Książka o charakterze autobiograficznym, w której Wharton opisuje przeżycia związane ze śmiercią swojej córki, zięcia i dwóch wnuczek. Dzieli się miłością, smutkiem, gniewem oraz pragnieniem doskonałej sprawiedliwości."Niezawinione śmierci" to powieść, która w tym samym stopniu jest afirmacją życia, co opowieścią o śmierci. To książka o życiu pogodzonym za śmiercią, o duchowej przemianie i pogłębionym rozumieniu naszych codziennych zmagań."Sądzę, że Wharton jest jedynym współczesnym pisarzem, który trafia wprost do czytelniczych serc i przyśpiesza ich bicie…"."London Evening Standard"

To, co wyróżnia "Nieznośną lekkość bytu" – to wielokierunkowość, wielopłaszczyznowość tej książki. Kiedy zabieramy się do czytania jakiejś powieści, często znamy zarys jej fabuły, wiemy, co po kolei się wydarzy czy też, nie daj Boże, jak książka się skończy. W „Nieznośnej lekkości bytu” zakończenie nie ma znaczenia, co pozwala nam tak naprawdę skupić się na całej treści książki. Pisząc o wielokierunkowości mam na myśli to, że Kundera łączy w tej powieści historię, romans, filozofię i dramat człowieka, dramat miłości w jedną całość. Jeden z internautów zarzucił autorowi, że mógłby po prostu swoje przemyślenia zawrzeć w esejach, że niepotrzebnie zrobił z tego powieść. Ale właśnie to, że „Nieznośna lekkość bytu” różni się budową od innych klasycznych powieści, stanowi jej atut – bo nieczęsto trafia się na książkę, w której autor opowiada o swoich przemyśleniach, pisząc o bohaterach wtrąca swoje „Myślę, że” „Moim zdaniem” i tak dalej…Historia miłości przedstawiona w tej powieści to studium psychologiczne związku dwojga ludzi, studium psychiki mężczyzny i kobiety. Tomasz i Teresa – bo tak nazywają się bohaterowie – reprzentują dwa zupełnie inne sposoby myślenia. On, szanowany lekarz – nieustannie ugania się za kobietami, w pewnym momencie stwierdza, że przez całe życie posiadł ponad dwieście kobiet… Teresa za to wychowała się na wsi, nigdy nie zaznała wielkomiejskiego życia i kiedy poznaje Tomasza, chwyta się go jako jedynej deski ratunku, jedynej możliwości wyrwania się ze znienawidzonego świata brudu, alkoholu… Kiedy zaczynają być razem, Tomasz nie rezygnuje ze swojego poligamicznego trybu życia – nadal odwiedza swoje kochanki… a Teresa umiera z zazdrości, zaczynają się w jej snach pojawiać koszmary – tu Kundera przenosi nas na kilka momentów w surrealistyczny świat snów, które są dla niego punktem wyjścia do analizy psychiki kobiety…Spotkanie Teresy i Tomasza jest dziełem przypadku – i to, okazuje się, nie jednego, ale aż sześciu. Kundera w świetny sposób ukazuje ciąg zdarzeń, ciąg przypadków, które musiały zajść, aby ta para mogła się spotkać. „To co pewne – pisze Kundera – to co nieuchronne – jest nieme. Tylko przypadek do nas przemawia”*. Przypadek jest wręcz jednym z bohaterów tej książki – autor pokazuje, jak bawi się bohaterami, jak zbliża ich i oddala od siebie, jak wręcz decyduje o ich istnieniu…„Słownik niezrozumiałych słów” – według wielu czytelników jedna z ciekawszych części książki. W każdym związku oprócz nici porozumienia między partnerami istnieje wiele pojęć, co do których każdy z partnerów ma inne zdanie – Kundera ubrał je właśnie w „Słownik niezrozumiałych słów”, który zawiera zarówno pojęcia ogólne – takie jak „muzyka” czy „wierność”, jak i słowa będące charakterystycznymi tylko dla danego związku…Książkę polecam wszystkim szukającym czegoś "innego", czegoś oryginalnego w europejskiej literaturze oraz tym, którzy szukają w książkach czegoś więcej niż tylko ciekawej fabuły.

Set in northern New Mexico, an astonishing, beautifully rendered debut about living in a landscape shaped by love, loss, and violence.A 2014 National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" HonoreeWith intensity, dark humor, and emotional precision, Kirstin Valdez Quade’s unforgettable stories plunge us into the fierce, troubled hearts of characters torn between their desires to escape the past and to plumb its depths. The deadbeat father of a pregnant teenager tries to transform his life by playing the role of Jesus in a bloody penitential Passion. A young man discovers that his estranged father and a boa constrictor have been squatting in his grandmother’s empty house. A young woman finds herself at an impasse when she is asked to hear her priest's confession.Always hopeful, these stories chart the passions and obligations of family life, exploring themes of race, class, and coming-of-age, as Quade's characters protect, betray, wound, undermine, bolster, define, and, ultimately, save one another.

A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy — the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova — a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world.The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.Night Film, the gorgeously written, spellbinding new novel by the dazzlingly inventive Marisha Pessl, will hold you in suspense until you turn the final page.

The final volume in Tariq Ali’s acclaimed cycle of historical novels. Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet — Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing. The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun — known as Plato — an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where “human dignity has become a wreckage.” Plato, who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight, now wants his life story written. As the tale unravels we meet Plato’s London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. “Naughty” Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals leads to her flight to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she is hailed as the Diderot of the Islamic world; and there’s Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator’s first love. Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie’s family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade, as Sultan Suleiman. Night of the Golden Butterfly reveals Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.

A Colombian philosophy student is arrested in Bangkok and accused of drug trafficking. Unless he enters a guilty plea he will almost certainly be sentenced to death. But it is not his own death that weighs most heavily on him but a tender longing for his sister, Juana, whom he hasn't seen for years. Before he dies he wants nothing more than to be reunited with her.As a boy, Manuel was a dreamer, a lover of literature, and a tagger. Juana made a promise to do everything in her power to protect him from the drug-and violence-infested streets of Bogotá. She decided to take him as far from Colombia as possible, and in order to raise the money to do so, she went to work as a high priced escort and entered into contact with the dangerous world of corrupt politicians. When things spun out of control she was forced to flee, leaving her beloved brother behind.Juana and Manuel's story reaches the ears of the Colombian counsel general in New Delhi, and he tracks down Juana, now married to a rich Japanese man, in Tokyo. The counsel general takes it upon himself to reunite the two siblings. A feat that may be beyond his power.Fans of both Roberto Bolaño and Gabriel García Márquez will find much to admire in this story about the mean streets of Bogotá, the sordid bordellos of Thailand, and a love between siblings that knows no end. With the stylishness that has earned him a reputation as one of "the most important Colombian writers" (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán), Santiago Gamboa lends his story a driving, irresistible rhythm.

Best known for his complex and beautiful novels — regularly compared to those of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo — Joseph McElroy is equally at home in the short story, having written numerous pieces over the course of his career that now, collected at last, serve as an ideal introduction to one of the most important contemporary American authors. Combining elements of classic McElroy with tantalizing stories pointing the way ahead (the spare and dangerous “No Man’s Land,” the lush and mischievous “The Campaign Trail”), Night Soul and Other Stories presents a wide range of work from a monumental artist.

An ordinary man wakes up to find that he's the only living creature in the entire city. The radio and TV are suddenly filled with white noise, there's no newspaper, the Internet is down and no one's answering the phone. Jonas is the last living being on the planet. What happened? How? Why? And why is he still here?

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society by one of our most enduringly popular and important writers

Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.

They took everything from me. Everything.’ So says the central character of Nightspawn, John Banville’s elusive, first novel, in which the author rehearses now familiar attributes: his humour, ironies, and brilliant knowing. In the arid setting of the Aegean, Ben White indulges in an obsessive quest to assemble his ‘story’ and to untangle his relationships with a cast of improbable figures. Banville’s subversive, Beckettian fiction embraces themes of freedom and betrayal, and toys with an implausible plot, the stuff of an ordinary ‘thriller’ shadowed by political intrigue. In this elaborate artifact, Banville’s characters ‘sometimes lose the meaning of things, and everything is just. . funny’. There begins their search for ‘the magic to combat any force’.

In this, her first collection of stories, Christine Schutt gives exquisite and provocative form to feelings and memories. Nightwork is a masterful dreamwork, revealing our lives with the startling clarity we long for.A young woman remembers, after a forbidden embrace, the exact quality of her father's skin, "pitted and stubbled under all that color." A girl recalls the strange kingdom that was her grandfather's estate, a place she came to inhabit only through betrayal.Romantic linkings are often unexpected: mother-son, father-daughter, mother-lover-daughter. In "What Have You Been Doing?" a mother teaches her son how to kiss. In "Dead Men," a woman finds herself unable to be touched by her new lover without experiencing intensely erotic recollections of the lover who is gone.The stories are sensually detailed and sometimes shocking. Hands, feet, breasts… bodies are known, as they are known, mostly in bed. "Before the dead man, she had slept by herself with her hands to herself like a poultice."Here is an Everywoman, voiced from familiar enclosures: a house in the country, an apartment in town. The muted landscapes, too, are an Everyplace made of "wind and slashes of high blue sky in the heads of furious trees."Schutt's fearlessness, her passionate honesty, is the source for the language of these splendid stories — night worlds, which may disturb our composure but enable us to dream while awake.

While post-communist Moscow deals with political transition, Vassili is descending into despair at his wife Anna’s chronic infertility. Following his father Sergey’s footsteps, he travels to Melbourne to teach Russian at a prestigious university. Accompanying him is a wrapped parcel to be delivered to a Helen Dalrymple of Mount Evelyn; a task that proves to be anything but straightforward. Miscast and adrift in his new home, Vassili awaits Anna’s arrival. Bringing with her devastating news, it is not long until old resentments surface. At an idyllic guesthouse in the Dandenong Hills, the scene is set for a reckoning that will crack the secrets of the parcel Vassili’s father gave him, and blow the family apart.

The third book in Edward Whittemore’s acclaimed Jerusalem Quartet is a riveting tale of espionage and intrigue in which the outcome of World War II and the destiny of the Middle East could hinge on the true identity of one shadowy man.On a clear night in 1941, a hand grenade explodes in a Cairo bar, taking the life of Stern, a petty gunrunner and morphine addict, nationality unknown, his aliases so numerous that it’s impossible to determine whether he was a Moslem, Christian, or Jew.His death could easily go unnoticed as Rommel’s tanks charge through the desert in an attempt to take the Suez Canal and open the Middle East to Hitler’s forces. Yet the mystery behind Stern’s death is a top priority for intelligence experts. Master spies from three countries converge on Joe O’Sullivan Beare, who is closer to Stern than anyone, in an effort to unravel the disturbing puzzle. The search for the truth about Stern leads O’Sullivan Beare through the slums of Cairo to a decaying former brothel called the Hotel Babylon, populated by unusual characters. Slowly, the mystery of Stern unravels as Whittemore explores the tragedy and yearning of one man fighting a battle for the human soul.

Роман о последних годах жизни Фёдора Петровича Гааза

Nine Inches, Tom Perrotta’s first true collection, features ten stories—some sharp and funny, some mordant and surprising, and a few intense and disturbing.   Whether he’s dropping into the lives of two teachers—and their love lost and found—in “Nine Inches”, documenting  the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face”, or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in “Senior Season”, Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.Nine Inches contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.

In Paula Bomer's bold, unapologetic debut novel, a pregnant mother and wife abandons her family in search of an identity that is hers alone after she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant for the third time. She does everything a pregnant mother shouldn't do — engaging in casual sex, drinking beer, and smoking weed — as she attempts to reclaim her sidelined career as an artist. A lacerating response to the culture of mommy blogs, helicopter parents, and "parental correctness" as well as an unflinching look at the choices women face when trying to balance art and family.

**"A treat for *Big Little Lies* fans." —*People***

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**From the #1 *New York Times* bestselling author of *Big Little Lies******Could ten days at a health resort really change you forever? In Liane Moriarty's latest page-turner, nine perfect strangers are about to find out...***Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are here to lose weight, some are here to get a reboot on life, some are here for reasons they can't even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.Frances Welty, the formerly best-selling romantic novelist, arrives at Tranquillum House nursing a bad back, a broken heart, and an exquisitely painful paper cut. She's immediately intrigued by her fellow guests. Most of them don't look to be in need of a health resort at all. But the person that intrigues her most is the strange and charismatic owner/director of Tranquillum House. Could this person really have the answers Frances didn’t even know she was seeking? Should Frances put aside her doubts and immerse herself in everything Tranquillum House has to offer – or should she run while she still can?It’s not long before every guest at Tranquillum House is asking exactly the same question.Combining all of the hallmarks that have made her writing a go-to for anyone looking for wickedly smart, page-turning fiction that will make you laugh and gasp, Liane Moriarty’s Nine Perfect Strangers once again shows why she is a master of her craft.