Эми М. Хоумс3.9 «Да будем мы прощены» – одна из самых ярких и необычных книг десятилетия. Полный парадоксального юмора, язвительный и в то же время трогательный роман о непростых отношениях самых близких людей.
Еще недавно историк Гарольд Сильвер только и мог, что завидовать старшему брату, настолько тот был успешен в карьере и в семейной жизни.
Но внезапно блеск и успех обернулись чудовищной трагедией, а записной холостяк и волокита Гарольд оказался в роли опекуна двух подростков-племянников – в роли, к которой он, мягко говоря, не вполне готов…
Так начинается эта история, в которой привычное соседствует с невероятным, а печальное – со смешным. Впрочем, не так ли все, в сущности, бывает и в реальной жизни?..
Мария Семпл3.8 Бернадетт Фокс бесследно исчезла за два дня до Рождества. За день до отъезда в обещанный дочери в награду за отличную учебу семейный круиз в Антарктиду…
Окружающие привыкли к странностям Бернадетт: она почти не выходит из дому, не ухаживает за газоном, отказывается заседать в родительском комитете, школьных мамашек называет не иначе как "мошкарой" и сорит деньгами так, как будто они ничего не значат.
Еще она не снимает темных очков, однажды заснула на диване в аптеке и… организацию всех бытовых дел поручила удаленному виртуальному помощнику в Индии! Ее муж Элджи - компьютерный гений из "Майкрософт" - честно пытается понять, что происходит с женой, но слишком редко бывает дома: совещания, командировки и вечный аврал на работе не оставляют времени на семью. Куда же пропала Бернадетт? Стала жертвой несчастного случая?
Покончила с собой? Никто не знает, что с ней случилось, но все уверены: ее больше нет в живых. Все, кроме пятнадцатилетней Би, которая в поисках мамы готова добраться до самого Южного полюса…
Дебора Копакен0.0 The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion.
Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place, both among the East Coast elite and within the social milieu of her prep-schooled beau, Bucky. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage, finding escape in both art and in the arms of another woman. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage, including a heartrending turn as Nora in A Doll’s House. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words, spending long hours as an editor at the Crimson.
Twenty years later, all their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter, as troubled as her children’s psyches, and as mismanaged as her trust fund. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss, having lost her journalist husband—the father of her young child—to war, her adoptive mother to cancer, and quite possibly her current partner due to an errant email.
Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend
Шани Боянцзю0.0 Yael, Avishag, and Lea grow up together in a tiny, dusty Israeli village, attending a high school made up of caravan classrooms, passing notes to each other to alleviate the universal boredom of teenage life. When they are conscripted into the army, their lives change in unpredictable ways, influencing the women they become and the friendship that they struggle to sustain. Yael trains marksmen and flirts with boys. Avishag stands guard, watching refugees throw themselves at barbed-wire fences. Lea, posted at a checkpoint, imagines the stories behind the familiar faces that pass by her day after day. They gossip about boys and whisper of an ever more violent world just beyond view. They drill, constantly, for a moment that may never come. They live inside that single, intense second just before danger erupts.
In a relentlessly energetic and arresting voice marked by humor and fierce intelligence, Shani Boianjiu, creates an unforgettably intense world, capturing that unique time in a young woman's life when a single moment can change everything.
Рос Барбер0.0 On May 30th, 1593, a celebrated young playwright was killed in a tavern brawl in London. That, at least, was the official version. Now let Christopher Marlowe tell you the truth: that his 'death' was an elaborate ruse to avoid his being hanged for heresy; that he was spirited across the channel to live on in lonely exile, longing for his true love and pining for the damp streets of London; that he continued to write plays and poetry, hiding behind the name of a colourless man from Stratford — one William Shakespeare.
With the grip of a thriller and the emotional force of a sonnet, this extraordinary novel in verse gives voice to a man who was brilliant, passionate, mercurial and not altogether trustworthy. The son of a cobbler who rose so far in Elizabethan society that he counted nobles among his friends and patrons, a spy in the Queen's service, a fickle lover and a declared religious sceptic, he was always courting trouble. When it caught up with him, he was lucky to have connections powerful enough to help him escape.
Memoir, love letter, settling of accounts and a cry for recognition as the creator of some of the most sublime works in the English language, this is Christopher Marlowe's testament — and a tour de force by an award-winning poet: provocative, persuasive and enthralling.
Francesca Segal0.0 What if everything you'd ever wanted was no longer enough?
Adam and Rachel are getting married at last. Childhood sweethearts whose lives and families have been intertwined for years; theirs is set to be the wedding of the year.
But then Rachel's cousin Ellie makes an unexpected return to the family fold. Beautiful, reckless and troubled, Ellie represents everything that Adam has tried all his life to avoid - and everything that is missing from his world. As the long-awaited wedding approaches, Adam is torn between duty and temptation, security and freedom, and must make a choice that will break either one heart, or many.
Марго Стедман4.4 Том Шербурн — смотритель маяка. Изабель — его молодая жена. На далеком острове они ведут тихую и размеренную жизнь, и их единственная мечта — иметь детей. И однажды к берегу прибивает лодку, в которой оказывается новорожденная девочка. Кто она? Есть ли у нее родители? Это подарок судьбы или… чья-то трагическая потеря? Немедленно сообщить о ребенке на материк или воспитывать его как собственного — решение, которое предстоит принять Тому и Изабель, решение, цена которого может быть слишком велика…
Zadie Smith3.4 Zadie Smith's brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they've made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent - as brimming with vitality as the city itself.
Эмили Перкинс0.0 Dorothy Forrest is immersed in the sensory world around her; she lives in the flickering moment. From the age of seven, when her odd, disenfranchised family moves from New York City to the wide skies of Auckland, to the very end of her life, this is her great gift and possible misfortune. Through the wilderness of a commune, to falling in love, to early marriage and motherhood, from the glorious anguish of parenting to the loss of everything worked for and the unexpected return of love, Dorothy is swept along by time. Her family looms and recedes; revelations come to light; death changes everything, but somehow life remains as potent as it ever was, and the joy in just being won't let her go.
In a narrative that shifts and moves, growing as wild as the characters, The Forrests is an extraordinary literary achievement. A novel that sings with colour and memory, it speaks of family and time, dysfunction, ageing and loneliness, about heat, youth, and how life can change if 'you're lucky enough to be around for it'.
Бонни Надзам0.0 Lamb traces the self-discovery of David Lamb, a narcissistic middle aged man with a tendency toward dishonesty, in the weeks following the disintegration of his marriage and the death of his father. Hoping to regain some faith in his own goodness, he turns his attention to Tommie, an awkward and unpopular eleven-year-old girl. Lamb is convinced that he can help her avoid a destiny of apathy and emptiness, and even comes to believe that his devotion to Tommie is in her best interest. But when Lamb decides to abduct a willing Tommie for a road trip from Chicago to the Rockies, planning to initiate her into the beauty of the mountain wilderness, they are both shaken in ways neither of them expects.
Lamb is a masterful exploration of the dynamics of love and dependency that challenges the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood, confronts preconceived notions about conventional morality, and exposes mankind’s eroded relationship with nature.
