Battle’s TriumphI parry the first sword that slashes at me, and as I swing away from it, I manage to cut through the wrist that holds it. A minor victory, since the creature simply switches to another hand, but one that makes me realize these creatures can be beaten.“They bleed!” I shout at the top of my lungs, then steady my feet and swing once more. This time a hideous black head falls to the ground at my feet.My heart pumps loudly now, and my spi...

When Maximov the Drinker collapses on his settee after a five-day binge, visions of his first love and glimpses of life as it once was, and can never be again, flood his mind. A horrible sense of sadness and regret overwhelms him he has wasted his youthful years on drink. When his housekeeper enters the room the next morning, she finds in place of her master, a vat of ruby-red wine. The local priest, captain of the military garrison, and Chernov-the-Moneylender, visit the house. Awed by su...

Scott O'Neil, one of America's most successful sports executives, shares seven principles to keep you present, grounded, and thriving.When we're moving at 115 MPH, we rarely see the wall coming. But it comes for all of us and when it does, we grasp for lessons, for meaning, for purpose. Each moment (good or bad) and each win or loss, provides us an opportunity to learn, and if we choose to take it, that opportunity can change our lives-and the world- for the better....

In its adventurous happenings–its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues–A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and ’30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin–the archetypal Russian antihero–Lermontov’s novel looks forward to the subsequent glories of a Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible.

A moving, utterly captivating love story: Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky. In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost t...

Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow, and he just can't seem to keep out of trouble... The fourth novel in the bestselling crime series from the author of THE WINTER QUEEN.Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow after an absence of six years, only to find himself instantly embroiled in court politics and scandal. His old friend General Sobolev - the famous 'Russian Achilles' - has been found dead in a hotel room, and Fandorin suspects foul play.Using his now-famous po...

From the acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky comes a new translation of the first great prison memoir: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictionalized account of his life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.In 1849 Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison camp for his participation in a utopian socialist discussion group. The account he wrote after his release, based on notes he smuggled out, was the first book to reveal life inside the R...

From the critically acclaimed author of The 25th Hour and When the Nines Roll Over and co-creator of the HBO series Game of Thrones, a captivating novel about war, courage, survival — and a remarkable friendship that ripples across a lifetime.During the Nazis’ brutal siege of Leningrad, Lev Beniov is arrested for looting and thrown into the same cell as a handsome deserter named Kolya. Instead of being executed, Lev and Kolya are given a ...

Read this stunning new translation of Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning masterpiece from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the acclaimed translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.Banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, Doctor Zhivago is the epic story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Yu...

THE FIRST BOOK IN THE MULTI-MILLION COPY, INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING ERAST FANDORIN MYSTERIES SERIES'A sparkling romp of a story' TLS'In Russia Boris Akunin is roughly the counterpart of John Grisham' TIME'Think Tolstoy writing James Bond with the logical rigour of Sherlock Holmes' GUARDIANMoscow 1876.A young law student commits suicide in broad day...

'I hope The Long Walk will remain as a memorial to all those who live and die for freedom, and for all those who for many reasons could not speak for themselves'Slavomir RawiczSlavomir Rawicz was a young Polish cavalry officer. On 19 November 1939 he was arrested by the Russians and after brutal interrogation he was sentenced to twenty-five years in a gulag.After a three-month journey in the dead of winter to Siberia, life in a Soviet labour camp meant endur...

The thrilling Cold War masterwork by the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Gulag Archipelago, published in full for the first time."Solzhenitsyn's best novel. . . . A great and important book, whose qualities are finally fully available to English-speaking readers." —Washington PostMoscow, Christmas Eve, 1949. In this tense Cold War thriller, the Soviet secret police intercept a call made to the American embassy by a Russi...