Bücher von Francis Spufford

In The Child That Books Built, this extended love letter to children's books and the wonders they perform, Francis Spufford makes a confession: books were his mother, his father, his school. Reading made him who he is. To understand the thrall of fiction, Spufford goes back to his earliest encounters with books, exploring such beloved classics as The Wind in the Willows, The Little House on the Prairie, and The Chronicles of Narnia. He recreates the excitement of discovery, writing joyfully of the moment when fuzzy marks on a page become words. Weaving together child development, personal reflection, and social observation, Spufford shows the force of fiction in shaping a child: how stories allow for escape from pain and mastery of the world, how they shift our boundaries of the sayable, how they stretch the chambers of our imagination.

Francis Spufford explores the British obsession with polar exploration in a book that Jan Morris, writing in The Times, called, "A truly majestic work of scholarship, thought and literary imagination . . ." The title, a last quote from one explorer to his party as he left their tent never to return, embodies the danger and mystery that fueled the romantic allure of the poles and, subsequently, the British imagination. Far from being a conventional history of polar exploration, I May Be Some Time attempts to understand what was going on in the minds of the polar explorers as they headed toward destinies like Terra Nova. Serving up a heady brew of Captain Perry, Jane Eyre, gastronomic obsessions with iced desserts, and the daily lives of Eskimos, Spufford treats the reader to one of the most satisfying and imaginative contemporary works dealing with exploration and human need.

1746 wirkt Neu-York noch wie ein holländisches Städtchen am Rande der Welt. Eines Tages steigt hier im Regen ein Brite namens Smith von einem Segler - liebenswert, charmant, doch irgendwie auch verdächtig. Mit sich trägt er einen Wechsel über tausend Pfund, keiner weiß, woher die ungeheure Summe stammt und was Mr. Smith damit in den Kolonien vorhat. Können die braven Kaufleute von Neu-York ihm trauen? Was sollen sie tun mit diesem Mr. Smith: Ihn bei sich einladen, ihn verführen, ihn berauben, ins Gefängnis werfen oder gar töten? Denn irgendwann steht Mr. Smith seinem besten Freund im Duell gegenüber - es wird nicht die letzte Überraschung sein in diesem geistreichen, spannenden Wunderwerk von einem Roman.