Шехан Карунатилака3.8 Сколько людей погибло и по чьей вине? Только мёртвые знают ответ.
Коломбо, 1990 год. Маали Алмейда, военный фотограф, просыпается где-то вроде небесного визового центра. Его расчлененное тело лежит на дне озера, и он понятия не имеет, кто его убил. Когда идёт гражданская война, список подозреваемых удручающе длинный.
У Маали есть всего семь лун – семь дней, чтобы найти своего убийцу и передать фотографии, доказывающие военные преступления, живым. В этом ему будут помогать духи, демоны и любимые люди.
Юлия Чегодайкина, шеф-редактор издательства «Строки»:
Актуальный и увлекательный роман, который способен рассорить даже самых сдержанных собеседников: настолько острые, болезненные и важные темы в нем затрагиваются. Автор прямым текстом говорит о том, что за все войны и трагедии ответственность лежит на каждом из нас: на каждом активном участнике и на каждом равнодушном наблюдателе. На первый взгляд, книга о гражданской войне на Шри-Ланке, на самом деле – она про сегодняшнюю нашу реальность, а если ничего не менять, молча позволять злу действовать, прощать и забывать несправедливость, то и про завтрашнюю.
Грэм Макрей Барнет3.1 «Я решила записывать всё, что сейчас происходит, потому что мне кажется, что я подвергаю себя опасности», — пишет молодая женщина, расследующая самоубийство своей сестры. Придумав для себя альтер-эго харизматичной и психически нестабильной девушки по имени Ребекка Смитт, она записывается на приём к скандально известному психотерапевту Коллинзу Бретуэйту. Она подозревает, что именно Бретуэйт подтолкнул её сестру к самоубийству, и начинает вести дневник, где фиксирует детали своего общения с психотерапевтом.
Однако, столкнувшись с противоречивым, загадочным, а местами насквозь шарлатанским миром психиатрии 60-х годов, героиня начинает сильно сомневаться не только в её методах, но и в собственном рассудке.
Карен Джой Фаулер5.0 Best Book of the Year
Real Simple - AARP - USA Today
From the Man Booker finalist and bestselling author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves comes an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history: John Wilkes Booth.
In 1822, a secret family moves into a secret cabin some thirty miles northeast of Baltimore, to farm, to hide, and to bear ten children over the course of the next sixteen years. Junius Booth--breadwinner, celebrated Shakespearean actor, and master of the house in more ways than one--is at once a mesmerizing talent and a man of terrifying instability. One by one the children arrive, as year by year, the country draws frighteningly closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.
As the tenor of the world shifts, the Booths emerge from their hidden lives to cement their place as one of the country's leading theatrical families. But behind the curtains of the many stages they have graced, multiple scandals, family triumphs, and criminal disasters begin to take their toll, and the solemn siblings of John Wilkes Booth are left to reckon with the truth behind the destructively specious promise of an early prophecy.
Booth is a startling portrait of a country in the throes of change and a vivid exploration of the ties that make, and break, a family.
Elizabeth Strout3.8 I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.
Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.
So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. What happens next is nothing less than another example of what Hilary Mantel has called Elizabeth Strout’s “perfect attunement to the human condition.” There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.
At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says: “the many things we do not know until it is too late.”
Эрнан Диаз4.1 Даже рев и грохот бурных двадцатых не могли заглушить их имена. Он легендарный магнат с Уолл-стрит, она — дочь эксцентричных аристократов. Вместе они поднялись на вершину мира, полного иллюзии безграничного богатства. Но какую цену они заплатили за столь огромное состояние? Мы узнаем об этом из нескольких источников. Из книги о жизни миллионера. Из его собственных мемуаров. От машинистки, которая записывает их и замечает, что история и реальность начинают расходиться. И — из дневников его жены. Чей голос честнее, а кто самый ненадежный рассказчик? Как вообще представления о реальности сосуществуют с самой реальностью? «Доверие» — одновременно захватывающая история и блестящая литературная головоломка.
Percival Everett4.5 Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.
The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
Alan Garner3.1 Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and an exploration of the fluidity of time, vivid storytelling that brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of everything around him.
'Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags! Pots for rags! Donkey stone!'
Joe looked up from his comic and lifted his eye patch. There was a white pony in the yard. It was harnessed to a cart, a flat cart, with a wooden chest on it. A man was sitting at a front corner of the cart, holding the reins. His face was creased. He wore a long coat and a floppy high-crowned hat, with hair straggling beneath, and a leather bag was slung from his shoulder across his hip.
Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds' eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the Cheshire moor one day - a wanderer, a healer - an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.
Мэдди Мортимер3.5 This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman’s life—told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease.
Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden diagnosis threatens to derail each of their lives, the secrets of Lia’s past come rushing into the present, and the world around them begins to transform.
Deftly guided through time, we discover the people who shaped Lia’s youth; from her deeply religious mother to her troubled first love. In turn, each will take their place in the shifting landscape of Lia’s body; at the center of which dances a gleeful narrator, learning her life from the inside, growing more emboldened by the day.
Pivoting between the domestic and the epic, the comic and the heart-breaking, this astonishing novel unearths the darkness and levity of one woman’s life to symphonic effect.
Leila Mottley4.3 Kiara and her brother, Marcus, are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent--which has more than doubled--and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed.
One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.
Claire Keegan4.1 It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.
Small Things Like These is an unforgettable story of hope, quiet heroism and tenderness.
Новайолет Булавайо4.2 From the award-winning author of the Booker-prize finalist We Need New Names, a blockbuster of a novel that chronicles the fall of an oppressive regime, and the chaotic, kinetic potential for real liberation that rises in its wake.
Glory centers around the unexpected fall of Old Horse, a long-serving leader of a fictional country, and the drama that follows for a rumbustious nation of animals on the path to true liberation. Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup, in November 2017, of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president of nearly four decades, Bulawayo's bold, vividly imagined novel shows a country imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices who unveil the ruthlessness and cold strategy required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, and the imagination and bullet-proof optimism to overthrow it completely.
As with her debut novel We Need New Names, Bulawayo's fierce voice and lucid imagery immerses us in the daily life of a traumatized nation, revealing the dazzling life force and irrepressible wit that lies barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances. At the center of this tumult is Destiny, who has returned to Jidada from exile to bear witness to revolution--and focus on the unofficial history and the potential legacy of the women who have quietly pulled the strings in this country.
The animal kingdom--its connection to our primal responses and resonance in the mythology, folktales, and fairytales that define cultures the world over--unmasks the surreality of contemporary global politics to help us understand our world more clearly, even as Bulwayo plucks us right out of it. Glory is a blockbuster, an exhilarating ride, and crystalizes a turning point in history with the texture and nuance that only the greatest of fiction can.
Селби Винн Шварц3.5 “The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho,” so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: “I want to make life fuller and fuller.” Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives. A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.
Одри Маги4.3 Маленький ирландский остров живет своей жизнью, и ему решительно наплевать, что где-то есть Цивилизация и происходит Прогресс, а по соседству гремит гражданская война. Острову хватает своих радостей и проблем. Но однажды на острове появляются два чужака: английский художник и французский лингвист. Такое соседство мало кто способен снести без моральных потерь, а уж жители маленького острова и подавно. Тем более что в гущу медленного, но верного сползания к развязке оказывается вовлечен едва ли не единственный местный подросток: в очень медлительной местной жизни ему в рекордный срок предстоит пройти все те этапы становления, на которые у мировой культуры и цивилизации почему-то ушло много, много веков.
