Чого варта одна доля, коли руйнуються мільйони доль?Скільки коштує одне життя, якщо поряд гинуть — покоління?Чи можна пройти через зраду, крах сподівань, неволю, приниження, і — не зрадити собі? Не зламатись і зберегти кохання?Особисте право на вибір у трагічних обставинах — проблема, яку досліджує автор, розгортаючи дію роману на тлі подій Другої світової війни.Жорстка правдивість поряд із тонкою лірикою, динамічний сюжет і тонкий психологізм — характерні ознаки стилю автора.

The stories in Other Kinds are about a place. They are stories about the woods, houses hidden in the gaps between mountains. Behind them, the skeletons of old and powerful machines rust into the slate and leaves. Water red with iron leeches from the empty mines and pools near a stone foundation. The boy there plays in the bones because he is a child and this will be his childhood. He watches while winter comes falling slowly down over the road. Sometimes he remembers a girl, her hair and the perfume she wore. These are stories about her and where she might have gone. He waits for sleep because in the next story he will leave. The boy watches an airplane blink red past his window. From here, you can't hear its violence.

A new novel from award-winning Lebanese writer Iman Humaydan. Did I live many lives or only one life enough for many women? asks Miriyam in Other Lives. This third novel by Lebanese writer, Iman Humaydan, starkly and poignantly demonstrates how war, violence and dislocation have an impact not only on the lives of people who live through them but what life itself means, particularly for women. In Other Lives, Miriyams travels take her from her Shouf mountain village to Beirut, Melbourne and Paradise, Australia to Nairobi, Mombasa and Cape Town. Unwilling to be tied down by geography, language or men, Miriyam forges a path through the world that is at once hers uniquely and also deeply informed by her lifes experiences. Again and again, she is drawn back to the Lebanon of her birth and childhood, only to find it no longer there. She is forced to confront the ghosts of the civil warher dead brother, her disappeared lover, and the life that she left behind when she immigrated to Australia. Humaydan deftly explores one womans negotiation of love and war, intimacy and loss, migration and home in a way that speaks beyond individual but to a collective experience.

What does a man really know about love?Francis Widmer is a well-bred, beautiful, provocative young woman with a good mind. When she is raped by Harry Koslak, she decides to press charges. Her attorney father sends her to George Thomassy, as successful criminal lawyer. Thomassy, against his better judgment, involves himself in the case and finds himself attracted to Francine more than he cares to admit. Stein lays bare the unsavory, manipulative aspects of criminal law as he explores today's sexuality — its cruelties, hypocrisies, joys and mysteries.

Provocative and disturbing, Truman Capote's first published novel is a meditation on how fate can debase youthful expectations. Joel Knox seeks his long-absent father and his own future, but nothing turns out as planned.

Momotarō, Click-Clack Mountain, The Sparrow Who Lost Her Tongue, The Stolen Wen, Urashima-san… The father reads these old tales to the children. Though he's shabbily dressed and looks to be a complete fool, this father is a singular man in his own right. He has an unusual knack for making up stories.Once upon a time, long, long ago…Even as he reads the picture book aloud in a strangely imbecilic voice, another, somewhat more elaborate tale is brewing inside him.Dazai Osamu wrote The Fairy Tale Book (Otogizoshi) in the last months of the Pacific War. The traditional tales upon which Dazai's retellings are based are well known to every Japanese schoolchild, but this is no children's book. In Dazai's hands such stock characters as the kindhearted Oji-san to Oba-san ("Grandmother and Grandfather"), the mischievous tanuki badger, the fearsome Oni ogres, the greedy old man, the "tongue-cut" sparrow, and of course Urashima Taro (the Japanese Rip van Winkle) become complex individuals facing difficult and nuanced moral dilemmas. The resulting stories are thought-provoking, slyly subversive, and often hilarious.

« Pour mon malheur, le questionnement grâce auquel je me suis fait un nom dans la presse écrite, à la radio et à la télévision, s'est étendu à ma vie privée. Je souffre d'une maladie chronique que j'appelle la "questionnite". Son symptôme est évident, identifié de tous mes proches : je n'arrête pas de leur poser des questions. Je ne peux pas m'en empêcher. C'est plus fort que moi. C'est une seconde nature. Je suis en état de perpétuelle curiosité. Et de manque si je n'arrive pas à la satisfaire. Je ne suis pas le type qui se contente d'un machinal "Comment vas-tu ?". Je veux savoir. Quoi ? Peu importe, je veux savoir. Toute personne détient de grands et de petits secrets qu'elle n'entend pas divulguer, mais que mes questions peuvent l'amener à avouer. Il n'y a pas d'homme ou de femme sans double fond. Sans mystères, sans cachotteries, sans arrière-pensées. Moi, j'en ai. Beaucoup. Heureusement, je ne suis jamais tombé sur un loustic comme moi qui vous bombarde de questions et qui, à la longue, devient insupportable. » Adam Hitch est un journaliste dont la vie sentimentale est ravagée par son addiction aux questions. En racontant son histoire, avec humour et élégance, Bernard Pivot a-t-il écrit un roman ou son autobiographie ?« Apostrophes », « Bouillon de culture » « Double je » et des années de chroniques littéraires, hier à Lire, aujourd'hui au Journal du dimanche, ont fait de Bernard Pivot un journaliste culturel aussi populaire que respecté. Ses derniers livres (Les mots de ma vie, 100 mots à sauver, 100 expressions à sauver parus chez Albin Michel et Le dictionnaire amoureux du vin paru chez Plon) ont rencontré un vif succès. Il est membre de l'Académie Goncourt. Suivez l'auteur sur son compte Twitter : https ://twitter.com/bernardpivot1

A ferocious political satire in the great tradition, Our Gang is Philip Roth’s brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

Amir and Effi collected relatives. With Holocaust survivors for parents and few other 'real' relatives alive, relationships operated under a "Law of Compression" in which tenuous connections turned friends into uncles, cousins and grandparents. Life was framed by Grandpa Lolek, the parsimonious and eccentric old rogue who put his tea bags through Selektion, and Grandpa Yosef, the neighborhood saint, who knew everything about everything, but refused to talk of his own past. Amir and Effi also collected information about what happened Over There. This was more difficult than collecting relatives; nobody would tell them any details because they weren't yet Old Enough. The intrepid pair won't let this stop them, and their quest for knowledge results in adventures both funny and alarming, as they try to unearth their neighbors' stories. As Amir grows up, his obsession with understanding the Holocaust remains with him, and finally Old Enough to know, the unforgettable cast of characters that populate his world open their hearts, souls, and pasts to him… Translated by Jessica Cohen from the Hebrew Shoah Shelanu.

The patients of the Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments are looking for a miracle, and Alice Bhatti is looking for a job.Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse, grade 4. It is only a few weeks since her release from Borstal. She has returned to her childhood home in the French Colony, where her father, recently retired from his position as chief janitor, continues as part-time healer, and full-time headache for the local church. It seems she has inherited some of his gift.With guidance from the working nurse’s manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings succour to the thousands of patients littering the hospital’s corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious ‘Gentleman Squad’ of the Karachi police. They fall in love; Teddy with sudden violence, Alice with cautious optimism.Their love is unexpected, but the consequences are not.Alice soon finds that her new life is built on foundations as unstable as those of her home. A Catholic snubbed by other Catholics, who are in turn hated by everyone around them, she is also put at risk by her husband, who does two things that no member of the Gentlemen Squad has ever done — fall in love with a working girl, and allow a potentially dangerous suspect to get away. Can Teddy and Alice ever live in peace? Can two people make a life together without destroying the very thing that united them? It seems unlikely, but then Alice Bhatti is no ordinary nurse…Filled with wit, colour and pathos, Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is a glorious story of second chances, thwarted ambitions and love in unlikely places, set in the febrile streets of downtown Karachi. It is the remarkable new novel from the author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

For her most recent work and first novel — Notre-Dame du Nil, originally published in March 2012 with Gallimard in French — Mukasonga immerses us in a school for young girls, called "Notre-Dame du Nil." The girls are sent to this high school perched on the ridge of the Nile in order to become the feminine elite of the country and to escape the dangers of the outside world. The book is a prelude to the Rwandan genocide and unfolds behind the closed doors of the school, in the interminable rainy season. Friendships, desires, hatred, political fights, incitation to racial violence, persecutions… The school soon becomes a fascinating existential microcosm of the true 1970s Rwanda.

A spare yet eloquent, bittersweet yet inspiring story of a man and a woman who, in advanced age, come together to wrestle with the events of their lives and their hopes for the imminent future.In the familiar setting of Holt, Colorado, home to all of Kent Haruf’s inimitable fiction, Addie Moore pays an unexpected visit to a neighbor, Louis Waters. Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis’s wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with.Their brave adventures — their pleasures and their difficulties — are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer’s enduring contribution to American literature.

Our Young Man follows the life of a gorgeous Frenchman, Guy, as he goes from the industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand to the top of the modeling profession in New York City's fashion world, becoming the darling of Fire Island's gay community. Like Wilde's Dorian Grey, Guy never seems to age; at thirty-five he is still modeling, still enjoying lavish gifts from older men who believe he's twenty-three-though their attentions always come at a price. Ambivalently, Guy lets them believe, driven especially by the memory of growing up poor, until he finds he needs the lie to secure not only wealth, but love itself. Surveying the full spectrum of gay amorous life through the disco era and into the age of AIDS, Edmund White (who worked at Vogue for ten years) explores the power of physical beauty-to fascinate, to enslave, and to deceive-with sparkling wit and pathos.

« Quand j'ai compris que Mario était mort, tous les détails me sont revenus. Les gens racontaient cela en long et en large à ma grand-mère. Mario traversait le champ, un peu plus haut, à la sortie du village. Il cachait la bombe dans un sac, il courait. Peut-être qu'il s'est pris les pieds dans une motte de terre, et il est tombé. La bombe a explosé. On n'a rien retrouvé de lui. C'était merveilleux. C'était comme si Mario s'était envolé vers un autre monde, vers Ourania. Puis les années ont passé, j'ai un peu oublié. Jusqu'à ce jour, vingt ans après, où le hasard m'a réuni avec le jeune homme le plus étrange que j'aie jamais rencontré. »C'est ainsi que Daniel Sillitoe, géographe en mission au centre du Mexique, découvre, grâce à son guide Raphaël, la république idéale de Campos, en marge de la Vallée, capitale de la terre noire du Chernozem, le rêve humaniste de l'Emporio, la zone rouge qui retient prisonnière Lili de la lagune, et l'amour pour Dahlia. »J.M.G. Le Clézio.

A young boy has fled his home. Crouched in his hiding place he hears the shouts of the men hunting him. When the search party has passed, what lies before him is an infinite, arid plain, one he must cross in order to escape those from whom he’s fleeing. One night he crosses paths with an old goatherd and from that moment nothing will ever be the same for either of them.Out in the Open tells the story of a boy in a drought-stricken country ruled by violence. A closed world where names and dates don’t matter, where morals have drained away with the water. In this landscape the boy, not yet a lost cause, has the chance to learn the painful basics of judgement, or to live out forever the violence with which he grew up.

Gaza is being bombed. Rashid – a bright, unemployed twenty-seven-year-old, who has stayed up smoking grass watching it happen – wakes the next day to hear that he’s got the escape route he’s been waiting for: a scholarship to London. His twin sister, Iman – frustrated by atrocities and inaction around her – has also been up all night in a meeting that offers her nothing but more disappointment. Grabbing recklessly at an opportunity to make a difference, she finds herself being followed by an unknown fighter.Meanwhile Sabri, the oldest brother of this disparate Palestinian family works on a history of Palestine from his wheelchair as their mother pickles vegetables and feuds with their neighbours.Written with extraordinary humanity and humour, and moving between Gaza London and the Gulf, Out of It is a tale that redefines Palestine and its people. It follows the lives of Rashid and Iman as they try to forge paths for themselves in the midst of occupation, religious fundamentalism and the divisions between Palestinian factions. It tells of family secrets, unlikely love stories and unburied tragedies as it captures the frustrations and energies of the modern Arab world.

This intimate and affecting story of the dramatic decline suffered by an elderly man afflicted by Alzheimer's disease draws its strength from the first-person narrative voice of the man himself. Initially lucid, if fatigued, 71-year-old Maarten Klein lives with his wife Vera in Gloucester, Mass. Dutch-born, they endured with difficulty the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands before emigrating to the U.S., where Maarten worked as a secretary for the Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization. While Maarten has long considered himself a socially "marginal figure," in other respects the Kleins' lives are unremarkable but for his intensity of perception, sustained in sharply convincing fragments even as his faculties disintegrate. "I seem to lose words like another person loses blood," he observes helplessly, and resolves to "invent a life for myself from minute to minute," but ultimately becomes the sole and poignant "survivor of my own language."(

Los Angeles. A would-be movie reviewer, looking for romance, takes an assignment to write a magazine article about celebrity look-alikes. After getting to know a Steve Martin impersonator, the writer decides to undertake his own process of transformation and becomes not Steve Martin but a version of him — graceful, charming, at home in the world. Safe in the guise of “Steve,” he begins to fall in love. And that’s when “Steve” takes over. Set in the capital of illusion, this is a story of one man’s journey into paradise — and his attempt to come out the other side.

From the critically acclaimed author of the novel The Good Brother and memoir My Father the Pornographer, Out of the Woods is Chris Offutt’s fiercely original short story collection the New York Times calls “a magical book”.Arriving seven years after Offutt’s debut collection Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods returns a masterly writer to the form which garnered him not only critical praise but many prestigious awards. Offutt, who “draws landscape and constructs dialogue with the eyes and ears of a native son” (The Miami Herald), is on strong home turf here, capturing those who have left the Kentucky hills and long to return. These nine stories of gravediggers and drifters, gamblers and truck drivers a long way from home, are tales so full of hard edges they can't help but tell some hard truths.