Bøger af Peter Foreman

In 1967, when Roland Haynes arrives in the Channel Island of Alderney to write his first novel, there's a story waiting for him. A ghostly encounter sets him on a search for Aurelie, an island girl who went missing during the Nazi Occupation. Together with Louis Ferrier, Aurelie's boyfriend from the past, Roland unravels the story of a beautiful and courageous young woman who paid the price of defying the Nazis.In Book Two Aurelie's daughter Jacquine takes up the story, telling of her life in the post-war world and how it can also destroy beauty, as the war destroyed her mother's.Set mainly on the wild, sea-swept island of Alderney, this romance combines fact, fiction and the supernatural to create a tragic love story and a chilling warning of how human power can destroy not only nature's beauty but that of the human spirit.

In his old schooner the 'Octavius' a huge shaman, called Pisuktuk by the Inuit, has wandered over the vast and desolate wastes of the Arctic for generations, witnessing the ravages caused by the white men. One day he rescues an Englishman, Leon Vaughan, who, on a journey to fulfill a lifetime's ambition to see the Arctic, crashes on the ice. The two men become good friends until the day that Leon discovers the real identity of his host. Then all his overweening ambition takes possession of him and he makes a daring bid for fame and fortune. His plan leads him into a maze of trickery and deception which eventually ends in a terrible and tragic conclusion. This is a tale of darkness and deceit and a warning against the 'hubris' of modern humanity's worship of science and technology. Leon's egoistic pursuit of his ambitions plunges his girlfriend Sonia, Pisuktuk, and himself into destruction - just as humanity's ambitions in the Arctic must inevitably destroy that beautiful wilderness. In the story Eskimos and Samis appear as real people worthy of our sympathy. Yet there is another, stranger dimension to the story involving Pisuktuk's mysterious encounter with a young woman when he pours out his life story to her while she is in a state halfway between waking and sleeping. The result is a fantastic creation of myth and fiction which the young woman believes she has dreamed. Eventually it became one of the most celebrated stories in the world.

There are some books that cry out to be written. "Be Lucky!" is one of them. An autobiographical narrative, it tells of the lives of the author and his father Ted, spanning pre-war London and the fifties and sixties to the present. Beginning with Ted Jerrard and his poor working-class upbringing, it goes on to describe his hair-raising experiences in the 1st Airlanding Brigade during World War II and his subsequent struggle with symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. As his son, the author felt compelled to write this book after Ted's death as a means of coming to terms with the effects of PTSD on the family. Inspired by a phantom encounter with Ted, the author begins a series of letters to his dead father which, interwoven with straight narrative, trace the moving story of the relations between father and son through the decades. Ted's battle against a strong temptation to join his brother Ricky in a lucrative criminal career is paralleled in his son's struggle to become a writer. Both are driven to make their dreams come true. Originating in the books and writers he admires, the author's dreams drive him on through a restless and improvident life. Gradually, his fears of failure and sense of life's incoherence increase until he reaches a point of despair. He is saved, however, by the hallucinatory meeting with his father, which spurs him to write this rich and engrossing narrative, full of interesting observations on people and the places he lived in. Married and divorced twice, the author enlivens the story by recounting his boyhood adventures with the bold girls of Battersea, south London, and his adult relationships with women. A tough street life, boozy family parties (attended occasionally by London criminals), schoolmates, pet animals, boxing matches, girlfriends and wives - all are involved in his odyssey to discover what he calls the "secret of living". Behind it all is the ghostly presence of his father, who he talks to in attempts to understand and so hopefully forgive past wrongs. His attempts finally succeed, and his hopes are fulfilled.

A collection of 15 stories, each one with an unusual flavour, conveying its message in a slightly off-beat way. In 'Eternal Youth' a woman seeks a solution to her fear of ageing, but the terrible conclusion is unexpected. Set in Italy, 'Tarantella' describes how a young woman finds inner peace in a bizarre way. How do a middle-aged couple on a holiday to recapture the bliss of their first honeymoon find their lives renewed by ending up isolated by a hurricane? Reading these stories, you are transported into a world with a different quality, so that by the time you have finished, you will see things with different eyes. The author's aim is to entertain while at the same time making you think and reconsider your views about the things that are most important to our lives in a complex, often baffling world.

When Max Anastasio goes to stay with his relations in Italy following a turbulent affair, he little suspects the life-changing discovery he is about to make. With his cousin Apollonia, called Polly for short, he finds two ancient Greek bronze statues in the sea, a discovery which leads to his kidnapping by the N'drangheta. Max suffers a deep traumatic experience, but after his recovery he and Polly can no longer avoid revealing their love for each other. When they learn that the bronzes contain a hidden message which apparently has fatal consequences for those who reveal it, the lovers are caught up in a struggle with a horrifying sense of doom. Taking as its focal point the true-life discovery of two magnificent bronze statues in 1972, this controversial novel raises critical issues such as fate and freedom, crime and violence, and the liberating power of beauty, all very relevant to modern times. At the same time it weaves a mesmerizing tale of villainy and tragic love.

In the 19th century Matthew Arnold wrote that all literature is a criticism of life. Maintaining that this still holds true today, the first section of "The Joker is Wild" is a collection of essays on literature, culture and society which casts a sharply critical eye on some of our most cherished orthodoxies. The second section consists of thirty-five poems, some of which follow the same line. The essays cover a wide range of subjects which includes in "The Joker is Wild" a penetrating analysis of the unique attributes of the novel and how modern society and culture are inimical to it. Our enslavement to machine-worship, truth versus political correctness, a new look at the age-old battle of the sexes - nothing is spared under the author's ruthless Orwellian eye. The poems form a kind of parallel connection to the essays. Keeping faithful to Arnold's maxim, and using language that conforms to "the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty", they tackle such controversial topics as overpopulation, the tyranny of the camera, and take a sardonic look at the condition of English culture in "England Needs You". There are also poems dealing with more personal issues such as depression and failure. Altogether a fascinating miscellany, this book offers, in the author's words, "an idiosyncratic world view, resting on certain propositions that may seem disturbingly strange, even shocking to the reader."

Wer war Jack the Ripper wirklich? Und wie ist es ihm gelungen, sich der Justiz zu entziehen? Tausend Verdachtsmomente und viele Theorien, die sich über ihn angesammelt haben, seit der Zeit, in der er das viktorianische London in Schrecken versetzte, haben nichts genützt, um das Geheimnis um ihn zu lüften. Dieses Buch, das den Fall und Zeugenaussagen der damaligen Zeit wieder aufnimmt, entüllt neue Wahrheiten über den berühmtesten Mörder der Kriminalgeschichte.Dossiers: Life in the East End Immigrants in the East End

Allegra is an unusual name. It means 'happy' in Italian, but the little girl in this story is sometimes very sad. She is only five years old, but she tells Adrian, her new friend, that she is going to die soon. How does she know?

Word count 6,115