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A high-speed, high-stakes thriller from Ken Follett, the grand master of international action and suspense. A fabulous "lost masterpiece" becomes the ultimate prize—for an art historian whose ambition consumes everyone around her, an angry young painter with a plan for revenge on the art establishment, and a desperate gallery owner who may have double-crossed his own life away. Behind the elegance and glamour of the art world, anything goes—theft, forgery, betrayal, and maybe even murder. . . .
A classic crime tale from the worldwide bestselling author - a special edition with a new introduction by the author. Modigliani. Unarguably one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Modigliani's women. Those elongated, haunting figures, as eternally provocative as the Mona Lisa. And Modigliani's missing masterpiece. A priceless lost treasure - or a chillingly dangerous game? Up and coming artist Peter Usher has still to exhibit anywhere, still to make even the most modest mark on the London art scene. But as rumour turns to reality, Usher finds himself caught up in a race to uncover the shadowy figures behind a breathtaking scam. Will art genius ever be rewarded? Will the brush prove more deadly than the gun?
“The wonderful cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, one of the greatest achievements of European civilization, was on fire. The sight dazed and disturbed us profoundly. I was on the edge of tears. Something priceless was dying in front of our eyes. The feeling was bewildering, as if the earth was shaking.” —Ken Follett “[A] treasure of a book.” —The New Yorker In this short, spellbinding book, international bestselling author Ken Follett describes the emotions that gripped him when he learned about the fire that threatened to destroy one of the greatest cathedrals in the world—the Notre-Dame de Paris. Follett then tells the story of the cathedral, from its construction to the role it has played across time and history, and he reveals the influence that the Notre-Dame had upon cathedrals around the world and on the writing of one of Follett's most famous and beloved novels, The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett will donate his proceeds from this book to the charity La Fondation du Patrimoine.
“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .
From Ken Follett—the #1 name in electrifying international suspense—comes a remarkable novel of intrigue and doomsday possibilities. The world's balance of power is about to shift dangerously as the ultimate weapon nears completion in a secret facility in the heart of the desert. Across the globe, operatives from the great nations set a deadly game in motion, covertly maneuvering pawns and kings to achieve a frightening advantage—while terrorists and their hunters prepare for the contest's final, bloody moves. And one man—a razor-sharp master of disguise, deceit, and triple-cross—must somehow do the impossible: steal 200 tons of uranium without any of the other players discovering the theft. The clock is ticking. And the price of failure is Apocalypse.
New York Times Bestseller The new must-read epic from master storyteller Ken Follett: more than a thriller, it’s an action-packed, globe-spanning drama set in the present day. “A compelling story, and only too realistic.” —Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary “Every catastrophe begins with a little problem that doesn’t get fixed.” So says Pauline Green, president of the United States, in Follett’s nerve-racking drama of international tension. A shrinking oasis in the Sahara Desert; a stolen US Army drone; an uninhabited Japanese island; and one country’s secret stash of deadly chemical poisons: all these play roles in a relentlessly escalating crisis. Struggling to prevent the outbreak of world war are a young woman intelligence officer; a spy working undercover with jihadists; a brilliant Chinese spymaster; and Pauline herself, beleaguered by a populist rival for the next president election. Never is an extraordinary novel, full of heroines and villains, false prophets and elite warriors, jaded politicians and opportunistic revolutionaries. It brims with cautionary wisdom for our times, and delivers a visceral, heart-pounding read that transports readers to the brink of the unimaginable.
Ken Follett’s magnificent historical epic begins as five interrelated families move through the momentous dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women’s suffrage. A thirteen-year-old Welsh boy enters a man’s world in the mining pits. . . . An American law student rejected in love finds a surprising new career in Woodrow Wilson’s White House. . . . A housekeeper for the aristocratic Fitzherberts takes a fateful step above her station, while Lady Maud Fitzherbert herself crosses deep into forbidden territory when she falls in love with a German spy. . . . And two orphaned Russian brothers embark on radically different paths when their plan to emigrate to America falls afoul of war, conscription, and revolution. From the dirt and danger of a coal mine to the glittering chandeliers of a palace, from the corridors of power to the bedrooms of the mighty, Fall of Giants takes us into the inextricably entangled fates of five families—and into a century that we thought we knew, but that now will never seem the same again. . . .
"Vintage Follett . . . This is his most ambitious novel and it succeeds admirably." —USA Today Ellis, the American. Jean-Pierre, the Frenchman. They were two men on opposite sides of the Cold War, with a woman torn between them. Together, they formed a triangle of passion and deception, racing from terrorist bombs in Paris to the violence and intrigue of Afghanistan—to the moment of truth and deadly decision for all of them. . . .
One man’s quest to make history—and a lot of money: “High entertainment” from the three-time Edgar Award–winning Grand Master of Mystery (Elmore Leonard). Kirby Galway may be a low-level marijuana smuggler in Belize, but the man has a dream—to make lots and lots of money. So when a local official offers him a back-jungle tract of land he swears would make a perfect cattle ranch, Kirby jumps at the opportunity. Unfortunately, he lands himself in a swamp—that he now owns. Kirby begins selling homemade “artifacts” from his property to American museums and witless tourists, even building a fake ancient temple and recruiting a tribe of Mayan Indians who know a good scam when they see one. But his cash-cow paradise soon attracts the attention of two snooping New York reporters, a beautiful archaeologist from UCLA, and a troop of Guatemalan guerillas just itching to shoot somebody. Kirby is going to have to talk fast, move faster, and pull out every dirty trick he knows if he’s going to get out of this alive . . . “I thoroughly enjoyed High Adventure.” —Elmore Leonard “Westlake at his best: intriguing, fast moving . . . Ends with a slam-bang climax.” —Los Angeles Times Praise for Donald E. Westlake “Westlake has no peer in the realm of comic mystery novelists.” —San Francisco Chronicle
"Pulls you into the depths of a secret world from the first page. Ian Smith’s novel is unmissable." —Harlan Coben, author of Missing You Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fall 1988 Spenser Collins An unlikely Harvard prospect, smart and athletic, strapped for cash, determined to succeed. Calls his mother—who raised him on her own in Chicago—every week. Dalton Winthrop A white-shoe legacy at Harvard, he's just the most recent in a string of moneyed, privileged Winthrop men in Cambridge. He's got the ease—and the deep knowledge—that come from belonging. These two find enough common ground to become friends, cementing their bond when Spenser is "punched" to join the Delphic Club, one of the most exclusive of Harvard's famous all-male final clubs. Founded in the nineteenth century, the Delphic has had titans of industry, Hollywood legends, heads of state, and power brokers among its members. Dalton Winthrop knows firsthand that the Delphic doesn't offer memberships to just anyone. His great-uncle is one of their oldest living members, and Dalton grew up on stories of the club's rituals. But why is his uncle so cryptic about the Ancient Nine, a shadowy group of alums whose identities are unknown and whose power is absolute? They protect the Delphic's darkest and oldest secrets—including what happened to a student who sneaked into the club's stately brick mansion in 1927 and was never seen again. Dalton steers Spenser into deeper and deeper recesses of the club, and beyond, to try to make sense of what they think they may be seeing. But with each scrap of information they get from an octogenarian Crimson graduate, a crumbling newspaper in the library's archives, or one of Harvard's most famous and heavily guarded historical books, a fresh complication trips them up. The more the friends investigate, the more questions they unearth, tangling the story of the club, the disappearance, and the Ancient Nine, until they realize their own lives are in danger.