Майк Маккормак3.5 Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer's mind how things are constructed - bridges, banking systems, marriages - and how they may come apart.
Mike McCormack captures with tenderness and feeling, in continuous, flowing prose, a whole life, suspended in a single hour.
Элизабет Страут3.3 Люси просыпается в больничной палате и обнаруживает рядом собственную мать. Мать, которую она не видела много лет, которая никогда не была с ней нежна в детстве, которая не могла ее защитить, утешить, сделать ее жизнь если не счастливой, то хотя бы сносной.
Люси хочется начать все с чистого листа. Быть просто Люси Бартон — забыть, как родители били ее и запирали в старом грузовике, забыть как ее, вечно грязную и оборванную девочку, унижали и дразнили в школе.
Но в то же время взрослой Люси — замужней женщине, матери двух дочерей, автору нескольких опубликованных рассказов, так не хватает материнского тепла.
И мать ее тоже одинока, и ей тоже, наверное, не хватает душевной близости. Но как быть, если нет дара любить?
Michelle Butler Hallett0.0 1593. Queen Elizabeth reigns from the throne while two rival spymasters -- Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex -- plot from the shadows. Their goal? To control succession upon the aged queen's death. The man on which their schemes depend? Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler's son from Canterbury who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright. Now that the plague has closed theatres, Marlowe must resume the work for which he was originally recruited: intelligence and espionage.
Fighting to stay one step ahead in a dizzying game that threatens the lives of those he holds most dear, Marlowe comes to question his allegiances and nearly everything he once believed. As tensions mount, he is tossed into an impossible bind. He must choose between paths that lead either to wretched guilt and miserable death or to love and honour.
An historical novel with a contemporary edge, This Marlowe measures the weight of the body politic, the torment of the flesh, and the state of the soul
Jen Sookfong Lee0.0 On a sunny May morning, social worker Jessica Campbell sorts through her mother’s belongings after her recent funeral. In the basement, she makes a shocking discovery — two dead girls curled into the bottom of her mother’s chest freezers. She remembers a pair of foster children who lived with the family in 1988: Casey and Jamie Cheng — troubled, beautiful, and wild teenaged sisters from Vancouver’s Chinatown. After six weeks, they disappeared; social workers, police officers, and Jessica herself assumed they had run away.
As Jessica learns more about Casey, Jamie, and their troubled immigrant Chinese parents, she also unearths dark stories about Donna, whom she had always thought of as the perfect mother. The complicated truths she uncovers force her to take stock of own life.
Moving between present and past, this riveting novel unflinchingly examines the myth of social heroism and traces the often-hidden fractures that divide our diverse cities.
Alina Bronsky4.4 Baba Dunja ist eine Tschernobyl-Heimkehrerin. Wo der Rest der Welt nach dem Reaktorunglück die tickenden Geigerzähler und die strahlenden Waldfrüchte fürchtet, baut sich die ehemalige Krankenschwester mit Gleichgesinnten ein neues Leben auf. Wasser gibt es aus dem Brunnen, Elektrizität an guten Tagen und Gemüse aus dem eigenen Garten. Die Vögel rufen im Niemandsland so laut wie nirgends sonst, die Spinnen weben verrückte Netze, und manchmal kommt sogar ein Toter auf einen Plausch vorbei. Während der sterbenskranke Petrov in der Hängematte Liebesgedichte liest, die Gavrilovs im Garten Schach spielen und die Melkerin Marja mit dem fast hundertjährigen Sidorow anbandelt, schreibt Baba Dunja Briefe an ihre Tochter Irina, die Chirurgin bei der deutschen Bundeswehr ist. Und an ihre Enkelin Laura. Doch dann kommen Fremde ins Dorf – und die Gemeinschaft steht erneut vor der Auflösung. Alina Bronsky lässt in ihrem neuen Roman eine untergegangene Welt wieder auferstehen. Komisch, klug und herzzerreißend erzählt sie die Geschichte eines Dorfes, das es nicht mehr geben soll – und einer außergewöhnlichen Frau, die im hohen Alter ihr selbstbestimmtes Paradies findet. Auf kleinem Raum gelingt ihr eine märchenhafte und zugleich fesselnd gegenwärtige Geschichte.
Yuri Herrera0.0 A plague has brought death to the city. Two feuding crime families with blood on their hands need our hard-boiled hero, The Redeemer, to broker peace.
Yuri Herrera’s novel, a response to the violence of contemporary Mexico with echoes of Romeo and Juliet, Bolaño and Chandler, is a noirish tragedy and a tribute to the bodies that violence touches.
Roy Jacobsen5.0 Barrøy Island off the North-western coast of Norway - a holdfast for a single family, their livestock, their crops, their hopes and dreams. And their fears. There is a taint passed down the Barrøy line, and Hans and Maria Barrøy fear their daughter Ingrid may be affected.
The early years of the twentieth century prove that Norway cannot stand apart from the wider world - no more than Barrøy island can remain at a remove from the rest of Norway. Hans Barrøy decides to build a quay so that his family can be properly connected to the mainland and with neighbouring islands.
In time, Ingrid is sent to serve with one of the rich families on the coast, caring for their two children. But when tragedy strikes - twice in quick succession - she finds herself responsible not only for two newly orphaned children, but for Barrøy Island itself. If they are to survive, she and the other young must learn how to tame this remote earthly paradise for themselves.
Han Kang4.4 Gwangju, South Korea, 1980. In the wake of a viciously suppressed student uprising, a boy searches for his friend's corpse, a consciousness searches for its abandoned body, and a brutalised country searches for a voice. In a sequence of interconnected chapters the victims and the bereaved encounter censorship, denial, forgiveness and the echoing agony of the original trauma.
Human Acts is a universal book, utterly modern and profoundly timeless. Already a controversial bestseller and award-winning book in Korea, it confirms Han Kang as a writer of immense importance.
Eimear McBride3.8 An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor. This older man has a disturbing past that the young girl is unprepared for. The young girl has a troubling past of her own. This is her story and their story.
The Lesser Bohemians is about sexual passion. It is about innocence and the loss of it. At once epic and exquisitely intimate, it is a celebration of the dark and the light in love.
Антонио Мореско0.0 A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle of the forest. But who really is this child? The answer at the secret heart of this novel is both uncanny and profoundly touching. Antonio Moresco's "Little Prince" is a moving meditation on life and the universe we inhabit. Moresco reflects on the solitude and pain of existence, but also on what we share with all around us, living and dead.
Marie NDiaye0.0 From the hugely acclaimed author of Three Strong Women—“a masterpiece of narrative ingenuity and emotional extremes” (The New York Times)—here is a harrowing and subtly crafted novel of a woman captive to a secret shame.
On the first Tuesday of every month, Clarisse Rivière leaves her husband and young daughter and secretly takes the train to Bordeaux to visit her mother, Ladivine. Just as Clarisse’s husband and daughter know nothing of Ladivine, Clarisse herself has hidden nearly every aspect of her adult life from this woman, whom she dreads and despises but also pities. Long ago abandoned by Clarisse’s father, Ladivine works as a housecleaner and has no one but her daughter, whom she knows as Malinka.
After more than twenty-five years of this deception, the idyllic middle-class existence Clarisse has built from scratch can no longer survive inside the walls she’s put up to protect it. Her untold anguish leaves her cold and guarded, her loved ones forever trapped outside, looking in. When her husband, Richard, finally leaves her, Clarisse finds comfort in the embrace of a volatile local man, Freddy Moliger. With Freddy, she finally feels reconciled to, or at least at ease with, her true self. But this peace comes at a terrible price. Clarisse will be brutally murdered, and it will be left to her now-grown daughter, who also bears the name Ladivine without knowing why, to work out who her mother was and what happened to her.
A mesmerizing and heart-stopping psychological tale of a trauma that ensnares three generations of women, Ladivine proves Marie NDiaye to be one of Europe’s great storytellers.
Еванде Омотосо0.0 Hortensia James and Marion Agostino are neighbors. One is black, the other white. Both are successful women with impressive careers. Both have recently been widowed, and are living with questions, disappointments, and secrets that have brought them shame. And each has something that the woman next door deeply desires.
Sworn enemies, the two share a hedge and a deliberate hostility, which they maintain with a zeal that belies their age. But, one day, an unexpected event forces Hortensia and Marion together. As the physical barriers between them collapse, their bickering gradually softens into conversation, which yields a discovery of shared experiences. But are these sparks of connection enough to ignite a friendship, or is it too late to expect these women to change?
The U.S. debut of an Etisalat Prize finalist, The Woman Next Door is a winning story of the common ground we sometimes find in unexpected places, told with wit and wry humor.
