Engelska

Paris, 1777. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau receives a mysterious letter from a foreign visitor, Gavin Mulvany, asking whether the great man will take walks with him. Against his better judgement, Rousseau agrees. Might this strange man, who claims to be from the 21st century, be the true friend that Rousseau has been searching for his whole life?<br/><br/>Paris, 2022. Gavin, a middle-aged academic, leaves his husband behind in Ireland to finish a long-delayed biography of Rousseau. While in Paris, he avoids work on his book by instead taking walks with Rousseau himself.<br/><br/>As they wander the crowded streets of the eighteenth-century city, Gavin and Rousseau open up about certain past actions that have come to define them. Was Rousseau justified in abandoning his children? Should Gavin be forgiven for the terrible crime he committed to protect a man he once loved?<br/><br/>Can talking and walking together lead both Gavin and Rousseau to finally be honest with themselves and their loved ones, and to a better understanding of what love, family, and society really mean?<br/><br/><i>Rousseau's Lost Children</i> is a thrilling epistolary novel cast across centuries, a bold and illuminating investigation into the boundaries of personal liberty and matters of morality, desire and loyalty.

<b>'Wonderful' JOHN BARTON<br/><br/>'A stupendous intellectual achievement' ANDREW PETTEGREE<br/><br/>'A stunning love song to the Bible . . . this will be a classic' CHINE MCDONALD<br/><br/>The remarkable story of the most influential book in human history.</b><br/><br/>The Bible is the world's best-known text. Yet, it is a book that never was - its original form does not exist and probably never did. What we have is the inheritance of generation after generation of Christians who have sought to hear God speak. Available in over three thousand languages and taking innumerable forms, each version is a revelation, evolving as a reflection of its own culture and moment.<br/><br/> Bruce Gordon traces the Bible's astounding journey from its emergence as a codex in the second century, to the Reformation, to the spectacular growth of Christianity in the Global South today. For centuries a source of inspiration, it has also been a tool for violence and oppression, weaponised in the name of colonialism, and it has expressed hopes for freedom in the struggle for liberation. Found in desert monasteries and Chinese house churches, in Byzantine cathedrals and Guatemalan villages, it has been a book in motion from its very beginnings, a product of more than two thousand years of wandering, restlessness and change.<br/><br/>Breathtakingly global in scope, <i>The Bible</i> is a sweeping history of this sacred book told through the stories of its diverse human encounters in search of the divine - revealing not a static text but a living, dynamic cultural force.