《The Kite Runner(追风筝的人)》是一个阿富汗作家的处女作，霸占了美国两大权威畅销书排行榜《纽约时报》排行榜、《出版商周刊》排行榜长达80余周，声势超过红透全世界的丹·布朗的《达·芬奇密码》。 这本小说太令人震撼，很长一段时日，让我所读的一切都相形失色。文学与生活中的所有重要主题，都交织在这部惊世之作里：爱、恐惧、愧疚、赎罪……——著名作家伊莎贝拉·阿连德 ★一个阿富汗作家的处女作 ★一部以史诗般的历史景观和荡气回肠的人性故事，深深地打动全世界各地亿万读者心的文学经典 ★美国《纽约时报》、《出版商周刊》等九大畅销书排行榜榜首图书 ★英国《观察家报》2005年度最佳图书 ★台湾诚品书店、金石堂书店、博客来书店销售冠军 ★连续80余周雄踞《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜，声势超过红透全球的丹·布朗的《达·芬奇密码》 “许多年过去了，人们说陈年旧事可以被埋葬，然而我终于明白这是错的，因为往事会自行爬上来。回首前尘，我意识到在过去二十六年里，自己始终在窥视着那荒芜的小径。” 《华盛顿邮报》认为：“没有虚矫赘文，没有无病呻吟，只有精炼的篇章，细腻勾勒家庭与友谊，背叛与救赎。作者对祖国的爱显然与对造成它今日沧桑的恨一样深。故事娓娓道来，轻笔淡描，近似川端康成的《千羽鹤》。” 12岁的阿富汗富家少爷阿米尔与仆人哈桑情同手足。然而，在一场风筝比赛后，发生了一件悲惨不堪的事，阿米尔为自己的懦弱感到自责和痛苦，逼走了哈桑，不久，自己也跟随父亲逃往美国。 成年后的阿米尔始终无法原谅自己当年对哈桑的背叛。为了赎罪，阿米尔再度踏上暌违二十多年的故乡，希望能为不幸的好友尽最后一点心力，却发现一个惊天谎言，儿时的噩梦再度重演，阿米尔该如何抉择？ 小说如此残忍而又美丽，作者以温暖细腻的笔法勾勒人性的本质与救赎，读来令人荡气回肠。 Book Description This is a wonderful, beautiful epic of a novel. Set in Afghanistan and the United States between the 1970s to the present day, it is a heartbreaking tale of a young boy, Amir, and his best friend who are torn apart. This is a classic word-of-mouth novel and is sure to become as universally loved as The God of Small Things and The Glass Palace. Twelve year old Amir is desperate to win the approval of his father Baba, one of the richest and most respected merchants in Kabul. He has failed to do so through academia or brawn, but the one area where they connect is the annual kite fighting tournament. Amir is determined not just to win the competition but to run the last kite and bring it home triumphantly, to prove to his father that he has the makings of a man. His loyal friend Hassan is the best kite runner that Amir has ever seen, and he promises to help him - for Hassan always helps Amir out of trouble. But Hassan is a Shi'a Muslim and this is 1970s Afghanistan. Hassan is taunted and jeered at by Amir's school friends; he is merely a servant living in a shack at the back of Amir's house. So why does Amir feel such envy towards his friend? Then, what happens to Hassan on the afternoon of the tournament is to shatter all their lives, and define their futures. Amazon.co.uk Review The Kite Runner of Khaled Hosseini's deeply moving fiction debut is an illiterate Afghan boy with an uncanny instinct for predicting exactly where a downed kite will land. Growing up in the city of Kabul in the early 1970s, Hassan was narrator Amir's closest friend even though the loyal 11-year-old with "a face like a Chinese doll" was the son of Amir's father's servant and a member of Afghanistan's despised Hazara minority. But in 1975, on the day of Kabul's annual kite-fighting tournament, something unspeakable happened between the two boys. Narrated by Amir, a 40-year-old novelist living in California, The Kite Runner tells the gripping story of a boyhood friendship destroyed by jealousy, fear, and the kind of ruthless evil that transcends mere politics. Running parallel to this personal narrative of loss and redemption is the story of modern Afghanistan and of Amir's equally guilt-ridden relationship with the war-torn city of his birth. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner begins in the final days of King Zahir Shah's 40-year reign and traces the country's fall from a secluded oasis to a tank-strewn battlefield controlled by the Russians and then the trigger-happy Taliban. When Amir returns to Kabul to rescue Hassan's orphaned child, the personal and the political get tangled together in a plot that is as suspenseful as it is taut with feeling. The son of an Afghan diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States in 1980, Hosseini combines the unflinching realism of a war correspondent with the satisfying emotional pull of master storytellers such as Rohinton Mistry. Like the kite that is its central image, the story line of this mesmerizing first novel occasionally dips and seems almost to dive to the ground. But Hosseini ultimately keeps everything airborne until his heartrending conclusion in an American picnic park. --Lisa Alward, Amazon.ca Book Dimension : length: (cm)17.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)11.1

When I was researching for my history doctorate in Italy, several years ago, I came across some very interesting documents in the archives of an obscure religious order, and in the Vatican. Over the next few years there was an explosion of interest in the phenomenon of paedophile priests, and the Catholic church tried to shrug it off as a new occurrence, exacerbated by media hype and a compensation culture. But the documents proved that there was nothing new about the child-abusing priest, and the recent opening of the Inquisition archive offered a further opportunity to investigate. This book shows how the patron saint of Catholic education himself was implicated, and how covering-up scandal has always been the top priority for the church.---Karen Liebreich

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine,University of Kent at Canterbury 陀思妥耶夫斯基是俄国著名的批判现实主义作家。《罪与罚》是他的一部卓越的社会哲理小说，它的发表标志着他艺术风格的成熟。小说成功地反映农奴制改革后，资本主义的发展在俄国生活的各个方面，探讨了贫穷与犯罪等社会哲理问题，但小说也暴露了作者世界观的全部矛盾。小说于1866年一发表，立即引起强烈的反响，使作者获得世界声誉。 Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written.From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who,against his better instincts,is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment on,we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride,of contempt for and need of others,and of terrible despair and hope of redemption:and,in a remarkable transformation of the detective novel,we follow his agonised efforts to probe and confront both his own motives for,and the consequences of,his crime. The result is a tragic novel built out of a series of supremely dramatic scenes that illuminate the eternal conflicts at the heart of human existence:most especially our desire for self-expression and self-fulfilment,as against the constraints of morality and human laws;and our agonised awareness of the world's harsh injustices and of our own mortality,as against the mysteries of divine justice and immortality. Book Description Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles. "Crime and Punishment", based on Dostoevsky's own experience of the justice and penal system of Tsarist Russia, is a dark tale set in the dingy streets of St Petersburg, concerning the actions of a murderer who decides to commit homicide as a matter of principle. Book Dimension : length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6

The true story of pianist Władysław Szpilman's experiences in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. When the Jews of the city find themselves forced into a ghetto, Szpilman finds work playing in a café; and when his family is deported in 1942, he stays behind, works for a while as a laborer, and eventually goes into hiding in the ruins of the war-torn city.

Three narratives, set in the fifth, fourteenth, and twentieth centuries, all revolving around an ancient text and each with a love story at its center, are the elements of this ingenious novel, a follow-up to the bestselling, An Instance Of The Fingerpost. The centuries are the fifth (the final days of the Roman Empire); the fourteenth (the years of the Black Death); and the twentieth (World War II). The setting for each is the same--Provence--and each has at its heart a love story. The narratives intertwine seamlessly, but what joins them thematically is an ancient text--"The Dream of Scipio"--a work of neo-Platonism that poses timeless philosophical questions. What is the obligation of the individual in a society under siege? What is the role of learning when civilization itself is threatened, whether by acts of man or nature? Does virtue lie more in engagement or in neutrality? "Power without wisdom is tyranny; wisdom without power is pointless," warns one of Pears's characters.

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.