Rawi Hage5.0 There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. In Rawi Hage's unforgettable novel, winner of the 2008 IMPAC Prize, this famous quote by Camus becomes a touchstone for two young men caught in Lebanon's civil war. Bassam and George are childhood best friends who have grown to adulthood in war torn Beirut. Now they must choose their futures: to stay in the city and consolidate power through crime; or to go into exile abroad, alienated from the only existence they have known. Bassam chooses one path: obsessed with leaving Beirut, he embarks on a series of petty crimes to finance his departure. Meanwhile, George builds his power in the underworld of the city and embraces a life of military service, crime for profit, killing, and drugs.
Told in the voice of Bassam, De Niro's Game is a beautiful, explosive portrait of a contemporary young man shaped by a lifelong experience of war. Rawi Hage's brilliant style mimics a world gone mad: so smooth and apparently sane that its razor-sharp edges surprise and cut deeply. A powerful meditation on life and death in a war zone, and what comes after.
Javier Cercas0.0 Javier Cercas' third and most ambitious novel has already been heralded in Spain as "daring," "magnificent, complex, and intense," and "a master class in invention and truth."As a young writer, the novel's protagonist-perhaps an apocryphal version of Cercas himself-accepts a post at a Midwestern university and soon he is in the United States, living a simple life, working and writing. It will be years before he understands that his burgeoning friendship with the Vietnam vet Rodney Falk, a strange and solitary man, will reshape his life, or that he will become obsessed with Rodney's mysterious past.
Why does Rodney shun the world? Why does he accept and befriend the narrator? And what really happened at the mysterious 'My Khe' incident? Many years pass with these questions unanswered; the two friends drift apart. But as the narrator's literary career takes off, his personal life collapses. Suddenly, impossibly, the novelist finds that Rodney's fate and his own are linked, and the story spirals towards its fascinating, surreal conclusion. Twisting together his own regrets with those of America, Cercas weaves the profound and personal story of a ghostly past.
Yasmine Gooneratne0.0 'Loyalty (and the damnable lack of it in his wife) was the thought uppermost in the mind of Sir Andrew Millbanke as he looked down at Lady Alexandra's dead body, spread-eagled on the paved pathway of the Residency.' And so begins an engrossing and dramatic family drama, set against the backdrop of Ceylon's bumpy evolution into Sri Lanka, as the Wijesinha clan struggle to balance their staunch political ambition against the ignominy of an embarrassing family scandal. And when two young family members, cousins Tsunami and Latha, meet and become firm friends no one can guess that their triumphant friendship will be played out over the passing years against both the best and the worst the newly independent Sri Lanka can offer as these two smart and Westernised young women pursue their own personal freedoms.
Гейл Джонс0.0 Far away from home and her beloved but distant sister, Norah, Alice meets an old Japanese man on a train journey. Together they form an unlikely friendship at a crucial point in Alice's life where she is reflecting upon her family and her past, and disentangling herself from an old love affair.
Alice is fascinated by the poetry of technology, and Mr Sakomoto, a survivor of the atomic bomb, entrances her with his amazing stories of twentieth-century inventions, including Alexander Graham Bell and the mysteries of the telephone. Drawn together by their shared enthusiasms, these two solitary beings slowly come to rely on one another.
In Dreams of Speaking, prize-winning author Gail Jones paints with grace and skill the experience of needing to belong despite wanting to be alone.
Sayed Kashua, Miriam Shlesinger0.0
A young journalist, recently married with a young child, is seeking a quieter life away from the city and has bought a large new home in his parent's hometown. It's a complicated return - his wife hates his parents - but they are also moving back to live in an Arab village in Israel. Nothing is as they remember: everything is smaller, the people petty and provincial and the villagers divided between sympathy for the Palestinians and dependence on the Israelis. Suddenly and shockingly, the village becomes a pawn in the never-ending power struggles of the Middle East. When Israeli tanks surround the village without warning or explanation, everyone inside is cut off from the outside world. As the situation grows increasingly dire, paranoia begins to threaten the community's fragile equilibrium, forcing the hero to decide what it means to be human in an inhuman situation.
Yasmina Khadra0.0 Dr. Amin Jaafari, an Arab-Israeli citizen, is a surgeon at a hospital in Tel Aviv. Dedicated to his work, respected and admired by his colleagues and community, he represents integration at its most successful. He has learned to live with the
Patrick McCabe0.0 Once, Redmond Hatch was in heaven, married to the lovely Catherine and father to enchanting daughter Immy. But then he took them both to Winterwood. And it would never be the same again…
In Patrick McCabe's spellbinding new novel, nothing--and no one--are ever quite what they seem. When Hatch, devoted husband and father, revisits the secluded mountains where he grew up, he meets Auld Pappie Ned. While he claims to be just a harmless local fiddler, a teller of tall tales, Ned sets off a cataclysmic chain of events in Redmond's life. From the mysterious disappearance of Redmond's daughter to the reluctant remembrance of a troubled boyhood to secret glimpses into an unstable marriage, everything soon spirals out of control. Narrated with hypnotic precision and fractured lyricism, Winterwood is a disturbing and unforgettable tale of love, death and identity from a masterful novelist.
Andrei Makine5.0 By a master of European literature, a sensual, absorting tale of the human capacity for enduring love, selfish passion and cowardly betrayal.
In a hamlet amid the austere beauty of northern Russia lives the woman who waited, still expecting her lover to return from the Second World War after thirty years. A young, rebellious writer from Leningrad, fascinated by her fruitless fidelity, seeks to unravel her secrets - but the closer he comes to her, the more she surprises him.
Софи Ханна3.3 Один из лучших детективов последних лет. Роман несколько недель возглавлял списки бестселлеров в крупнейших магазинах Великобритании.
Элис лишь на два часа ушла из дома, оставив свою двухмесячную дочку на попечение мужа. Она не знала, что через два часа ее жизнь превратится в кошмар. Вернувшись домой, она обнаружила в детской кроватке вовсе не свою дочь, а чужого ребенка. Но так считает только она. Все остальные считают, что Элис тронулась умом, но это лишь завязка сложнейшей истории, которая держит в напряжении от первой до последней страницы. "Маленькое личико" - великолепный психологический детектив с совершенно непредсказуемой развязкой.
