Лучшие книги Питера Камерона

It's time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he's surfing the real-estate listings, searching for a sanctuary - a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty first-century Manhattan, he's more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope - or his favourite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James's sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his wilfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James's growing infatuation with a handsome male…

In the spring of 1950, Coral Glynn arrives at an isolated mansion in the English countryside to nurse the elderly Edith Hart. There, Coral meets Hart House's odd inhabitants: Mrs. Prence, the perpetually disgruntled housekeeper, and Major Clement Hart, her charge's war-ravaged son. When a child's game goes violently awry in the nearby woods, a great shadow―love, perhaps―descends upon its residents. Other seemingly random events―a torn dress, a missing ring, a lost letter―propel Coral and Clement precipitously into the mysterious thicket of marriage

Nel mondo dei racconti di Peter Cameron, che assomiglia terribilmente al nostro, chi cerca sé stessa, rimpiange qualcuno che ha perso, fa i conti con un perenne senso di inadeguatezza, si sforza – spesso invano – di trovare un modo per comunicare con le persone vicine. Conduce una vita ordinaria, insomma, che però d’un tratto può conoscere una svolta spiazzante. Accade all’uomo che preferisce far credere alla moglie di avere una relazione anziché rivelarle che tiene un cane nascosto in un ripostiglio, e che ogni notte esce per portarlo a spasso; alla giovane inquieta che scopre un inaspettato alito di calore domestico nel più artefatto degli ambienti: un parco a tema per turisti; ad adolescenti invischiati nelle dinamiche disfunzionali degli adulti ma non ancora contaminati dalla loro ipocrisia; a donne che si aggirano sole in case diventate di colpo gelide e vuote. Nel mondo di Peter Cameron, sospeso in un’atmosfera rarefatta e straniante, piccoli e grandi drammi familiari, amorosi, esistenziali si consumano in sordina, mentre una vena sotterranea di dolore invade l’esistenza e finisce inesorabilmente per travolgerla e stravolgerla. Quanto a noi, saremo accompagnati a lungo da un sottile turbamento, una volta chiuso il libro – e dovremo arrenderci all’evidenza che ancora una volta Cameron ci ha messi a nudo e raccontati, come solo lui sa fare.

An atmospheric, suspenseful story of a couple's struggle to adopt a baby, while staying in a fading, grand European hotel. (Think: Barton Fink crossed with Patricia Highsmith)

In this atmospheric, suspenseful novel, an American couple travels to a strange, snowy European city to adopt a baby, who they hope will resurrect their failing marriage. Their difficult journey leaves the wife, who is struggling with cancer, desperately weak, and her husband worries that her apparent illness will prevent the orphanage from releasing their child.

The couple check into the cavernous and eerily deserted Borgarfjaroasysla Grand Imperial Hotel where the bar is always open, the restaurant serves thirteen-course dinners from centuries past, and the doors of the guest rooms have been salvaged from demolished opera houses. Their attempt to claim their baby is both helped and hampered by the people they encounter: an ancient, flamboyant chanteuse, a debauched businessman, an enigmatic faith healer, and a stoic bartender who dispenses an addictive, lichen-flavored schnapps. Nothing is as it seems in this mysterious, frozen world, and the longer the couple endure the punishing cold the less they seem to know about their marriage, themselves, and life itself. What Happens at Night is a "masterpiece" (Edmund White) poised on the cusp of reality, told by "an elegantly acute and mysteriously beguiling writer" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).

James ha 18 anni e vive a New York. Finita la scuola, lavoricchia nella galleria d'arte della madre, dove non entra mai nessuno: sarebbe arduo, d'altra parte, suscitare clamore intorno a opere di tendenza come le pattumiere dell'artista giapponese che vuole restare Senza Nome. Per ingannare il tempo, e nella speranza di trovare un'alternativa all'università ("Ho passato tutta la vita con i miei coetanei e non mi piacciono granché"), James cerca in rete una casa nel Midwest dove coltivare in pace le sue attività preferite - la lettura e la solitudine -, ma per sua fortuna gli incauti agenti immobiliari gli riveleranno alcuni allarmanti inconvenienti della vita di provincia. Finché un giorno James entra in una chat di cuori solitari e, sotto falso nome, propone a John, il gestore della galleria che ne è un utente compulsivo, un appuntamento al buio...

After a devastating personal tragedy, a man leaves the United States to begin life abroad. The country in which he finds himself is inordinately influenced by his imagination, and the events there are eerily reminiscent of his past, especially when he begins to fall in love with two women simultaneously. Andorra is a small country, populated (almost exclusively) by the ancient Mrs. Reinhardt, who outlives her lifetime lease on the penthouse of the Hotel Excelsior; the Dents, an Australian couple who share a first name, a huge dog, and a secret; Sophonsobia Quay, the kayaking matriarch of the powerful Quay family; her two beautiful but…

On a midsummer weekend, in a country house in upstate New York, three friends gather on the anniversary of the death of a man related to them all by blood or love. Their idyll is disturbed by the presence of two outsiders: a faux Italian dinner guest and a young gay man now involved with the dead man's lover. As the weekend unfolds, with its walks in the woods, its swims in the river, its wine sipped by moonlight, and its sparkling conversation, each character's heart and soul is stripped bare, as old memories and new desires create a chemistry that will leave none of them untouched or unchanged.