In a famous but declining Hollywood bar works A Barman. Morbidly amused by the decadent decay of his surroundings, he watches the patrons fall into their nightly oblivion, making notes for his novel. In the hope of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with the cast of variously pathological regulars.But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to serve himself more often than his customers, and the moments he lives outside the bar become more and more painful: he loses his wife, his way, himself. Trapped by his habits and his loneliness, he realizes he will not survive if he doesn't break free. And so he hatches a terrible, necessary plan of escape and his only chance for redemption.Step into Ablutions and step behind the bar, below rock bottom, and beyond the everyday take on storytelling for a brilliant, new twist on the classic tale of addiction and its consequences.

"Morocco's greatest living author." — The Guardian UK"A writer of social and moral acuteness." — Los Angeles Times"A writer of much originality." — The Chicago TribuneLalla Fatma believes she is in Fez in 1944—where she grew up — not in Tangier in 2000, where the story begins.Guided by her fragmented memories, Ben Jelloun reimagines his mother's life in Fez at the end of the war, in the heavily ritualised world of custom and tradition that saw her married, pregnant, and widowed by sixteen. He gains privileged, painful access to her lives as daughter, sister, thrice-widowed wife — lives in which she had little say, mostly spent working in kitchens, marked by a deep religious faith and love for her family — as Alzheimer's rips them all away.A delicate portrait of a woman's slow and unwinding descent into dementia, About My Mother maps out the beautiful, fragile, and complex nature of human experience in prose equally tender and compelling.Tahar Ben Jelloun is an award-winning and internationally bestselling Moroccan novelist, essayist, critic, and poet. Regularly shortlisted for the Nobel Prize, he has won the Prix Goncourt and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Ben Jelloun received the rank of Officier de la Légion d'honneur in 2008. A frequent contributor to Le Monde, Panorama, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review, his other works include The Blinding Lights of Absence, Leaving Tangier, Sand Child, and Racism Explained to My Daughter.

Svevo Romano is every woman's dream turned nightmare, living the life of excess in Rome. He may be handsome, rich and successful, but he is also a ruthless businessman, workaholic and playboy. At the back of his mind he has a nagging feeling that his life has no meaning; a feeling he tries to ignore. But one day, everything changes: time suddenly speeds up — but only for him. Svevo finds himself in a race against life itself, trying desperately to keep up with his colleagues and friends, to hold on to all the things he once thought important. His life becomes a mad whirl; but just as everything threatens to spiral out of control, life acquires a meaning that reaches beyond time and space.

The time is an unspecified modernity, the place possibly Europe. Absence follows four nameless people — the old man, the woman, the soldier, and the gambler — as they journey to a desolate wasteland beyond the limits of an unnamed city.

**An unprecedented glimpse into the minds of two maestros.**

Haruki Murakami's passion for music runs deep. Before turning his hand to writing, he ran a jazz club in Tokyo, and the aesthetic and emotional power of music permeates every one of his much-loved books. Now, in *Absolutely on Music,* Murakami fulfills a personal dream, sitting down with his friend, acclaimed conductor Seiji Ozawa, to talk about their shared interest.

They discuss everything from Brahms to Beethoven, from Leonard Bernstein to Glenn Gould, from record collecting to pop-up orchestras, and much more.

In this stunning literary debut, Patrick Flanery delivers a devastating and intimate portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, and the perils of taking sides when the sides are changing around you.Told in shifting perspectives, Absolution is centred on the mysterious character of Clare Wald, a controversial writer of great fame, haunted by the memories of a sister she fears she betrayed to her death and a daughter she fears she abandoned. Clare comes to learn that in this conflict the dead do not stay buried, and the missing return in other forms-such as the small child present in her daughter's last days who has reappeared, posing as Clare's official biographer. Sam Leroux, a South African expatriate returning to Cape Town after many years in New York, gradually earns Clare's trust, his own ghosts emerging from the histories that he and Clare begin to unravel, leading them both along a path in search of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Reminiscent of Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Abyssinian Chronicles tells a riveting story of 20th-century Africa that is passionate in vision and breathtaking in scope.

‘With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion amid the legions of the meek and the unobtrusive.’J.M. CoetzeeAcademy Street is the heart-breaking and evocative story of one woman’s life spanning six decades. Tess’s childhood in 1940’s rural Ireland is defined by the sudden death of her mother. Later, in New York, she encounters the ferocious power and calamity of love, and the effects of catastrophic fate. The novel resonates with the rhythms of memory and home as well as those of America’s greatest city.This is an intimate story about unexpected gifts and unbearable losses, and the perpetual ache for belonging. It is exquisitely written and profoundly moving.

A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family.Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied?So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past.In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.

Handke's novel tells the story of a quiet, organized classics teacher named Andreas Loser. One night, on the way to his regularly scheduled card game, he passes a tree that has been defaced by a swastika. Impulsively yet deliberately, he tracks down the defacer and kills him. With this act, Loser has crossed an invisble threshold, and will be stuck in this secular purgatory until he can confess his crime.

A new collection of stories by Mavis Gallant is always a major publishing event. For this is the writer who — like Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro — has made Canadian short stories a presence on the world literary scene, and on our bestseller lists.In Across the Bridge four of the eleven stories are connected, following the fortunes of the Carette family in Montreal. In “1933” their widowed mother teaches Berthe and Marie to deny that she was a seamstress and to say instead that she was “clever with her hands.” In “The Chosen Husband” the luckless suitor Louis has to undergo the front-parlour scrutiny of Marie’s mother and sister: “But then Louis began to cough and had to cover his mouth. He was in trouble with a caramel. The Carettes looked away, so that he could strangle unobserved. ‘How dark it is,’ said Berthe, to let him think he could not be seen.”We then follow their marriage, the birth of Raymond, and Raymond’s flight from his mother and aunt to his eventual role as a motel manager in Florida. “‘The place was full of Canadians,’ he said. ‘They stole like raccoons…’”With the exception of “The Fenton Child,” an eerie story set in postwar Montreal, the other stories take place in the Paris Mavis Gallant knows so well. “Across the Bridge,” the title story, begins with the narrator’s mother throwing her reluctant daughter’s wedding invitations into the Seine. “I watched the envelopes fall in a slow shower and land on the dark water and float apart. Strangers leaned on the parapet and stared, too, but nobody spoke.”This is a superb collection of stories by a writer at the top of her form.

Título original "Acts of Love" traducción de Montserrat Solanas

Gallio does counter-insurgency. But the theft of a body he's supposed to be guarding ruins his career. Bizarre rumours of the walking dead are swirling, there is panic in the air, and it’s his job to straighten out the conspiracy. He blows the case.Years later, the file is reopened when a second body appears. Gallio is called back by headquarters and ordered to track down everyone involved the first time round. The only problem is they keep dying, in ever more grotesque and violent ways. How can Gallio stay ahead of the game when the game keeps changing?Acts of the Assassins is about one man’s struggle to confront forces beyond his understanding. And about how lonely a turbulent world can be.

Новый роман одного из самых талантливых писателей поколения 35-летних, финалиста премий «Русский Букер»-2008 и «Национальный бестселлер»-2009.Загадочное убийство на новогоднем корпоративе. Убит председатель совета директоров холдинга «А.Д.». Расследование поручают следователю по особо важным делам Главного следственного управления по Северо-Западному округу П.Б.Катаеву.Опрос свидетелей, поиск улик, оперативные мероприятия… Однако рутинная следственная работа приведет Катаева к удивительному открытию: не каждый подозреваемый виновен, но кто убийца, а кто жертва решает далеко не милиция…

FINALISTA DEL PREMIO PLANETA 1973La gangrena es más fruto del oficio que de la brillantez, este Adagio confidencial habla del reencuentro, veinte años después, entre Marina y Germán. Abundante diálogo, ambiente burgués, ciertos golpes de efecto que la acercan al folletín y también fácil y amena lectura son las señas de identidad que siguen fieles muchos lectores.

Adam and Thomas is the story of two nine-year-old Jewish boys who survive World War II by banding together in the forest. They are alone, visited only furtively, every few days by Mina, a mercurial girl who herself has found refuge from the war by living with a peasant family. She makes secret journeys and brings the boys parcels of food at her own risk.Adam and Thomas must learn to survive and do. They forage and build a small tree house, although it's more like a bird's nest. Adam's family dog, Miro, manages to find his way to him, to the joy of both boys. Miro brings the warmth of home with him. Echoes of the war are felt in the forest. The boys meet fugitives fleeing for their lives and try to help them. They learn to disappear in moments of danger. And they barely survive winter's harshest weather, but when things seem to be at their worst, a miracle happens.

With the same élan and wit that inform her internationally acclaimed and award-winning plays, Yasmina Reza’s second novel, Adam Haberberg, revels in the tragicomedy of one man’s midlife crisis.While slumped on a park bench in Paris, a man is suddenly hailed by an old female classmate whom he has not seen since high school. The poor guy is, of course, a writer. Morose, panicked about his health, preoccupied with his marriage miseries and the fiasco of his recent book launch, he finds himself stranded in the desert of male middle age. And now there’s the strange business of this woman, who may or may not still be in love with him. Somehow he finds himself riding in her Jeep, riding to her place, not for any of the sensational reasons you might imagine, but because he sort of got stuck in a conversation without any chance of escape. Now he has to find his way out — and home.A bitingly funny, lethally wise portrait of a hapless nonhero’s big adventure.

In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden. But there are snakes in this Garden too, and in order to save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, he may have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these serpents from his Mexican Eden.In this comic novel of political intrigue, Adam Gorozpe, a respected businessman in Mexico, has a life so perfect that he might as well be his namesake in the Garden of Eden — but there are snakes in this Eden too. For one thing, Adam’s wife Priscila has fallen in love with the brash director of national security — also named Adam — who uses violence against token victims to hide the fact that he’s letting drug runners, murderers, and kidnappers go free. Another unlikely snake is the little Boy-God who’s started preaching in the street wearing a white tunic and stick-on wings, inspiring Adam’s brother-in-law to give up his job writing soap operas to follow this junior deity and implore Adam to do the same. Even Elle, Adam’s mistress, thinks the boy is important to their salvation — especially now that it seems the other Adam has put out a contract on Adam Gorozpe. To save his relationship, his marriage, his life, and the soul of his country, perhaps Adam will indeed have to call upon the wrath of the angels to expel all these snakes from his Mexican Eden.

" Ce matin, je me lève décidé à ne pas prendre une cigarette après mon café, comme je l'ai fait depuis une trentaine d'années. Si l'envie est trop forte, je pourrai toujours me recoucher. " Fumer tue, paraît-il. Mais vivre aussi, alors pourquoi s'en faire ? C'est que l'esprit du temps est à l'hygiène de soi, au corps immaculé, à l'extermination des mauvaises habitudes. Le narrateur se donne donc trois jours pour arrêter de fumer. Niais on ne se défait pas facilement d'une pratique devenue une seconde nature : et voilà notre anti-héros contemporain arrêté, rêveur, au milieu des volutes de fumée. Plusieurs fois par jour, il prend une dernière cigarette en se posant la question obsédante : pourquoi fume-t-on ? La réponse, enfin, est au cœur de cette fiction théorique, élégante et burlesque loin, très loin des méthodes soporifiques supposées nous délivrer de la nicotine.