Zuhause ist die Familie Kocsis also in der Schweiz, aber es ist ein schwieriges Zuhause, von Heimat gar nicht zu reden, obwohl sie doch die Cafeteria betreiben und obwohl die Kinder dort aufgewachsen sind. Die Eltern haben es immerhin geschafft, aber die Schweiz schafft manchmal die Töchter, Ildiko vor allem, sie sind zwar dort angekommen, aber nicht immer angenommen. Es genügt schon, den Streitigkeiten ihrer Angestellten aus den verschiedenen ehemals jugoslawischen Republiken zuzuhören, um sich nicht mehr zu wundern über ein seltsames Europa, das einander nicht wahrnehmen will. Bleiben da wirklich nur die Liebe und der Rückzug ins angeblich private Leben?

Wie in seinem Welterfolg DRACHENLÄUFER erzählt Khaled Hosseini erneut eine zutiefst bewegende Geschichte aus seinem Heimatland: von Leid und Ohnmacht, aber auch vom außergewöhnlichen Mut zweier afghanischer Frauen. Die unehelich geborene Mariam wird mit fünfzehn ins ferne Kabul geschickt, wo sie mit dem dreißig Jahre älteren Witwer Rashid verheiratet wird. Zwanzig Jahre später erlebt das Nachbarkind Leila ein ähnliches Schicksal. Auch ihr bleibt keine Wahl: Nachdem ihre Familie bei einem Bombenangriff getötet wurde und sie erfährt, dass auch ihr Jugendfreund Tarik ums Leben gekommen ist, wird sie Rashids Zweitfrau. In dem bis dahin kinderlos gebliebenen Haushalt bringt Leila eine Tochter und einen Sohn zur Welt. Während der Taliban-Herrschaft machen Bombardierungen, Hunger und physische Gewalt das Leben der Familie zur Qual. Die Not lässt die beiden unterschiedlichen Frauen zu Freundinnen werden und ihre Stärke schließlich ins Übermenschliche wachsen. Khaled Hosseini gelingt es wieder auf unvergleichliche Weise, seine Figuren so lebendig und authentisch werden zu lassen, dass der Leser sich mit ihrem Schicksal identifiziert.KHALED HOSSEINI wurde 1965 in Kabul als Sohn eines Diplomaten geboren. Seine Familie erhielt 1980 in den Vereinigten Staaten politisches Asyl. Er lebt heute als Arzt und Autor in Kalifornien. Sein Roman DRACHENLÄUFER erschien in vierzig Sprachen und hat eine Weltauflage von sieben Millionen Exemplaren.

В свои тридцать с небольшим лет Виржини Депант — одна из самых модных современных французских писательниц лауреат престижной литературной премии «Флор». Первый же ее роман «Трахни меня» (Baise-moi, 1993) произвел подлинный фурор. Фильм по этому роману, снятый ею совместно с бывшей порноактрисой Корали, упрочил ее скандальную славу. «Дрессированные сучки» (Les Chiennes savantes, 1999), где сюжеты «Трахни меня» получили еще более скандальное продолжение, — уже не один год среди лидеров продаж во Франции. Новый роман Виржини Депант — «Teen spirit» (2002) — это опять вызов обществу, вещь провокационная и предельно откровенная.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples’ already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe’s life.An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we’ve been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.

A psychological thriller blurring the line between literary fantasy and real-life tragedy, written by one of the most influential authors in the Middle East.A Sudanese writer begins to suspect that one of his most idiosyncratic characters from a recent novel resembles — in an uncanny and terrifying way — a real person he has never met. Since he condemned this character to an untimely death in the novel, should he attempt to save this real man from a similar fate?Elsir takes his readers on a chilling journey through the unsettled mind of an author who loses control over his own creations and sense of reality. Set in both sides of Khartoum — the bustling capital city and the neglected, poverty stricken underbelly — this is a novel of unreliable narrators, of insane asylums and of the (dubious?) relationship between imagination and reality.

RACHEL KUSHNER HAS WRITTEN AN ASTONISHINGLY wise, ambitious, and riveting novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. The first Novel to tell the story of the Americans who were driven out in 1958, this is a masterful debut.Young Everly Lederer and K.C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dream-world, Everly and K.C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of grown-ups around them the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence.In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a caberet dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazire, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Raul Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K.C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. If their parents manage to remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come.At the time, urgent news was conveyed by telex. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

A collection of unforgettable short stories that explores the wondrous transformation between grief and hope, a journey often marked by moments of unexpected grace.Set in California, Tell Me One Thing is an uplifting and poignant book about people finding their way toward happiness. In "Get Your Dead Man's Clothes," "Irish Twins," and "Aftermath," Jamie O'Connor finally reckons with his tumultuous childhood, which propels him to an unexpected awakening. In "Tell Me One Thing," Lucia's decision to leave her loveless marriage has unintended consequences for her young daughter. In "Sweet Peas," "What We Give," and "The Neighbor," the sudden death of librarian Trudy Dugan's beloved husband forces her out of isolation and prompts her to become more engaged with her community. And in "Wishing," Anna finds an unusual kind of love. Tell Me One Thing is about the life we can create despite the grief we carry and, sometimes, even because of the grief we have experienced.

A collection of unforgettable short stories that explores the wondrous transformation between grief and hope, a journey often marked by moments of unexpected grace.Set in California, Tell Me One Thing is an uplifting and poignant book about people finding their way toward happiness. In "Get Your Dead Man's Clothes," "Irish Twins," and "Aftermath," Jamie O'Connor finally reckons with his tumultuous childhood, which propels him to an unexpected awakening. In "Tell Me One Thing," Lucia's decision to leave her loveless marriage has unintended consequences for her young daughter. In "Sweet Peas," "What We Give," and "The Neighbor," the sudden death of librarian Trudy Dugan's beloved husband forces her out of isolation and prompts her to become more engaged with her community. And in "Wishing," Anna finds an unusual kind of love. Tell Me One Thing is about the life we can create despite the grief we carry and, sometimes, even because of the grief we have experienced.

Meet Ashley Patterson, the brainy, babelicious "computer whiz" and confused heroine of Tell Me Your Dreams. Although she has a cushy job at Global Computer Graphics, a fast-growing start-up in Silicon Valley, her life falls short of fulfilling. She's lonely, shy, and absolutely convinced she's being stalked. What's worse, the only sympathetic ear around is her father, Dr. Patterson, the heartless heart surgeon, who has the charm of an electric eel and the compassion of a tarantula. Given her options, Ashley looks to the heavens for support and offers up an ultimatum to the Almighty: "I'll make a deal with you, God. If it doesn't rain, it means that everything is all right, that I've been imagining everything." Of course, it starts raining buckets just paragraphs later, setting off a car alarm of an omen about our computer cutie's fate.Enter Toni Prescott and Alette Peters. They both work with Ashley at Global Computer Graphics, but the similarities end there. Toni is a saucy, British vixen with a penchant for Internet dating and discotheques. La bella Italiana Alette, on the other hand, is a wannabe artist who prefers quiet, dreamy weekends with beefcake painters. Reminiscent of junior high school, Toni and Alette do their best to keep Ashley out of their cool clique, but find it difficult when a string of murders irrevocably binds them together. Based on a true story and laden with realistic details--not to mention a whopper of an ending--Tell Me Your Dreams is vintage Sheldon. However, there is one necessary caveat: avoid moviegoer types who insist on telling you the entire plot before you have a chance to see it. You should be doing this anyway, but take extra care with this book. Once the surprise ending is blown, so is the fun in reading it. --Rebekah Warren --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Nearly a decade after his last volume of short stories was published, Jeffrey Archer returns with his eagerly-awaited, brand-new collection TELL TALE, giving us a fascinating, exciting and sometimes poignant insight into the people he has met, the stories he has come across and the countries he has visited during the past ten years.

Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to find out Who Killed the Mayor? and the pretentious schoolboy in A Road to Damascus, whose discovery of the origins of his father’s wealth changes his life in the most profound way.

Revel in the stories of the 1930’s woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League University in A Gentleman and A Scholar while another young woman who thumbs a lift gets more than she bargained for in A Wasted Hour.

These wonderfully engaging and always refreshingly original tales prove why Archer has been described by The Times as probably the greatest storyteller of our age.

Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in that field-from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives-literature and politics-infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe-inspiring nature-including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities-political, moral, and social-of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.

En anglais, on appelle « novella » une longue nouvelle qui unit les lieux, l'action et le ton. Le modèle parfait serait Joseph Conrad. De ces deux novellas, l'une se déroule sur l'île d'Udo, dans la mer du Japon, que les Coréens nomment la mer de l'Est, la seconde à Paris, et dans quelques autres endroits. Elles sont contemporaines.J. M. G. Le Clézio

A Dance to the Music of Time — his brilliant 12-novel sequence, which chronicles the lives of over three hundred characters, is a unique evocation of life in twentieth-century England.The novels follow Nicholas Jenkins, Kenneth Widmerpool and others, as they negotiate the intellectual, cultural and social hurdles that stand between them and the “Acceptance World.”

A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, this bestselling collection from master storyteller Sherman Alexie tackles love, loss, basketball — and everything in between.The characters that populate the lyrical and affectionate tales in Ten Little Indians battle stereotypes and navigate the crossroads of culture in life off the reservation. Richard, the narrator of “Lawyer’s League,” grows up in Seattle the son of “an African American giant who played defensive end for the University of Washington Huskies” and “a petite Spokane Indian ballerina.” Estelle Walks Above (née Estelle Miller), the mother of the narrator in “The Life and Times of Estelle Walks Above,” studies her way off the Spokane Indian Reservation and into the University of Washington, and goes on to both enjoy and resent the company of the white women of Seattle — who see her as a shamanic genius, and look to her for guidance on everything from sex and fashion to spirituality and politics.These and the other stories in Ten Little Indians run the gamut from earthy humor to sobering emotional truth, mapping the outer reaches of the human heart.

Ten Tales Tall & True carries on the tradition, illustrations and all, from the alarming story of the train of the future and the child who has not yet made up its mind whether to be male or female to the poignancy of "Time Travelling, " a memorable picture of old age. There are, as the author assures us, social realism, sexual comedy, science fiction, and satire included here. There are also, as Gray confesses, more than ten tales — but "I would spoil my book by shortening it, spoil the title if I made it true." These stories are pure, unadulterated Alasdair Gray.

The eagerly anticipated, internationally bestselling new novel by the winner of the world’s richest literary prize for a single work of fictionA woman rents a remote farm in rural Wales. She says her name is Emilie. An Emily Dickinson scholar, she has fled Amsterdam, having just confessed to an affair. On the farm she finds ten geese. One by one they disappear. Who is this woman? Will her husband manage to find her? The young man who stays the night: why won’t he leave? And the vanishing geese?Set against a stark and pristine landscape, and with a seductive blend of solace and menace, this novel of stealth intrigue summons from a woman’s silent longing fugitive moments of profound beauty and compassion.

A searing novel about longing, intimacy and obsession from the award-winning author of Solace.When they meet in Dublin in the late nineties, Catherine and James become close as two friends can be. She is a sheltered college student, he an adventurous, charismatic young artist. In a city brimming with possibilities, he spurs her to take life on with gusto. But as Catherine opens herself to new experiences, James's life becomes a prison; as changed as the new Ireland may be, it is still not a place in which he feels able to truly be himself. Catherine, grateful to James and worried for him, desperately wants to help — but as time moves on, and as life begins to take the friends in different directions, she discovers that there is a perilously fine line between helping someone and hurting them further. When crisis hits, Catherine finds herself at the mercy of feelings she cannot control, leading her to jeopardize all she holds dear.By turns exhilarating and devastating, Tender is a dazzling exploration of human relationships, of the lies we tell ourselves and the lies we are taught to tell. It is the story of first love and lost innocence, of discovery and betrayal. A tense high-wire act with keen psychological insights, this daring novel confirms McKeon as a major voice in contemporary fiction, belonging alongside the masterful Edna O'Brien and Anne Enright.

Una Barcelona que se eleva sórdida e intrigante. El mítico cine Roxy, que en su tiempo alivió la miseria de posguerra con sus leyendas de celuloide. El mundo de este gran escritor desfila por estos relatos.En este libro Juan Marsé reúne tres historias magistrales. En «Historia de detectives», cuatro muchachos, encerrados en un Lincoln abollado y herrumbroso, dan alas a su fantasía. Mezclados con el humo azul de sus aromáticos cigarrillos de regaliz, los relatos de crímenes y viudas peligrosas llenan el interior del automóvil. La crítica mordaz, irónica, patética y a menudo divertida de la bravura obcecada de un militar franquista en «Teniente Bravo» constituye uno de los hitos en la historia de la narración breve de las letras hispanas. Y finalmente, en «El fantasma del Cine Roxy», los mitos del celuloide conviven con la realidad del presente, encarnada en un banco construido sobre las ruinas de un antiguo cine de barrio cuyos héroes se resisten a desaparecer.«Marsé bucea en los fondos abisales de su inconsciente para sacar a flote experiencias lejanas que transforma en material literario.»MÀRIUS CAROL«Lo grande de un escritor como Marsé es saber crear personajes con entidad.»FERNANDO TRUEBA.

Como cualquier guionista de Hollywood, David Armitage aspira convertirse en rico y famoso para huir de la mediocridad de su vida. Cuando está a punto de dar por muerta su carrera, se produce el milagro: la televisión compra uno de sus guiones y se convierte en un rotundo éxito. Pasado un tiempo, el millonario Philip Fleck le propone ir a su isla privada para trabajar en un nuevo guión cinematográfico. David se lleva una desagradable sorpresa cuando descubre que se trata de uno de sus propios guiones, escrito unos años antes, copiado palabra por palabra. Furioso, David se niega a colaborar con el millonario. Pero su decisión le costará cara…***«¡Esto es una novela!: flechazos, dilemas, pesares, y la certeza de que el éxito se conjuga siempre con el condicional o el imperfecto.» Le Figaro.