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Le patron de Dallaire parle: révélations sur les dérives d'un général de l'ONU au Rwanda
By Jacques-Roger Booh Booh. 2005
Le dernier roi d'Écosse
By Giles Foden. 2000
Un livre sombre et comique, en tous points conforme à la vérité historique et qui aussi une galerie de portraits.…
On y rencontre des femmes de diplomates qui "bovarysent", des ministres flagorneurs, des paramilitaires sanguinaires... qui gravitent autour de ce "dernier roi d'Ecosse", titre parmi d'autres tout aussi ronflants, que s'est généreusement attribué Idi Amin Dada, ce dictateur ougandaisMille jours à Venise: récit (Bibliothèque étrangère)
By Marlena Blasi. 2009
Ce n'est pas un conte, c'est une histoire vraie. L'enthousiaste et désarmante Marlena, bouleversée par sa rencontre avec son "bel…
étranger", va liquider en quelques semaines tout ce qu'elle avait en Amérique, une jolie maison, un charmant restaurant, une brillante carrière de critique gastronomique et de "chef", pour aller vivre avec lui à Venise. Certes, il y aura pas mal d'obstacles à surmonter, la langue qu'elle ne parle pas, l'appartement sinistre de son mari, la solitude, l'ennui, car elle n'a ni amis ni travail là-bas. Mais Marlena a de la ressource et elle va nous entraîner dans le récit plein d'humour de ses découvertes, de ses mécomptes, puis de son bonheur à se sentir peu à peu "acceptée". Jusqu'au jour où l'imprévisible Fernando lui réservera une drôle de surprise... -- 4e de couvThe Post-Office Girl
By Joel Rotenberg, Stefan Zweig. 1982
2009 PEN Translation Prize FinalistThe logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human…
feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl, Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism.Christine toils in a provincial post office in post-World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine's rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same.Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within.Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde in Zweig's haunting and hard-as-nails novel, completed during the 1930s, as he was driven by the Nazis into exile, but left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl, available here for the first time in English, transforms our image of a modern master's achievement.A Man of Genius
By Janet Todd. 2016
"Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness." Philippa Gregory"A quirky, darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and…
the burden of charisma, played out against the backdrop of Venice's watery, decadent glory." Sarah Dunant'A mesmerizing story of love and obsession in nineteenth century Venice: dark and utterly compelling."Natasha Solomons"Intriguing and entertaining; a clever, beguiling debut.Todd knows her Venice backwards."Salley Vickers"Revealing, surprising, compelling, gripping." Miriam Margolyes, actressA Man of Genius portrays a psychological journey from safety into obsession and secrecy. It mirrors a physical passage from flamboyant Regency England through a Europe conquered by Napoleon.Ann, a successful writer of cheap Gothic novels, becomes obsessed with Robert James, regarded by many, including himself, as a genius, with his ideas, his talk, and his band of male followers. However, their relationship becomes tortuous, as Robert descends into violence and madness. The pair leaves London for occupied Venice, where Ann tries to cope with the monstrous ego of her lover. Forced to flee with a stranger, she delves into her past, to be jolted by a series of revelations--about her lover, her parentage, the stranger, and herself. Janet Todd is known for her works about Mary Wollstonecraft, Aphra Behn, the Shelley circle, and Jane Austen. Born in Wales, her wandering childhood in the United Kingdom, Bermuda, and Sri Lanka led to work as an academic in Ghana, the United States, and United Kingdom. Her passion has been for women writers, the largely unknown and the famous. A former president of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, she lives in Cambridge and Venice.The Attempt
By Magdaléna Platzová, Alex Zucker. 2016
"The Attempt is historical fiction at its best. Through its narrator's archival approach to his material, the book explores the…
intimate lives of a pair of fervent idealists, as well as a robber baron and his family. The result is a vivid, poignant narrative about political upheaval, both in the past and the present." -SIRI HUSTVEDT, author of The Blazing WorldWhen a Czech historian becomes convinced he's the illegitimate great-grandson of an infamous anarchist who attempted an assassination while living in the United States, he travels to New York to investigate. Arriving in Manhattan during the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement, his research takes him further back into the past-from the Pittsburgh home of a nineteenth-century US industrialist to 1920s Europe, where a celebrated anarchist couple is on the run from the law.Based on the lives of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, The Attempt is a novel about the legacy of radical politics and relationships-one that traverses centuries and continents to deliver a moving, powerful story of personal and political transformation.Magdaléna Platzová is the author of six books, including two novels published in English: Aaron's Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, and The Attempt, a Czech Book Award finalist. Her fiction has also appeared in A Public Space and Words Without Borders. Platzová grew up in the Czech Republic, studied in Washington, DC, and England, received her MA in Philosophy at Charles University in Prague, and has taught at New York University's Gallatin School. She is now a freelance journalist based in Lyon, France.The House with the Stained-Glass Window (MacLehose Press Editions #7)
By Zanna Sloniowska, Antonia Lloyd Jones. 2015
"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"America's preeminent writer of prehistoric history [writes] ... . a book of hearts and minds." Grace Cavalieri, award-winning author, host…
of The Poet and the Poem from the US Library of Congress.After years of abuse from his father, Wing leaves the only home he's ever known. As the male lion leaves its pride, he must find a new home or die. He is sixteen, frail, injured, and alone in the mountainous untamed and untouched wilderness of Mexico of 250,000 BC. Wing struggles to survive, proving himself against a bear, where he learns elementary freedom. Award-winning writer of prehistoric fiction Bonnye Matthews' novella, Freedom, 250,000 BC, brings to life primitive early Americans through Wing's growing understanding of what freedom is and its importance for life.Freedom, 250,000 BC is dedicated to the archaeological site south of Puebla, Mexico at the Valsequillo Reservoir. The site is an amazingly rich prehistoric view of the glory and infamy of human life in the Americas, specifically Mexico, in 250,000 BC. "The outstanding Winds of Change series is highly and enthusiastically recommended for personal reading lists, as well as both community and academic library historical fiction collections." Midwest Book ReviewSomeone Else
By Adriana Hunter, Tonino Benacquista. 2005
"Breathless pace. Touches effortlessly on identity, love, alcohol, and the cynicism of the business world."--Les EchosWho hasn't wanted to become…
"someone else"? Over a drink in Paris, two men give each other three years to see which one can more radically alter his life. Blin becomes a private detective. He takes on a new identity, even a surgically altered face. Gredzinski, a self-effacing corporate executive, discovers liquor that evening and rapidly yields to the sensuality and self-confidence induced by alcoholism. Things get complicated when Blin is hired by an ex-lover to find himself and when Gredzinski secretly follows his girlfriend to her home. A helter-skelter tale of humor and suspense.Winner of the literary prize RTL-Lire.Blackout
By Howard Curtis, Gianluca Morozzi. 2004
"A spine-tingling novel that keeps you mesmerized from beginning to end."--InfiniteStorie"Morozzi has a light touch. He has an uncanny ability…
to convey mood swings, excitement and plot twists with ever increasing velocity."--Gazzetta di Parma"A chilling and claustrophobic thriller with an unpredictable ending. Morozzi joins the best in the genre."--LINUSBologna in August: unbearable heat, an empty city. Claudia is a young student in a hurry to return home from her work as a waitress and get out of the skimpy uniform she hates. Tomas is a young man on his way to elope to Amsterdam with his girlfriend, Francesca. Aldo is a husband and father with an uncanny resemblance to Elvis Presley, anxious to get to an apartment filled with guilty secrets. All three have an urgent need to be somewhere else. Instead, they are trapped in an elevator in a deserted building on a holiday weekend. They are like three wasps in an upturned glass . . . and one of the trio is a serial killer.This dark, twist-packed psychological thriller in the style of Phonebooth has been adapted as a US film to be released in the fall of 2008, starring Amber Tamblyn and directed by cult Mexican auteur Rigoberto Castañeda.Gianluca Morozzi was born in Bologna in 1971, where he lives today. He is well-known as a cutting-edge satirist and music critic, often compared to Nick Hornby and Ben Elton. Blackout is his first thriller.The Snowman
By Anthea Bell, Jörg Fauser. 2004
"Prose that penetrates the reader's mind like speed, fast paced, without an ounce of fat."--WeltwocheHe's found five pounds of top--quality…
Peruvian cocaine in a suit-case. Pur-sued by the police and drug traffickers the luckless Blum falls prey to the frenzied paranoia of the cocaine addict and dealer. This is a fast-paced thriller written with acerbic humour, a hardboiled evocation of drug-fuelled existence and a penetrating observation of those at the edge of German society.Having broken his addiction to on heroin at the age of thirty, Jörg Fauser spent much of the rest of his life dependent on alcohol. He died aged forty-three in 1987, run over by a truck at four am on a German highway.Sleep of Memory (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Mark Polizzotti, Patrick Modiano. 2018
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.At the age of eighty-five my grandfather Napoleon decided he needed to try something new . . . Everything starts…
to go south when Napoleon leaves his wife. An eighty-five-year-old former boxer with a restless, youthful spirit, Napoleon decides to say to hell with it all! He wants a new life. With his ten-year-old grandson Leonard Sunshine, he embarks on a moving adventure, a rebellion against everything that takes the fun out of life. Above all, Leonard is determined to spare his grandfather the fate of the elderly - his final years spent exiled in a retirement home. The chaotic duo adopt a dog, drive a fake taxi, escape to the seaside, sabotage door-to-door salesmen and plot to kidnap a famous radio star. From the heart of Paris to the coast of Normandy, The Last Adventure of Napoleon Sunshine is a moving, life-affirming and melancholy tale of new beginnings and the importance of family.The Book of Collateral Damage (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Sinan Antoon. 2016
Sinan Antoon returns to the Iraq war in a poetic and provocative tribute to reclaiming memory Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon’s…
fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans. Entrusted with the catalogue and obsessed with Wadood’s project, Nameer finds life in New York movingly intertwined with fragments from his homeland’s past and its present—destroyed letters, verses, epigraphs, and anecdotes—in this stylistically ambitious panorama of the wreckage of war and the power of memory.The Lost Book of Adana Moreau: A Novel
By Michael Zapata. 2020
A Boston Globe Most Anticipated Book of 2020A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from The Millions“A stunner—equal parts epic and…
intimate, thrilling and elegiac.”—Laura Van den Berg, author of The Third HotelThe mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New OrleansIn 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript.Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau. With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers.What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds.Can you hear me?: A viciously gripping holiday read set during a scorching Italian summer
By Elena Varvello. 2017
'Utterly gripped me from beginning to end' Victoria Hislop | 'Move over Ferrante, there's a new Elena in town' Independent…
| 'There is much beauty and sadness in this slim novel' The Times | 'A novel of crime and darkness that eschews straightforward domestic noir' Guardian **The Times bestseller. Longlisted for the CWA International Dagger. Shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize.**In the August of 1978, the summer I met Anna Trabuio, my father took a girl into the woods...I was sixteen.He had been gone a long time already, but that was it - not even a year after he lost his job and that boy disappeared - that was when everything broke.1978. Ponte, a small community in Northern Italy. An unbearably hot summer like many others.Elia Furenti is sixteen, living an unremarkable life of moderate unhappiness, until the day the beautiful, damaged Anna returns to Ponte and firmly propels Elia to the edge of adulthood. But then everything starts to unravel.Elia's father, Ettore, is let go from his job and loses himself in the darkest corners of his mind.A young boy is murdered.And a girl climbs into a van and vanishes in the deep, dark woods...Translated by Alex Valente | Winner of an English PEN AwardLonglisted for the CWA International Dagger Award 2018The Punishment (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Tahar Ben Jelloun. 2020
An innocent man’s gripping personal account of terrifying confinement by the Moroccan military during the reign of a formidable twentieth-century…
despot In 1967 Tahar Ben Jelloun, a peaceful young political protestor, was one of nearly a hundred other hapless men taken into punitive custody by the Moroccan army. It was a time of dangerous importance in Moroccan history, and they were treated with a chilling brutality that not all of them survived. This powerful portrait of the author’s traumatic experience, written with a memoirist’s immediacy, reveals both his helpless terror and his desperate hope to survive by drawing strength from his love of literature. Shaken to the core by his disillusionment with a brutal regime, unsure of surviving his ordeal, he stole some paper and began to secretly write, with the admittedly romantic idea of leaving some testament behind, a veiled denunciation of the evils of his time. His first poem was published after he was unexpectedly released, and his vocation was born.The Orphanage: A Novel (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
By Serhiy Zhadan. 2021
A devastating story of the struggle of civilians caught up in the conflict in eastern Ukraine&“A nightmarish, raw vision of…
contemporary eastern Ukraine under siege. . . . With a poet&’s sense of lyricism . . . [Zhadan] unblinkingly reveals a country&’s devastation and its people&’s passionate determination to survive.&”—Publishers Weekly, starred review Recalling the brutal landscape of The Road and the wartime storytelling of A Farewell to Arms, The Orphanage is a searing novel that excavates the human collateral damage wrought by the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine. When hostile soldiers invade a neighboring city, Pasha, a thirty-five-year-old Ukrainian language teacher, sets out for the orphanage where his nephew Sasha lives, now in occupied territory. Venturing into combat zones, traversing shifting borders, and forging uneasy alliances along the way, Pasha realizes where his true loyalties lie in an increasingly desperate fight to rescue Sasha and bring him home. Written with a raw intensity, this is a deeply personal account of violence that will be remembered as the definitive novel of the war in Ukraine.The King's Fool
By Mahi Binebine. 2017
Sidi is dying.In the last days of this all-powerful tyrant, his faithful court fool takes stock of the decades he…
has spent in the king's service. For the many years have left certain indelible wounds.During his service, the fool has been the king's closest counsel, his most trusted companion and adviser, privy to the king's deepest secrets and most intimate thoughts. It is an honoured position for which many other courtiers would pay a hefty price. Something the fool understands only too well, for this closeness has indeed come at a terrible cost.What price the confidence of a great king? Is it stories, jokes, witty repartee? Or does the debt fall closer to home? Perhaps it must be paid far from the magnificent palaces, feasting and festivities of the royal court. Perhaps it must be paid in the death jails of a formidable prison fortress far out in the desert; a place so feared that few dare to speak its name . . .LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT HISTORICAL FICTION PRIZE 2021SHORTLISTED FOR THE HWA GOLD CROWN AWARD 2020'A STRIKINGLY SHARP AND SUBTLE…
WRITER' Guardian'SUPERB...BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN...UNFORGETTABLE' FT Weekend'SKILFUL' Sunday Times 'RICH, INTRICATE, IMPRESSIVELY REALISED' Observer 'VIVIDLY REALISED' The Times'A VISION OF THE PAST AND A VISION OF THE FUTURE' Irish Times'A VIVID SLICE OF HISTORICAL FICTION' Sunday Express1815, Sumbawa Island, IndonesiaMount Tambora explodes in a cataclysmic eruption, killing thousands. Sent to investigate, ship surgeon Henry Hoggcan barely believe his eyes. Once a paradise, the island is now solid ash, the surrounding sea turned to stone. But worse is yet to come: as the ash cloud rises and covers the sun, the seasons will fail.1816In Switzerland, Mary Shelley finds dark inspiration. Confined inside by the unseasonable weather, thousands of famine refugees stream past her door. In Vermont, preacher Charles Whitlock begs his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells and their livestock starve.In Suffolk, the ambitious and lovesick painter John Constable struggles to reconcile the idyllic England he paints with the misery that surrounds him. In the Fens, farm labourer Sarah Hobbs has had enough of going hungry while the farmers flaunt their wealth. And Hope Peter, returned from the Napoleonic wars, finds his family home demolished and a fence gone up in its place. He flees to London, where he falls in with a group of revolutionaries who speak of a better life, whatever the cost. As desperation sets in, Britain becomes beset by riots - rebellion is in the air.The Year Without Summer is the story of the books written, the art made; of the journeys taken, of the love longed for and the lives lost during that fateful year. Six separate lives, connected only by an event many thousands of miles away. Few had heard of Tambora - but none could escape its effects.'VIVID, VIBRANT, HARD TO PUT DOWN' Hilary Spurling'THOUGHT-PROVOKING, BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN AND VERY COMPELLING' Harriet Tyce'INGENIOUS AND ABSORBING' Kirsty Wark 'ASTONISHING, RIVETING, MASTERFUL, POETIC' Emily Rapp Black 'A WORLDWIDE CANVAS BROUGHT TO LIFE IN VIVID, HEARTBREAKING DETAIL' Marianne Kavanagh