a web of intrigue that threatens the country. His boyhood allegiance to a brotherhood of deep-sea fishermen involves him and his handsome ex-pupil with a beautiful, but dangerous, woman.

When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island -- they never choose the Delaneys. They don't even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests ...' Maria, Niall and Celia have grown up in the shadow of their famous parents - their father, a flamboyant singer and their mother, a talented dancer. Now pursuing their own creative dreams, all three siblings feel an undeniable bond, but it is Maria and Niall who share the secret of their parents' pasts. Alternately comic and poignant, The Parasites is based on the artistic milieu its author knew best, and draws the reader effortlessly into that magical world.

Les lecteurs de ##Cinquième emploi## retrouveront ici des personnages qu'ils connaissent déjà. Le héros est un avocat traumatisé par la mort mystérieuse de son père. Il se rend à Zurich pour se faire psychanalyser. Son analyste est une jolie femme et il découvrira (p. 179), qu'il en est tombé amoureux ...

Published in 1932 as an 'entertainment', Graham Greene's gripping spy thriller unfolds aboard the majestic Orient Express as it crosses Europe from Ostend to Constantinople. Weaving a web of subterfuge, murder and politics along the way, the novel focuses upon the disturbing relationship between Myatt, the pragmatic Jew, and naive chorus girl Coral Musker as they engage in a desperate, angst-ridden pas-de-deux before a chilling turn of events spells an end to the unlikely interlude. Exploring the many shades of despair and hope, innocence and duplicity, Stamboul Train offers a poignant testimony to Greene's extraordinary powers of insight into the human condition.

The characters who populate an Alice Munro story live and breathe. Passions hopelessly conceived, affections betrayed, marriages made and broken: the joys, fears, loves, and awakenings of women echo throughout these twleve unforgettable stories, laying bare the unexpected and yet inescapable pain of human contact.

This is Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories. The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony) they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.