Mea M. Flothuis Books

It's known as the science of secrecy: cryptography, the encoding and decoding of private information. Singh follows the evolution of secret writing with a clarity that lets the reader enjoy the captivating story while easily absorbing the details of cryptography.

Kritische analyse van de maatschappelijke bejegening van (aanstaande) moeders, met name in de Verenigde Staten.

Establishing Dibdin as a master of the historical mystery, "A Rich Full Death" begins in 1855 Florence at the hanging of Isabel Eaken. Engrossing, lively, lush with details, this evocative story has been seamlessly created from both fact and fancy, characters both imagined and real.

Widely hailed as the Nobel Prize-winning author’s greatest work, this novel immerses us in the life of a young Indian man who relocates to an isolated town by a great river in a newly independent African nation. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul presents a compelling vision of a place caught between the allure of modernity and its tenacious past. Salim, an outsider due to his Indian merchant origins in East Africa, arrives to take possession of a local trading post he has purchased sight unseen. However, he finds a ghost town, ravaged by the recent departure of European colonizers and slowly being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. As Salim attempts to establish his business amid growing chaos, conflict, and poverty, he embarks on a journey into the heart of Africa, echoing the territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier, but from a different perspective on colonization. He confronts the nation’s violent legacy, embodied in a dictator who presents himself as the people's savior while ruling through fear and deception. This work confirms Naipaul's status as one of the finest writers of our time.

'I am following the traces of a great jewel. All its owners are dead, and the jewel is lost...' Precious stones are thousands of years old. They pass through the hands of owners and smugglers, merchants and thieves. Often the hands leave no trace, but they are there all the same: they leave impressions, invisible, like atoms of hydrogen drawn to the surface of a diamond. The Love of Stones charts three lives linked by one such jewel. Katherine Sterne searches the goldsmiths' quarters and hidden archives of contemporary London, Tokyo and Istanbul, following the trail of a long-lost jewel: a brooch of rubies, diamonds and pearls once worn by Queen Elizabeth I. Two hundred years earlier, a pair of Iraqi Jewish brothers travel to London, their fortunes made by an unearthed jar of mysterious and priceless stones. An epic story spanning two continents and six centuries, The Love of Stones follows three very different people, each in their own way consumed by the same desire. At the heart of their lives is the Three Brethren, the legendary jewel that binds them together in a narrative as clear and irresistible as the facets of a diamond.

Robin begins to realize the intricacy of what it means to be human when she rescues an innocent man mistaken for a beast and takes him home with her.

The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary Germans: Helmut, a young photographer in Berlin in the 1930s who uses his craft to express his patriotic fervour; Lore, a twelve-year-old girl who in 1945 guides her young siblings across a devastated Germany after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies; and, fifty years later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his loving grandfather did in the war, struggling to deal with the past of his family and his country.

Originally written under a pseudonym, this thrilling novel of passion in post-World War II London was banned upon its publication in the late 1960s, and is only now being republished under the author's real name. Edith Templeton creates an indelible character in the smartly dressed Louisa, a savvy young woman in the midst of a divorce who meets a charismatic man in a pub and within an hour has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. Thus begins her baffling but magnetic love affair with, and virtual enslavement to, Richard Gordon. Gordon, a psychiatrist, keeps Louisa in his thrall with his almost omniscient ability to see through her and she, in turn, is gripped by the deep, unexpected pleasure of complete submission. As they venture further and further into the depths -- both psychological and sexual -- she begins, for the first time, to understand her troubled history and the self that has emerged from it. In her clean, precise style, with every social nuance and motive exquisitely observed, Templeton delivers a tightly wound drama, unsparingly forthright in its description of how this form of love can bring incomparable rapture. Louisa's unsettling story has more than the ring of truth to it: it is told with urgency and relish, and its outcome, which leaves Louisa enlightened and changed forever, is profoundly satisfying.