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Showing 1 - 20 of 131 items
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history
Human-narrated audio
Chant épique et nostalgique. Un chef-d'oeuvre de ce qu'on désigne aujourd'hui par "littérature voyageuse". La découverte étonnante d'un village espagnol…
(vers 1954) qui vit comme si rien ne s'était passé sur terre depuis l'Antiquité. [SDM
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, Biography
Human-narrated audio
A Rome, au milieu de la vieille aristocratie européenne, s'introduit une jeune Américaine aux façons quelque peu désinvoltes. Deux cultures s'affrontent.
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Family stories, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, Psychology
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
The Brother is a spaghetti western told in poetic prose, simultaneously paying tribute to both Clint Eastwood and Alessandro Baricco.…
It opens with a mysterious stranger arriving in a small town controlled by a group of men-men who recently cheated the stranger's supposed sister out of her inheritance. Following his arrival, fortunes change dramatically, enraging this group of powerful men.
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General fiction, Serious and literary fiction, War storiesEuropean history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
We first meet its young protagonist, Adrià Guinart, as he is leaving Barcelona out of boredom and a thirst for…
freedom, embarking on a long journey through the backwaters of a rural land that one can only suppose is Catalonia, accompanied by the interminable, distant rumblings of an indefinable war. In vignette-like chapters and with a narrative style imbued with the fantastic, Guinart meets with numerous adventures and peculiar characters who offer him a composite, if surrealistic, view of an impoverished, war-ravaged society and shape his perception of his place in the world.As in Rodoreda's Death in Spring, nature and death play an fundamental role in a narrative that often takes on a phantasmagoric quality and seems to be a meditation on the consequences of moral degradation and the inescapable presence of evil.Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) is widely regarded as the most important Catalan writer of the twentieth century. Exiled in France and Switzerland following the Spanish Civil War, Rodoreda began writing the novels and short stories--Twenty-Two Short Stories, The Time of the Doves, Camellia Street, Garden by the Sea--that would eventually make her internationally famous.
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General fiction, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"The House with the Stained-Glass Window is remarkable, a gripping, Lvivian evocation of a city and a family across a…
long and painful century, at once personal and political, a novel of life and survival across the ages" PHILIPPE SANDS, author of East West StreetIn 1989, Marianna, the beautiful star soprano at the Lviv opera, is shot dead in the street as she leads the Ukrainian citizens in their protest against Soviet power. Only eleven years old at the time, her daughter tells the story of their family before and after that critical moment - including, ten years later, her own passionate affair with an older, married man. Just like their home city of Lviv, which stands at the crossroads of nations and cultures, the women in this family have had turbulent lives, scarred by war and political turmoil, but also by their own inability to show each other their feelings. Lyrically told, this is the story of a young girl's emotional, sexual, artistic and political awakening as she matures under the influence of her relatives, her mother's former lover, her city and its fortunes.Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
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Family stories, Serious and literary fictionDeath and bereavement, European history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"The emotions unleashed in this tale . . . are painfully universal. Yet you know exactly where in the universe…
you are. This is the hallmark of great short stories, from Chekhov's portraits of discontented Russians to Joyce's struggling Dubliners."-Radhika Jones, TimeNaja Marie Aidt's long-awaited first novel is a breathtaking page-turner and complex portrait of a man whose life slowly devolves into one of violence and jealousy.Rock, Paper, Scissors opens shortly after the death of Thomas and Jenny's criminal father. While trying to fix a toaster that he left behind, Thomas discovers a secret, setting into motion a series of events leading to the dissolution of his life, and plunging him into a dark, shadowy underworld of violence and betrayal.A gripping story written with a poet's sensibility and attention to language, Rock, Paper, Scissors showcases all of Aidt's gifts and will greatly expand the readership for one of Denmark's most decorated and beloved writers.Naja Marie Aidt was born in Greenland and raised in Copenhagen. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and five short story collections, including Baboon (Two Lines Press), which received the Nordic Council's Literature Prize and the Danish Critics Prize for Literature. Rock, Paper, Scissors is her first novel.K. E. Semmel is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in Ontario Review, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. His translations include books by Karin Fossum, Erik Valeur, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Simon Fruelund.
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, Anthologies
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Jean d’Arras’s splendid prose romance of Melusine, written for Jean de Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France,…
is one of the most significant and complex literary works of the later Middle Ages. The author, promising to tell us “how the noble and powerful fortress of Lusignan in Poitou was founded by a fairy,” writes a ceaselessly astonishing account of the origins of the powerful feudal dynasty of the Lusignans in southwestern France, which flourished in western Europe and the Near East during the age of the Crusades. The spellbinding story of the destinies of the fairy Melusine, her mortal husband, and her extraordinary sons blends history, myth, genealogy, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, romance, and Crusade narrative.Preceded by a substantial introduction, this translation, the first in English to be amply annotated, captures the remarkable range of stylistic registers that characterizes this extravagant and captivating work.
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, Anthologies
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Jean d’Arras’s splendid prose romance of Melusine, written for Jean de Berry, the brother of King Charles V of France,…
is one of the most significant and complex literary works of the later Middle Ages. The author, promising to tell us “how the noble and powerful fortress of Lusignan in Poitou was founded by a fairy,” writes a ceaselessly astonishing account of the origins of the powerful feudal dynasty of the Lusignans in southwestern France, which flourished in western Europe and the Near East during the age of the Crusades. The spellbinding story of the destinies of the fairy Melusine, her mortal husband, and her extraordinary sons blends history, myth, genealogy, folklore, and popular traditions with epic, romance, and Crusade narrative.Preceded by a substantial introduction, this translation, the first in English to be amply annotated, captures the remarkable range of stylistic registers that characterizes this extravagant and captivating work.
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, History
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The newest best-seller by Patrick Modiano is a beautiful tapestry that brings together memory, esoteric encounters, and fragmented sensations Patrick…
Modiano’s first book since his 2014 Nobel Prize revisits moments of the author’s past to produce a spare yet moving reflection on the destructive underside of love, the dreams and follies of youth, the vagaries of memory, and the melancholy of loss. Writing from the perspective of an older man, the narrator relives a key period in his life through his relationships with several enigmatic women—Geneviève, Martine, Madeleine, a certain Madame Huberson—in the process unearthing his troubled relationship with his parents, his unorthodox childhood, and the unsettled years of his youth that helped form the celebrated writer he would become. This is classic Modiano, utilizing his signature mix of autobiography and invention to create his most intriguing and intimate book yet.
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
'The best novel I've encountered this year, brilliant and funny and profound, producing some of the most complex, fascinating characters…
I've ever known. As far as I'm concerned, the novel is an instant classic' Jaroslav Kalfar, author of Spaceman of Bohemia'This is art of the highest order, a masterpiece of restraint, insight and style' Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves9th November 1989, East Berlin, the day the Berlin Wall will fall - Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi agent whose life's work, a manual on the demoralisation of political opponents, once made him renowned now faces an ailing psyche and the fading twilight of his career. His whole life has been reduced to a preoccupation with the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his local café. Twenty-five years earlier, during the Cold War, a physicist Johannes Held had been sent by the East Germans to infiltrate a US military operation in the Arizona desert, where teleportation and other paranormal activities were being investigated. On his return to Germany he refused to divulge what he had learned there and Zeiger was summoned to obtain his confession. The torturer and the tortured strangely became friends. But Zeiger soon betrayed Held - a treachery that haunts him to this day and one that will prove to be connected to Lara's disappearance. Darkly comic and hauntingly surreal, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures examines obsession, Cold War paranoia and the dwindling career of a Stasi operative. Set against the brutal backdrop of communist East Germany, Hofmann's debut captures the fate of humanist fantasies under an extreme surveillance state.
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War stories, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, War
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"This is a beautiful book, a masterpiece of brevity and depth" New European"This tense novella builds to a final reckoning"…
The TimesIn October 1944, a thirteen-year-old girl arrives in a tiny farming community in Lower Austria, at some distance from the main theatre of war. She remembers very little about how she got there, it seems she has suffered trauma from bombardment. One night a few months later, a young, emaciated Russian appears, a deserter from forced labour in the east. He has nothing with him but a canvas roll, which he guards like a hawk. Their burgeoning friendship is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of a group of Wehrmacht soldiers in retreat, who commandeer the farm.Paulus Hochgatterer's intensely atmospheric, resonant novel is like a painting in itself, a beautiful observation of small shifts from apathy in a community not directly affected by the war, but exhausted by it nonetheless; individual acts of moral bravery which to some extent have the power to change the course of history.Longlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2017, this subtle, evocative novella will appeal to readers of Hubert Mingarelli's A MEAL IN WINTER and Jenny Erpenbeck's THE END OF DAYS. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
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Serious and literary fictionArts and entertainment, European history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"A novel par excellence that is destined to become a classic' of almost byzantine splendour . . . At its…
best worthy of comparison with Gabriel García Márquez" Catherine Taylor, Irish Times"Afonso Cruz is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Portuguese literature" Antonio Saez Delgado, El PaisAt the age of forty-two, Bonifaz Vogel begins to hear a voice.But it doesn't belong to the mice or the woodworm, as he first imagines. Nor is it the voice of God, as he comes to believe. It belongs to young Isaac Dresner, who takes refuge in the cellar of Vogel's bird shop on the run from the soldier who shot his best friend. Soon Vogel comes to rely on it for advice: he cannot make a sale without first bending down to confer with the floorboards. Thus begins the story of two Dresden families, fractured and displaced by the devastating bombing of the city 1945, their fates not only intertwined, but bound also to that of a life-sized doll commissioned by the artist Oskar Kokoschka in the image of his lost lover.Based on a curious true story, Kokoschka's Doll is an imaginative and playful novel that transports the reader to Dresden, Paris, Lagos and Marrakesh, introducing them to an unforgettable cast of characters along the way.Translated from the Portuguese by Rahul Bery
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Serious and literary fictionArts and entertainment, European history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"A novel par excellence that is destined to become a classic' of almost byzantine splendour . . . At its…
best worthy of comparison with Gabriel García Márquez" Catherine Taylor, Irish Times"Afonso Cruz is one of the strongest voices in contemporary Portuguese literature" Antonio Saez Delgado, El PaisAt the age of forty-two, Bonifaz Vogel begins to hear a voice.But it doesn't belong to the mice or the woodworm, as he first imagines. Nor is it the voice of God, as he comes to believe. It belongs to young Isaac Dresner, who takes refuge in the cellar of Vogel's bird shop on the run from the soldier who shot his best friend. Soon Vogel comes to rely on it for advice: he cannot make a sale without first bending down to confer with the floorboards. Thus begins the story of two Dresden families, fractured and displaced by the devastating bombing of the city 1945, their fates not only intertwined, but bound also to that of a life-sized doll commissioned by the artist Oskar Kokoschka in the image of his lost lover.Based on a curious true story, Kokoschka's Doll is an imaginative and playful novel that transports the reader to Dresden, Paris, Lagos and Marrakesh, introducing them to an unforgettable cast of characters along the way.Translated from the Portuguese by Rahul Bery
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, World War II, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"Caterina Pascual Söderbaum has left a major European literary work of art as her legacy" STEVE SEM-SANDBERG, author of Emperor…
of LiesThe Oblique Place is a captivating journey of the imagination, a prize-winning novel that probes the ruinous legacies of Fascist Europe in the twentieth century.The discovery of photographs in an album - of her Spanish grandfather who joined Hitler's Wehrmacht and her father in the uniform of Franco's army- leads Caterina Pascual Söderbaum to explore her family's links to some of the most abhorrent passages of twentieth-century history. Her mother turns out to be related to Kristina Söderbaum, a celebrated Swedish film star of the Third Reich, adored by Goebbels.She travels with husband and child to the shores of the idyllic Attersee in Austria, where the officers of the extermination camps spent their holidays. The journey continues from Schloss Hartheim, where the staff of the Nazi euthanasia programme forgot, with the help of alcohol and sex, the horrors that took place there, to the Villa Saint-Jean, where malnourished children from France's internment camps were sent to recover. This imaginative rediscovery of her own family's disturbing history is fused with vividly captured episodes from other lives and times, and the threads of evil that she lays bare are described in language so beautiful, so subtle and painterly, that her odyssey is at once shattering and mesmerising.Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry
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General fiction, War stories, Serious and literary fictionEuropean history
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
** NOW SHORTLISTED FOR THE WARWICK WOMEN IN TRANSLATION PRIZE 2019 **** WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE **BY…
THE AUTHOR OF THE DOOR, ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF 2015"Extraordinary" New York Times"Quite unforgettable" Daily Telegraph"Unusual, piercing . . . oddly percipient" Irish Times"A gorgeous elegy" Publishers Weekly"A brightly shining star in the Szabo universe" World Literature TodayIn prewar Budapest three families live side by side on gracious Katalin Street, their lives closely intertwined. A game is played by the four children in which Bálint, the promising son of the Major, invariably chooses Irén Elekes, the headmaster's dutiful elder daughter, over her younger sister, the scatterbrained Blanka, and little Henriette Held, the daughter of the Jewish dentist.Their lives are torn apart in 1944 by the German occupation, which only the Elekes family survives intact. The postwar regime relocates them to a cramped Soviet-style apartment and they struggle to come to terms with social and political change, personal loss, and unstated feelings of guilt over the deportation of the Held parents and the death of little Henriette, who had been left in their protection. But the girl survives in a miasmal afterlife, and reappears at key moments as a mute witness to the inescapable power of past events.As in The Door and Iza's Ballad, Magda Szabó conducts a clear-eyed investigation into the ways in which we inflict suffering on those we love. Katalin Street, which won the 2007 Prix Cévennes for Best European novel, is a poignant, sombre, at times harrowing book, but beautifully conceived and truly unforgettable.Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix
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Multi-cultural fiction, Family stories, Serious and literary fictionBusiness and economics, Food and drink, European history, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
The Cheffe is born into a very poor family in Sainte-Bazeille in south-western France, but when she takes a job…
working in the kitchen of a couple in the Landes region, it does not take long before it becomes clear that the Cheffe has an unusual, remarkable talent for cooking. She dreams in recipes, she's always imagining food combinations and cooking times, she hunts down elusive flavours and aromas, and she soon usurps the couple's cook.But for all her genius, the Cheffe remains very secretive about the rest of her life. She becomes pregnant, but will not reveal her daughter's father. She shares nothing of her feelings or emotions. And when the demands of her work and caring for her child become too much, she leaves her baby in the care of her family, and sets out to open her own restaurant, which will soon win rave reviews and be lauded by all.But her relationship with her daughter will never be easy, and before long, it will threaten to destroy everything the Cheffe has spent her life perfecting.
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fictionDeath and bereavement, European history, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"A remarkable act of personal history: brave, revelatory and unflinchingly honest" WILLIAM BOYD"There is no-one writing in English like this:…
engaged humanity achieving a hard-won wisdom" DAVID MILLS, The TimesLord of All the Dead is a courageous journey into Javier Cercas' family history and that of a country collapsing from a fratricidal war. The author revisits Ibahernando, his parents' village in southern Spain, to research the life of Manuel Mena. This ancestor, dearly loved by Cercas' mother, died in combat at the age of nineteen during the battle of the Ebro, the bloodiest episode in Spain's history. Who was Manuel Mena? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment to the author, or a young idealist who happened to fight on the wrong side? And how should we judge him, as grandchildren and great-grandchildren of that generation, interpreting history from our supposed omniscience and the misleadingperspective of a present full of automatic answers, that fails to consider the particularities of each personal and family drama?Wartime epics, heroism and death are some of the underlying themes of this unclassifiable novel that combines road trips, personal confessions, war stories and historical scholarship, finally becoming an incomparable tribute to the author's mother and the incurable scars of an entire generation.
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Serious and literary fictionEuropean history, World War II, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
"Caterina Pascual Söderbaum has left a major European literary work of art as her legacy" STEVE SEM-SANDBERG, author of Emperor…
of LiesThe Oblique Place is a captivating journey of the imagination, a prize-winning novel that probes the ruinous legacies of Fascist Europe in the twentieth century.The discovery of photographs in an album - of her Spanish grandfather who joined Hitler's Wehrmacht and her father in the uniform of Franco's army- leads Caterina Pascual Söderbaum to explore her family's links to some of the most abhorrent passages of twentieth-century history. Her mother turns out to be related to Kristina Söderbaum, a celebrated Swedish film star of the Third Reich, adored by Goebbels.She travels with husband and child to the shores of the idyllic Attersee in Austria, where the officers of the extermination camps spent their holidays. The journey continues from Schloss Hartheim, where the staff of the Nazi euthanasia programme forgot, with the help of alcohol and sex, the horrors that took place there, to the Villa Saint-Jean, where malnourished children from France's internment camps were sent to recover. This imaginative rediscovery of her own family's disturbing history is fused with vividly captured episodes from other lives and times, and the threads of evil that she lays bare are described in language so beautiful, so subtle and painterly, that her odyssey is at once shattering and mesmerising.Translated from the Swedish by Frank Perry
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Historical fiction, Serious and literary fiction, General fictionEuropean history, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Vincenzo Chironi sets foot for the first time on the island of Sardinia - 'a raft in the middle of…
the Mediterranean' - in 1943, a year of famine and malaria. All he has with him is an old document as proof of his name and date of birth, but to find out who he really is he has had to undertake an even more stressful journey than the one he has just faced in the steamer from mainland Italy to Sardinia. At Núoro he will find his grandfather, a master blacksmith, who will act as a substitute father but also as an accomplice to him, and his aunt Marianna, who greets the unexpected arrival of a previously unknown nephew as an opportunity to redeem a life previously afflicted by misfortune.Years later, when the presence of Vincenzo Chironi in Núoro seems to have become taken for granted, as natural as the sea and rocks, his blood asserts itself. Vincenzo meets Cecilia, a beautiful girl with eyes of an undefinable shade who is a wartime refugee from elsewhere in Sardinia, and falling in love seems the only course open to either of them. Never mind that she is already engaged to Nicola, a boy with whom Vincenzo is indirectly connected by marriage through his aunt Marianna . . . Even if it may be a fact that "disobedience must involve punishment", it may also be true that love cannot avoid adding the latest link to an endless chain.
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Family stories, Serious and literary fiction, General fictionEuropean history, European travel and geography
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Aged fifteen, as Franco's forces begin their murderous purges and cities across Spain rise up against the old order, Montse…
has never heard the word fascista before. In any case, the villagers say facha (the ch is a real Spanish ch, by the way, with a real spit).Montse lives in a small village, high in the hills, where few people can read or write and fewer still ever leave. If everything goes according to her mother's plan, Montse will never leave either. She will become a good, humble maid for the local landowners, muchísimas gracias, with every Sunday off to dance the jota in the church square.But Montse's world is changing. Her brother José has just returned from Lérida with a red and black scarf and a new, dangerous vocabulary and his words are beginning to open up new realms to his little sister. She might not understand half of what he says, but how can anyone become a maid in the Burgos family when their head is ringing with shouts of Revolución, Comunidad and Libertad?The war, it seems, has arrived in the nick of time.