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14 h 59
By Valérie Guibbaud. 2018
Le matin du 9 mai 2017, Valérie Guibbaud rend visite à son papa à l'hôpital. L'état de santé de celui-ci…
s'est détérioré depuis quelques semaines ; impossible de contrôler sa grave maladie pulmonaire. Il avait déjà vaguement mentionné l'aide médicale à mourir. À 10 h 35, ce matin-là, il annonce à ses proches qu'il va partir l'après-midi même. Elle n'est pas prête, mais lui, il l'est. Dans ce récit se déroulant en un court laps de temps, l'auteure laisse la place aux souvenirs et raconte les coulisses de cette histoire bouleversante. 14 h 59 est l'heure exacte du décès de son pèreAaron's Leap
By Craig Cravens, Magdaléna Platzová. 2014
"Told in clear and beautiful prose, Aaron's Leap is a deeply moving portrait of love, sacrifice, and the transformative power…
of art in a time of brutal uncertainty." -SIMON VAN BOOY, author of The Illusion of SeparatenessBased on the real-life story of Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Aaron's Leap is framed by the lens of a twenty first-century Israeli film crew delving into the extraordinary life of a woman who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz. Aided by the granddaughter of one of the artist's pupils, the filmmakers begin to uncover buried secrets from a time when personal and artistic decisions became matters of life-and-death. Spanning a century of Central European history, the novel evokes the founding impulses, theories, and personalities of the European Modernist movement (with characters modeled after Oskar Kokoschka, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel) and shows what it takes to grapple with a troubled history, "leap" into the unknown, and dare to be oneself.Magdaléna Platzová was raised in Prague and has lived in Washington, DC and New York City, where she taught literature at NYU, and now lives in Lyon, France. She is the author of a children's book, two collections of short stories, and three novels, including Aaron's Leap, a Lidové Noviny Book of the Year Award finalist, hailed by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a novel that "must be counted among the best written by contemporary Czech writers." It is her first book to be published in English.The German Money
By Lev Raphael. 2003
"Lev Raphael is a daring writer--one who will not be -restrained by genre, but who tells his story with all…
the tools at his command. The German Money combines all of Raphael's estimable talents, delivering an emotional thriller about a totally believable contemporary family coming to terms with fifty years of silence."--Edmund WhiteBest known for Dancing on Tisha B'Av, the groundbreaking story collection exploring the lives of children of Holocaust survivors, Lev Raphael is also the author of five popular mysteries. Now he combines his talents in a story of emotional suspense.Paul has spent his life running--from New York, the city of his birth; from his beautiful beshert; from contact with his own siblings; but mostly from his mother, a Holocaust survivor of inexplicable coldness. Upon her mysterious death, the children face shocking questions. What caused her to die? Why did she divide their inheritance so that Paul, the least favorite son, was singled out to receive the most, the dreaded "German money,"a bequest of a million dollars accrued from German reparations to survivors . . . a gift as cynical as it is generous."Lev Raphael's new novel is a powerful, haunting and erotic tale. The stunning narrative builds to a shocking -denouement and kept me turning pages faster and faster to learn the truth."--Linda FairsteinLev Raphael is the author of thirteen books and known internationally as an insightful chronicler of the lives of the children of Holocaust survivors. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award, among many prizes, his short works have appeared in two dozen anthologies, including American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories. He is a book critic for National Public Radio and mysteries columnist for the Detroit Free Press.The Zone of Interest
By Martin Amis. 2014
From one of England's most renowned authors, an unforgettable new novel that provides a searing portrait of life--and, shockingly, love--in…
a concentration camp. Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. It showed you your soul--it showed you who you really were. The wizard couldn't look at it without turning away. The king couldn't look at it. The courtiers couldn't look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for 60 seconds without turning away. And no one could. The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other's eye, after we have seen who we really are? In a novel powered by both wit and pathos, Martin Amis excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.The Dalai Lama's Cat: A Novel
By David Michie. 2012
"In the months that followed I watched His Holiness working on a new book . . . I began to…
think that perhaps the time had come for me to turn my paws to a book of my own . . . one that tells my own tale . . . How I was rescued from a fate too grisly to contemplate, to become constant companion to a man who is not only one of the world’s greatest spiritual leaders and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but who is also a dab hand with the can opener."Not so much fly-on-the-wall as cat-on-the-sill, this is the warmhearted tale of a small kitten rescued from the slums of New Delhi who finds herself in a beautiful sanctuary with sweeping views of the snow-capped Himalayas. In her exotic new home, the Dalai Lama’s cat encounters Hollywood stars, Buddhist masters, Ivy-league professors, famous philanthropists, and a host of other people who come visiting His Holiness. Each encounter offers a fresh insight into finding happiness and meaning in the midst of a life of busy-ness and challenge. Drawing us into her world with her adorable but all-too-flawed personality, the Dalai Lama’s cat discovers how instead of trying to change the world, changing the way we experience the world is the key to true contentment.Featuring a delightful cast of characters, timeless Buddhist wisdom, and His Holiness’s compassion pervading every chapter, The Dalai Lama’s Cat is simply enchanting.The Prophet (A Penguin Classics Hardcover)
By Rupi Kaur, Kahlil Gibran. 2017
A stunning new hardcover edition--with a full linen case, copper stamping, gilded edges, and colored endpapers--of one of the world's…
most beloved and popular spiritual classics, featuring a new foreword by Rupi Kaur, the multimillion-copy, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Milk and Honey and The Sun and Her Flowers"This book cracked my heart wide open. And I think it's going to do the same to yours." --Rupi Kaur, from the ForewordThe most famous work of spiritual fiction of the twentieth century, The Prophet is rooted in Kahlil Gibran's own experience as an immigrant and provides inspiration to anyone feeling adrift in a world in flux. As a prophet named Almustafa is about to board a ship to travel back to his homeland after twelve years in exile, he is stopped by a group of people who ask him to share his wisdom before he leaves. In twenty-eight poetic essays, he does so, offering profound and timeless insights on many aspects of life, including love, pain, friendship, family, beauty, religion, joy, sorrow, and death. An immediate success when first published in 1923, The Prophet is a modern classic, having been translated into more than forty languages and sold more than ten million copies in the United States alone. The message it imparts, of finding divinity through love, made it the bible of 1960s culture and continues to touch hearts and minds across generations and national borders. This edition is illustrated with twelve of Gibran's famous visionary paintings and features a foreword by Rupi Kaur.In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.The Prince
By Niccolò Machiavelli, Christopher Celenza. 2018
Packaged in handsome, affordable trade editions, Clydesdale Classics is a new series of essential works. From the musings of intellectuals…
such as Thomas Paine in Common Sense to the striking personal narrative of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, this new series is a comprehensive collection of our intellectual history through the words of the exceptional few.Widely acknowledged as Machiavelli’s defining work, The Prince is an innovative and rich treatise marked by his political theories and the principles of leadership. Based upon his own experiences witnessing “the actions of great men” and the often immoral aspects that come with power, Machiavelli encouraged ambition amongst leaders—which was a break from the philosophy of other contemporary thinkers. The Prince identifies the aims of powerful leaders, which can help to justify the use of largely immoral means in their methods.With a new foreword by scholar Christopher Celenza, this essential work on politics contemplates leadership in a manner still relevant today. This lesson in autocratic rule will provide the reader with the author’s rational approach to control and the contextualization for the term “Machiavellian.”Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream: Translated with Introductions by Leonard Tancock
By Denis Diderot. 1966
In Rameau's Nephew, the eccentric and foolish nephew of the great composer Jean-Philippe Rameau meets Diderot by chance, and the…
two embark on a hilarious consideration of society, music, literature, politics, morality and philosophy.The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua (Dimyonot: Jews and the Cultural Imagination #9)
By Yael Halevi-Wise. 2020
Once referred to by the New York Times as the "Israeli Faulkner," A. B. Yehoshua’s fiction invites an assessment of…
Israel’s Jewish inheritance and the moral and political options that the country currently faces in the Middle East. The Retrospective Imagination of A. B. Yehoshua is an insightful overview of the fiction, nonfiction, and hundreds of critical responses to the work of Israel’s leading novelist.Instead of an exhaustive chronological-biographical account of Yehoshua’s artistic growth, Yael Halevi-Wise calls for a systematic appreciation of the author’s major themes and compositional patterns. Specifically, she argues for reading Yehoshua’s novels as reflections on the "condition of Israel," constructed multifocally to engage four intersecting levels of signification: psychological, sociological, historical, and historiosophic. Each of the book’s seven chapters employs a different interpretive method to showcase how Yehoshua’s constructions of character psychology, social relations, national history, and historiosophic allusions to traditional Jewish symbols manifest themselves across his novels. The book ends with a playful dialogue in the style of Yehoshua’s masterpiece, Mr. Mani, that interrogates his definition of Jewish identity.Masterfully written, with full control of all the relevant materials, Halevi-Wise’s assessment of Yehoshua will appeal to students and scholars of modern Jewish literature and Jewish studies.The Oblique Place
By Caterina Pascual Söderbaum. 2018
"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 PerryThe Oblique Place (MacLehose Press Editions #14)
By Caterina Pascual Söderbaum. 2018
"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 PerryMadeleine
By Euan Cameron. 2019
"Immersive, nuanced, impeccably researched" IAN RANKIN"Beautifully written and moving" ALLAN MASSIE"Poignant, nostalgic and redolent of the smell of France" SIMON…
BRETTFamily history has always been a mystery to Will Latymer. His father flatly refused to talk about it, and with no other relatives to consult, it seems that a mystery it shall always remain. Until of course, Will meets Ghislaine, his beautiful French cousin, in a chance encounter that introduces him to his grandmother, Madeleine, shut away in a quiet Breton manor with her memories and secrets.Before long, Will has been plunged headlong into the life of Madeleine's great love, his longlost grandfather, Henry Latymer. Reading Henry's old letters and diaries for the first time, Will discovers an idealistic young man, full of hopes and optimism - an optimism that will gradually be crushed as the realities of life under the Vichy regime become glaringly clear.But the more Will delves into Madeleine and Henry's past, and into France's troubled history, the darker the secrets he discovers become, and the more he has cause to wonder if sometimes, the past should remain buried.Leica Format
By Daša Drndic. 2003
This is like a fairy tale, all this. A woman meets a stranger who tells her her identity is a…
lie. 772 (or 789) children's brains rest silently in jars. A traveller comes to a quotidian city, unknowingly approaching her past. From the author of Trieste (shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize) comes this bedazzling kaleidoscopic novel, stitching together fact and fiction, history and memory, words and images into a heart-breaking collage that manages to look askance at the blinding horror of history. Ranging across themes of memory, loss, inheritance and storytelling, Drndic borrows from every tradition of writing to weave together a fragmented narrative of love and disease, in a novel that's very format raises penetrating and unanswerable questions about history, and the processes by which we describe and remember it.Every Promise
By Andrea Bajani. 2010
When Sarah leaves him - heartbroken by their inability to conceive - Pietro reverts to a younger self, leaving the…
dishes unwashed, his bed unmade and the post unopened. Soon afterwards, Sarah confesses that she is pregnant, but from a casual encounter. She comes to rely on Pietro's mother for support, leaving all three in a painful limbo, unable to move on or return to the way things were. Into the void falls Olmo, an old man haunted by memories of war. At first he provides a distraction, but when he asks Pietro to travel to Russia on his behalf, to right a wrong from his past, he offers this most troubled of young men the chance of a new beginning.Rituals
By Cees Nooteboom. 1984
In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An…
unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines. Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless. A novel for those who seek to unravel our mysterious, apparently directionless lives...In the Gold of Time
By Claudie Gallay. 2006
Set between Normandy and Arizona, In the Gold of Time is a seductive tale of silences and dark, half-revealed secrets,…
and a haunting elegy for innocence lost in a lost world. A young father holidays by the sea near Dieppe with his reproachfully perfect wife and their twin daughters. Returning from the local shop, he meets an eccentric old lady, Alice Berthier, who lives with he mute sister, Clémence. Their mysterious house is full of old photographs and strange objects - sacred ceremonial masks once belonging to the Hopi, a tribe of Native Americans from Arizona. Haunted by memories of a tragic past, Alice takes comfort in her new companion, and he, in turn, is drawn into her mysterious world. As his family recedes into the background, her stirring tales of the Hopi and the Arizona desert become the only salve to his despondent soul.The Third Day
By Chochana Boukhobza. 2010
A leading Israeli musician and her protégé return to Jerusalem for three days to perform with the Philharmonic Orchestra. Both…
women - one a gifted young cellist, one a Holocaust survivor saved by her extraordinary musical talent - have been in America for some time, are quickly caught up in tangled threads from former lives. Elisheva is reunited with her godson, Daniel; Rachel must face both her distant father and Erytan, a former lover, whose lingering power over her now threatens all she has worked for. Elisheva is coaching Rachel for the solo performance, but something else has drawn her to Jerusalem. Another old friend has lured a Nazi eugenicist, the Butcher of Majdanek, to Israel from Venezuela. The Butcher performed torturous experiments on Elisheva, determining not only her fate but also that of her closest friends. On the third day of her stay, the day of the concert, she will take her revenge. Set in the late 1980s, The Third Day is a vivid portrait of life in Jerusalem and a sensitive meditation on the power of music and the sacrifices it demands. And at its heart is a gripping narrative of retribution that brings the novel's many moving strands towards a tense and shattering conclusion.Olga: A Novel
By Prof Bernhard Schlink. 2018
A #1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER'Bernhard Schlink speaks straight to the heart' New York Times'Brilliant... A tale of love and loss in…
20th century Germany' Evening Standard'A cleverly-constructed tale of cross-class romance' Mail on Sunday'A poignant portrait of a woman out of step with her time' Observer Olga is an orphan raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village around the turn of the 20th century. Smart and precocious, she fights against the prejudices of the time to find her place in a world that sees her as second-best.When she falls in love with Herbert, a local aristocrat obsessed with the era's dreams of power, glory and greatness, her life is irremediably changed.Theirs is a love against all odds, entwined with the twisting paths of German history, leading us from the late 19th to the early 21st century, from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west.This is the story of that love, of Olga's devotion to a restless man - told in thought, letters and in a fateful moment of great rebellion.News from Berlin
By Otto De Kat. 2012
June 1941. Dutch diplomat Oscar Verschuur has been posted to neutral Switzerland. His family is spread across Europe. His wife…
Kate works as a nurse in London and their daughter Emma is living in Berlin with her husband Carl, a 'good' German who works at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Briefly reunited with her father in a restaurant in Geneva, Emma drops a bombshell. A date and a codename, and the fate of nations is placed in Verschuur's hands: June 22, Barbarossa. What should he do? Warn the world, or put his daughter's safety first? The Gestapo are watching them both. And with Stalin lulled by his alliance with Hitler, will anyone even listen? Otto de Kat is fast gaining a reputation as one of Europe's sharpest and most lucid writers. News from Berlin, a book for all readers, a true page-turner driven by the pulse of a ticking clock, confirms him as a storyteller of subtly extravagant gifts.Madeleine
By Euan Cameron. 2019
"Immersive, nuanced, impeccably researched" IAN RANKIN"Beautifully written and moving" ALLAN MASSIE"Poignant, nostalgic and redolent of the smell of France" SIMON…
BRETTFamily history has always been a mystery to Will Latymer. His father flatly refused to talk about it, and with no other relatives to consult, it seems that a mystery it shall always remain. Until of course, Will meets Ghislaine, his beautiful French cousin, in a chance encounter that introduces him to his grandmother, Madeleine, shut away in a quiet Breton manor with her memories and secrets.Before long, Will has been plunged headlong into the life of Madeleine's great love, his longlost grandfather, Henry Latymer. Reading Henry's old letters and diaries for the first time, Will discovers an idealistic young man, full of hopes and optimism - an optimism that will gradually be crushed as the realities of life under the Vichy regime become glaringly clear.But the more Will delves into Madeleine and Henry's past, and into France's troubled history, the darker the secrets he discovers become, and the more he has cause to wonder if sometimes, the past should remain buried.