From Publishers Weekly"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow ...
This stunning new novel from Tatiana de Rosnay, author of the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Sarah's Key, plumbs the depths of complex family relationships and the power of a past secret to change everything in the present.It all began with a simple seaside vacation, a brother and sister recapturing their childhood. Antoine Rey thought he had the perfect surprise for his sister M?lanie's birthday: a weekend by the sea at Noirmoutier Island, where the pair spent many happy childhood summers playing on the beach. It had been too long, Antoine thought, since they'd returned to ...
No novelist alive knows the human heart better than Scott Spencer does. No one tells stories about human passion with greater urgency, insight, or sympathy. In A Ship Made of Paper, this artist of desire paints his most profound and compelling canvas yet. Daniel Emerson lives with Kate Ellis and is like a father to her daughter, Ruby. But he cannot control his desire for Iris Davenport, the African-American woman whose son is Ruby's best friend. During a freak October blizzard, Daniel is stranded at Iris's house and they begin a sexual liaison that eventually imperils all their relationships, Daniel's profession, their children's well-being, their own race- blindness, and their view of themselves as essentially good people. A Ship Made of Paper captures all the drama, nuance, and helpless intensity of sexual and romantic yearning, and it bears witness to the age-old conflict between the order of the human community and the disorder of desire.
For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other-and they have their reasons. But now they find they’d better learn how to get along, because since their mother’s death their aging father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as ...
Christopher Isherwood was born in Cheshire in 1904. He began to write at university and later moved to Berlin, where he gave English lessons to support himself. He witnessed first hand the rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany and some of his best works, such as and , draw on these experiences. He created the character of Sally Bowles, later made famous as the heroine of the musical . Isherwood travelled with W.H. Auden to China in the late 1930s before going with him to America, which became his home for the rest of his life. He died on 4 January 1986.
A Hindi film star… an American missionary… twins separated at birth… a dwarf chauffeur… a serial killer… all are on a collision course. In the tradition of , Irving’s characters transcend nationality. They are misfits—coming from everywhere, belonging nowhere. Set almost entirely in India, this is John Irving’s most ambitious novel and a major publishing event.
The war is ending, but for the occupants of the castle, their troubles are just beginning. Armed gangs roam a lawless land, and the castle becomes the focus of a dangerous game of desire, deceit and death to one particular outlawed captain. From the author of WHIT, THE CROW ROAD and COMPLICITY.
Publisher's WeeklyThis sequel to Liss's Edgar Award-winning A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) brings back ex-pugilist Benjamin Weaver and his 18th-century London environs in all their squalid glory. Benjamin has become a "thieftaker," a sort of bounty hunter/private eye, and is investigating the simple case of a threatening letter when he is caught up in a riot, accused of murder and sentenced to hang. After a gutsy escape, he sets about unraveling the mystery of who framed him and why. Donning the disguise of a wealthy coffee planter from Jamaica, Benjamin infiltrates the upper classes, where he encounters ...
As he demonstrated in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a canine murder mystery from the point of view of an autistic boy, former children's book author and illustrator Mark Haddon has a gift for reaching inside the inner world of characters whose minds should prove difficult to penetrate.A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel aimed at adults, and again he writes his characters with great affection despite the fact that they're deeply flawed. Or, in the case of Bother's protagonist, George Hall, deeply insane.The Halls are a family of people ...
It is a very short list of 20th-century American plays that continue to have the same power and impact as when they first appeared—57 years after its Broadway premiere, Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those plays. The story famously recounts how the faded and promiscuous Blanche DuBois is pushed over the edge by her sexy and brutal brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Streetcar launched the careers of Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden, and solidified the position of Tennessee Williams as one of the most important young playwrights of his generation, as well as ...
It's difficult to imagine a harder first act to follow than The Kite Runner: a debut novel by an unknown writer about a country many readers knew little about that has gone on to have over four million copies in print worldwide. But when preview copies of Khaled Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, started circulating at Amazon.com, readers reacted with a unanimous enthusiasm that few of us could remember seeing before. As special as The Kite Runner was, those readers said, A Thousand Splendid Suns is more so, bringing Hosseini's compassionate storytelling and his sense of personal and national tragedy to a tale of two women that is weighted equally with despair and grave hope.
"Will rock readers witha stunning new world, a hot-blooded hero, and a strong, kick-ass heroine!" – Larissa IoneFIRST IN A NEW SERIES! CAN TRUE LOVE SURVIVE A WAR BETWEEN ANGELS, VAMPIRES, AND LYCANS?Adrian Mitchell is a powerful angel leading an elite Special Ops unit of Seraphim. His task is to punish the Fallen-angels who have become vampires-and command a restless pack of indentured lycans. But Adrian has suffered his own punishment for becoming involved with mortals-losing the woman he loves again and again. Now, after nearly two hundred years, he has found her-Shadoe-her soul once more inhabiting a new body, with no memory of him. And this time, he won't let her go…
Un castello gotico nel bel mezzo di una foresta. Un gruppo di eccentrici musicisti alle prese con una partitura estremamente complicata e con la convivenza forzata. Le tensioni sessuali tra i membri del gruppo rivelano in realt? una pi? profonda, segreta nevrosi, resa ancor pi? minacciosa dalla clausura. E una donna fragile, alla deriva, ? affascinata da strane urla nella notte... L’autore di “Il Petalo cremisi e il bianco” (2003) e di “Sotto la pelle” (2004) ? nato in Olanda e cresciuto in Australia. Ora vive nelle Highlands scozzesi.
A laugh-out-loud account of an outrageously rugged hike-by the beloved comic author of Lost Continent and Notes from a Small Island. Published on the 75th anniversary year of the Appalachian Trail.
There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister....Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart—and the joy and pain of living. The inspiration for this novel came from Nicholas Sparks's sister: her life and her courage. From the internationally bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, comes his most moving story yet....
There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the shy, almost ethereal daughter of the town's Baptist minister....Jamie, who was destined to show him the depths of the human heart—and the joy and pain of living. The inspiration for this novel came from Nicholas Sparks's sister: her life and her courage. From the internationally bestselling author Nicholas Sparks, comes his most moving story yet....
ACCLAIM FOR “[ is] a bold new advance in international fiction…. Youthful, slangy, political, and allegorical.”“Murakami’s writing injects the rock ‘n’ roll of everyday language into the exquisite silences of Japanese literary prose.”“[Murakami belongs] in the topmost rank of writers of international stature.”“Greatly entertaining…. Will remind readers of the first time they read Tom Robbins or … Thomas Pynchon.”“Murakami captures a kind of isolation that is special in its beauty, and particular to our time…. His language speaks so directly to the mind that one remembers with ...
From New York Times bestselling author Barbara Taylor Bradford comes a triumphant novel of an unforgettable womanDetermined to rise above all that she has ever known, a young and impoverished Emma Harte embarks on a journey first of survival, then of unimaginable achievement. Driven to succeed, the iron-willed Emma parlays a small shop into the world's greatest department store and an international business empire: Harte Enterprises.Unhappily married twice, loving only the one man she can never marry, personal happiness eludes her. Harte Enterprises, the realization of her grand dreams, is her all: her heart, her ...
Amazon.com ReviewWho hasn't dreamed, on a mundane Monday or frowzy Friday, of chucking it all in and packing off to the south of France? Proven?al cookbooks and guidebooks entice with provocatively fresh salads and azure skies, but is it really all C?tes-du-Rh?ne and fleur-de-lis? Author Peter Mayle answers that question with wit, warmth, and wicked candor in A Year in Provence, the chronicle of his own foray into Proven?al domesticity.Beginning, appropriately enough, on New Year's Day with a divine luncheon in a quaint restaurant, Mayle sets the scene and pits ...
La marshal Mackenzie Stewart estaba pasando un tranquilo fin de semana en New Hampshire, en la casa de su amiga la jueza federal Bernadette Peacham, cuando fue atacada. Ella pudo repeler el ataque, pero el agresor consigui? escapar. Todo suger?a que se trataba de un loco violento… hasta que lleg? el agente del FBI Andrew Rook.Mackenzie hab?a roto con ?l su norma de no salir con agentes del orden, pero sab?a que ?l no se hab?a desplazado desde Washington para verla, sino porque trabajaba en su caso. A medida que continuaba la caza del misterioso atacante, el caso dio un giro inesperado cuando Mackenzie sigui? a Rook a Washington y descubri? que un antiguo juez amigo de Bernadette, ahora ca?do en desgracia y convertido en informador de Rook, hab?a desaparecido.Mackenzie y Rook comprender?an entonces que hab?a m?s en juego de lo que pensaban y que se enfrentaban a una mente criminal que no ten?a nada que perder y estaba dispuesta a jug?rselo todo.
Abba Abba is about two poets who may or may not have met in Rome in 1820-1821. One was John Keats, who was dying in a house on the Spanish Steps. The other was Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli a great poet, though little known outside Rome. The first part of the book is about Keats and Belli. The second part presents Belli himself as poet, translated by Mr. Burgess.
?ad serca uwa?any jest za pierwszy polski utw?r nawi?zuj?cy do rozwijaj?cego si? w Europie nurtu humanizmu katolickiego i por?wnywany do powie?ci Georges’a Bernanosa i Fran?ois Mauriaca. Akcja powie?ci rozgrywa si? w ci?gu jednej nocy w bia?oruskiej wiosce, w kt?rej splataj? si? losy kilkorga os?b, staj?cych przed odwiecznym wyborem pomi?dzy dobrem a z?em. G??wny bohater, rozdarty wewn?trznie katolicki ksi?dz, szukaj?cy drogi do ?adu serca, stara si? zachowa? wierno?? swojemu powo?aniu, mimo w?asnych w?tpliwo?ci, otaczaj?cego ...
FINALISTA DEL PREMIO PLANETA 1973La gangrena es m?s fruto del oficio que de la brillantez, este Adagio confidencial habla del reencuentro, veinte a?os despu?s, entre Marina y Germ?n. Abundante di?logo, ambiente burgu?s, ciertos golpes de efecto que la acercan al follet?n y tambi?n f?cil y amena lectura son las se?as de identidad que siguen fieles muchos lectores.
" Ce matin, je me l?ve d?cid? ? ne pas prendre une cigarette apr?s mon caf?, comme je l'ai fait depuis une trentaine d'ann?es. Si l'envie est trop forte, je pourrai toujours me recoucher. " Fumer tue, para?t-il. Mais vivre aussi, alors pourquoi s'en faire ? C'est que l'esprit du temps est ? l'hygi?ne de soi, au corps immacul?, ? l'extermination des mauvaises habitudes. Le narrateur se donne donc trois jours pour arr?ter de fumer. Niais on ne se d?fait pas facilement d'une pratique devenue une seconde nature : et voil? notre anti-h?ros contemporain arr?t?, r?veur, au milieu des volutes de fum?e. Plusieurs fois par jour, il prend une derni?re cigarette en se posant la question obs?dante : pourquoi fume-t-on ? La r?ponse, enfin, est au c?ur de cette fiction th?orique, ?l?gante et burlesque loin, tr?s loin des m?thodes soporifiques suppos?es nous d?livrer de la nicotine.
