The Color Purple. Alice Walker. Phoenix Paperbacks, 2004 re-edition.
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award, this is the life story of Celie, a young black girl born into poverty and segregation in the American South who endures a series of blows before meeting Shug Avery, a singer and magic-maker, from whom she learns how to take control of her own destiny, free herself of her traumatic past and reunite with her loved ones. The book was made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg and starred Whoopi Goldberg (as Celie), Danny Glover and Oprah Winfrey.
The Lost World. Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford World’s Classics, 2008 re-edition.
This classic adventure story could have been called a fantasy, had it not been written in 1912 before that genre was established. The tale of a scientific expedition headed by Professor Challenger that sets out to explore a mysterious plateau in the Amazon rainforest remains witty, enthralling and attractive a hundred years on. The adventurers find themselves trapped in a world lost in time, inhabited by dinosaurs and ape-men. Their situation forces them to fight for survival. This edition is complete with explanatory notes and explores the work’s cultural contexts.
Limitless. Alan Glynn. Faber and Faber, 2011 re-edition (previously published as The Dark Fields).
The idea seems so attractive and pioneering: imagine a drug that made your brain function to its full potential, allows you to pick up a foreign language in a single day or spot stock-market patterns... Eddie Spinota comes across such a pill; but while its benefits materialise quickly, so do certain side-effects. And when he decides to find other users of the drug, he soon discovers that they are all dying – or dead. This book was recently turned into a film starring Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish and Robert De Niro.
Idioms and Phrasal Verbs; Advanced. Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman. Oxford University Press 2011.
A handbook for both the classroom and self-study enhances the vocabulary and use of idioms, fixed phrases, similes, proverbs and sayings for use in presentations, discussion and elsewhere. It is recommended for intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced learners.
This column is a selection by The Slovak Spectator of English-language books recently released in Slovakia; it does not represent an endorsement of any of the books selected. The column is prepared in cooperation with the Oxford Bookshop Bratislava, located at Laurinská 9.
