Frans Reusink Books

The book delves into the intricacies of human relationships and societal dynamics, exploring themes of love, betrayal, and redemption. Through a richly woven narrative, it presents a diverse cast of characters whose lives intertwine in unexpected ways, revealing the complexities of their emotional struggles. Set against a backdrop of contemporary issues, the story captures the essence of resilience and the quest for identity, inviting readers to reflect on their own experiences and connections.

In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the 26-year-old Ernst Gombrich was invited by a publishing acquaintance to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurze Weltgeschichte für junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success, and is now available in seventeen languages across the world. Toward the end of his long life, Gombrich embarked upon a revision and, at last, an English translation. A Little History of the World presents his lively and involving history to English-language readers for the first time. Superbly designed and freshly illustrated, this is a book to be savored and collected. In forty concise chapters, Gombrich tells the story of man from the stone age to the atomic bomb. In between emerges a colorful picture of wars and conquests, grand works of art, and the spread and limitations of science. This is a text dominated not by dates and facts, but by the sweep of mankind's experience across the centuries, a guide to humanity's achievements and an acute witness to its frailties. The product of a generous and humane sensibility, this timeless account makes intelligible the full span of human history.

An unbearably moving, intensely passionate, deeply personal account of life as seen through the eyes of one of America’s best-loved novelists.‘When I began writing this history, I let go of my doubts. I trusted the ghosts of my imagination. They showed me the hundred secret senses. And what I wrote is what I discovered about the endurance of love.’So writes Amy Tan at the beginning of this remarkably candid insight into her life. Tan takes us on a journey from her childhood, as a sensitive but intelligent young Chinese-American, ashamed of her parents’ Chinese ways, to the present day and her position as one of the world's best-loved novelists.She describes the daily difficulties of being at once American and Chinese and yet feeling at times like she was truly neither. Most significantly, and heartbreakingly, she tells the history of her the grandmother who committed suicide as the only means of defiance open to her against a husband who ignored her wishes; her remarkable mother, whose first husband had her jailed when she tried to leave him; and the shocking deaths of both her father and husband when Amy was just 14.How this weight of history has brought itself to bear on the adult Amy looms large in her own story. Ghosts, chance and fate have played a part in her life, and ‘The Opposite of Fate’ is an insight into those ancestors, the women who ‘never let me forget why these stories need to be told’.

Venetian cop, Commissario Guido Brunetti, wonders whom he knows to bring pressure on a local government department, to investigate the lack of official building approval on his apartment. But when that same official phones him at work, clearly scared by some information he plans to give Brunetti, and is later found dead after a fall from scaffolding, something is clearly wrong, something with far greater implications than the fate of Guido's own apartment. Brunetti's investigations take him into the unfamiliar areas of Venetian life - drug abuse and loan sharking - while the deaths of two young drug addicts, and the arrest and release of a suspected drug dealer, reveal, once again, what a difference it makes in Venice to have 'Friends in High Places'.

An upcoming title from Bantam, an imprint of Penguin Random House UK[Bokinfo].

From Maggie O'Farrell, bestselling author of AFTER YOU'D GONE and THE HAND THAT FIRST HELD MINE, comes a gripping novel about the way childhood fears can haunt adult lives. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but she instantly recognises him. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand. Gripping, insightful and deft, this is Maggie O'Farrell's finest achievement to date.

Is America the new world empire? Presidents from Woodrow Wilson to George W Bush may have denied it but, as Niall Ferguson's brilliant and provocative book shows, the US is in many ways the greatest imperial power of all time. What's more, it always has been an empire, expanding westwards throughout the nineteenth century and rising to global dominance in the twentieth. But is today's American colossus really equipped to play Atlas, bearing the weight of the world on its shoulders? The United States, Ferguson reveals, is an empire running on empty, weakened by chronic deficits of money, manpower and political will. When the New Rome falls, he warns, its collapse may well come from within.

A revelatory biography of the first Black woman to stand for Vice President charts how the daughter of two immigrants in segregated California became one of the most effective power players in the United States