James Meek

The new novel about home, belonging, love, courage, and identity, set in the fourteenth century, from the Booker-longlisted author of The People's Act of Love

To Calais, in Ordinary Time

Long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, the story of a Russian prison camp escapee who makes his way to a remote Siberian village recounts his fantastical adventures as imparted to the megalomaniac captain of a Czech regiment and a self-reliant widowed mother. Reprint. 50,000 first printing. $75,000 ad/promo.

The People's Act of Love

"In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy-- rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing--have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners. In a series of brilliant portraits James Meek shows how Britain's common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all. In a series of panoramic accounts, Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. As our national assets are being sold, the new buyers reap the rewards, and the ordinary consumer is left to pay the ever rising bill. Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, Private Island is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation for readers of Chavs and Whoops!"--

Why Britain Now Belongs to Someone Else

Private Island

The anatomy of Britain on the edge of Brexit, by Orwell Prize winning journalist Since Britain’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, the nation has been profoundly split: one side fantasizing that the referendum will never be acted upon, the other entrenched in questionable assumptions about reclaimed sovereignty and independence. Underlying the cleavage are primal myths, deeper histories, and political folk-legends. James Meek, “the George Orwell of our times,” goes in search of the stories and consequences arising out of a nation’s alienation from itself. In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, Meek meets farmers and fishermen intent on exiting the EU despite the loss of protections they will incur. He reports on a Cadbury’s factory shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an aging population. Dreams of Leaving and Remaining is urgent reporting from one of Britain’s finest journalists. James Meek asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind. There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation.

Fragments of a Nation

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining

"The essential public good that Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and now Cameron sell is not power stations, or trains, or hospitals. It's the public itself. it's us." In a little over a generation the bones and sinews of the British economy - rail, energy, water, postal services, municipal housing - have been sold to remote, unaccountable private owners, often from overseas. In a series of brilliant portraits the award-winning novelist and journalist James Meek shows how Britain's common wealth became private, and the impact it has had on us all: from the growing shortage of housing to spiralling energy bills. Meek explores the human stories behind the incremental privatization of the nation over the last three decades. He shows how, as our national assets are sold, ordinary citizens are handed over to private tax-gatherers, and the greatest burden of taxes shifts to the poorest. In the end, it is not only public enterprises that have become private property, but we ourselves. Urgent, powerfully written and deeply moving, this is a passionate anatomy of the state of the nation: of what we have lost and what losing it cost us - the rent we must pay to exist on this private island.

Esta es la historia de Adam Kellas, un corresponsal británico que cubre el conflicto afgano. La novela empieza con un críptico mail que Adam recibe. Astrid, la mujer que amó, le escribe pidiendo ayuda y él no duda en dejarlo todo para ir a buscarla, olvid

Iniciamos nuestro descenso

Signed hardback edition of James Meek's acclaimed new novelBec Shepherd is a malaria researcher struggling to lead a good life. Ritchie, her reprobate brother, is a rock star turned TV producer. When Bec refuses an offer of marriage from a powerful newspaper editor and Ritchie's indiscretions catch up with him, brother and sister are forced to choose between loyalty and betrayal.The Heart Broke In is an old-fashioned story of modern times, a rich, ambitious family drama of love, death and money in the era of gene therapy and Internet exposes. From the author of the 'spellbinding' (Guardian), 'quite extraordinary' (Philip Pullman), 'startlingly original' (Mail on Sunday) novel, The People's Act of Love

The Heart Broke in

From the prize-winning author of The Heart Broke In and The People's Act of Love.

The Museum of Doubt

Praised in over a dozen countries around the world, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, named a Globe and Mail Book of the Year and distinguished as a national bestseller, The People’s Act of Love has been compared to the works of such Russian masters as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. In a Siberian town caught between a zealous cult and bullying soldiers, a stranger named Samarin arrives. Claiming to be an escapee from an isolated prison camp, pursued in his flight by a bloodthirsty cannibal, he unleashes a storm of suspicion and terror. The People’s Act of Love is an epic drama of desire and sacrifice, full of hot blood and magnetic characters, played out against one of the most remote landscapes on earth.

People's Act Of Love

Like the world around him, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Adam Kellas' life is showing distinct signs of cracking apart. Against his better judgement, Kellas--divorced, unstable, spurned by his lover and by the world of letters--accepts a war assignment from his newspaper. It is the beginning of a journey which takes him from the mountains of Afghanistan to the elegant dinner tables of north London, the marshlands of the American South and, ultimately, to the darkest realms of the human imagination. Only the memory of the beautiful, elusive Astrid, a fellow reporter in Afghanistan, offers him the possibility of hope.

We are Now Beginning Our Descent

EVERY ACTION HAS A CONSEQUENCE Bec Shepherd is a scientist struggling to lead a good life Ritchie, her brother, is a TV star with skeletons in his closet Alex wants a family if he could only meet the right woman . . . One man has the information to destroy them all

The Heart Broke In

A RICHLY IMAGINED NOVEL OF FAMILY, LOVE AND SCIENCE SET IN MODERN-DAY LONDON, FROM THE INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE PEOPLE'S ACT OF LOVE Ritchie Shepherd, aging former pop star and wildly successful producer of a reality teen talent show, is starting to trip over the intricacy of his own lies. Gallingly, his sister, Bec, a scientist developing a crucial vaccine, is as addicted to truth-telling as Ritchie is to falsehood. Ritchie relies on her certitude even as he seethes with resentment. A devastating chain of events is set into motion when Bec tells her fiancé, Val, a powerful tabloid editor, that she can't bring herself to marry him after all. Furious, he sets into motion an elaborate revenge plot intended to destroy Bec by exposing the people who are close to her. A bighearted epic in the manner of Tolstoy, James Meek's The Heart Broke In is also as shrewd, starkly funny, and of-the-moment as Jonathan Franzen's Freedom or Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. Most of all, it is a staggeringly good read, fiction with the reverberating resonance of truth.

A Novel

Der große Gesellschaftsroman unserer Zeit – scharfsinnig, provokant und voll schwarzem Humor! Bec Shepherd, Forscherin aus Leidenschaft, hat ein hehres Ziel im Leben: Sie will die Menschheit von der Geißel der Malaria befreien. Dafür ist sie sogar bereit, ihre eigene Gesundheit aufs Spiel zu setzen. Ihr Bruder Ritchie hingegen, einstmals gefeierter Rockstar und nun millionenschwerer TV-Produzent, riskiert für eine Affäre mit einer Minderjährigen die Trennung von seiner Ehefrau. Nur einer weiß von dieser Bettgeschichte: der skrupellose Journalist Val. Als Bec seinen Heiratsantrag ablehnt, droht Val, Ritchies Fehltritt publik zu machen – wenn dieser nicht seine Schwester an den öffentlichen Pranger stellt. Muss Ritchie sie wirklich verraten, um seine eigene Haut zu retten? Klug, kühn, komisch – eine provozierende Geschichte über die Kraft von Familienbanden, die Unvereinbarkeit von Glaube und Vernunft, über Musik, Medienhypes, Evolution und den Drang, die Welt zu verbessern. Ein groß angelegter Gesellschaftsroman über unsere Zeit, in der Richtig und Falsch, Gut und Schlecht nicht immer zu unterscheiden sind.

Roman

Liebe und andere Parasiten

“[A] sharply observed meditation on modern war . . . as far from Tom Clancy’s entertainments as a vintage Mini Cooper is from a snarling Hummer” (Alex Berenson, The New York Times Book Review). James Meek’s masterful historical novel, The People’s Act of Love, received accolades around the world, earning Meek comparisons to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and Greene. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a tour de force of storytelling, furthering his reputation as one of the most exciting and original young novelists writing today. Adam Kellas, a British journalist, would-be thriller novelist, and failed lover meets Astrid Walsh, a self-possessed, hard-charging reporter while the two are covering allied military operations in the Afghan mountains. After sharing one passionate night in a watchtower near a defunct airfield, Astrid disappears from Adam’s life. A year later, following a disastrous dinner party in London during which he destroys his few remaining friendships, Adam receives a short, beseeching email and hastily embarks on a transatlantic journey to a small town near the Chesapeake Bay where he believes Astrid waits for him. He envisions the fresh start his new life with Astrid might offer, unaware that she may be harboring unsettling secrets of her own. A passionate, incisive novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent lays bare the entwined hypocrisies, foibles, and desires of our age, and is a testament to the obsessive pull of love. “I am full of admiration for Meek’s precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global news stream.” —The Washington Post

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

1919, Siberia . . . Deep in the unforgiving landscape a town lies under military rule, awaiting the remorseless assault of Bolsheviks along the Trans-Siberian railway. One night a stranger, Samarin, appears from the woods with a tale of escape from an Arctic prison, insisting a cannibal is on his trail. Only Anna, a beautiful young widow, trusts his story. When a local shaman is found dead suspicion and terror engulf the isolated community, which harbours a secret of its own . . .

James Meek

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