en-US Fri, 15 Mar 2024 06:58:50 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 17125 The only English translation authorized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"--Harrison Salisbury

This unexpurgated 1991 translation by H. T. Willetts is the only authorized edition available, and fully captures the power and beauty of the original Russian.]]> 182 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Jan 0 3.98 1962
author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
name: Jan
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1962
rating: 0
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]]> 91519
Stephanie Potter gives up a promising academic career to marry Daniel Orton, while her sister, Frederica, enters Cambridge, and her brother, Marcus, begins recovering from a nervous breakdown.]]> 384 A.S. Byatt 0684835037 Jan 0 3.89 1985
author: A.S. Byatt
name: Jan
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1985
rating: 0
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]]> 40595446 The never-before-told story of one woman's heroism that changed the course of the Second World War

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her."

This spy was Virginia Hall, a young American woman--rejected from the foreign service because of her gender and her prosthetic leg--who talked her way into the spy organization deemed Churchill's "ministry of ungentlemanly warfare," and, before the United States had even entered the war, became the first woman to deploy to occupied France.

Virginia Hall was one of the greatest spies in American history, yet her story remains untold. Just as she did in Clementine, Sonia Purnell uncovers the captivating story of a powerful, influential, yet shockingly overlooked heroine of the Second World War. At a time when sending female secret agents into enemy territory was still strictly forbidden, Virginia Hall came to be known as the "Madonna of the Resistance," coordinating a network of spies to blow up bridges, report on German troop movements, arrange equipment drops for Resistance agents, and recruit and train guerilla fighters. Even as her face covered WANTED posters throughout Europe, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped with her life in a grueling hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown, and her associates all imprisoned or executed. But, adamant that she had "more lives to save," she dove back in as soon as she could, organizing forces to sabotage enemy lines and back up Allied forces landing on Normandy beaches. Told with Purnell's signature insight and novelistic flare, A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.]]> 352 Sonia Purnell 073522529X Jan 0 4.08 2019
author: Sonia Purnell
name: Jan
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/09/07
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]]> 2017056
Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.

As they work their way west, they encounter a countryside ravaged by war. Their flight will test both Anna’s and Callum’s love, as well as their friendship with Manfred–assuming any of them even survive.

Perhaps not since The English Patient has a novel so deftly captured both the power and poignancy of romance and the terror and tragedy of war. Skillfully portraying the flesh and blood of history, Chris Bohjalian has crafted a rich tapestry that puts a face on one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies–while creating, perhaps, a masterpiece that will haunt readers for generations.]]> 372 Chris Bohjalian 0307394956 Jan 0 4.00 2008
author: Chris Bohjalian
name: Jan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at: 2021/07/15
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]]> 2320230 A young Nigerian writer living in New York City returns to Lagos in search of a subject-and himself.

Visiting Lagos after many years away, Teju Cole's unnamed narrator rediscovers his hometown as both a foreigner and a local. A young writer uncertain of what he wants to say, the man moves through tableaus of life in one of the most dynamic cities in the world: he hears the muezzin's call to prayer in the early morning light, and listens to John Coltrane during the late afternoon heat. He witnesses teenagers diligently perpetrating e-mail frauds from internet cafes, longs after a woman reading Michael Ondaatje on a public bus, and visits the impoverished National Museum. Along the way, he reconnects with old school friends and his family, who force him to ask himself profound questions of personal and national history. Over long, wandering days, the narrator compares present-day Lagos to the Lagos of his memory, and in doing so reveals changes that have taken place in himself.]]> 128 Teju Cole 978080515X Jan 0 to-read 3.68 2007
author: Teju Cole
name: Jan
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/06/01
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]]> 40164365
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.]]> 212 Sigrid Nunez 0735219451 Jan 0 to-read 3.73 2018
author: Sigrid Nunez
name: Jan
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2021/06/01
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]]> 144977
J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice.

At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. Cops and poets, bookies and soldiers, movie stars and stumblebums, all sorts of men gathered in the bar to tell their stories and forget their cares. The alphas along the bar—including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler—took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fatherhood-by-committee.

Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys—from his grandfather's tumbledown house to the hallowed towers and spires of Yale; from his absurd stint selling housewares at Lord & Taylor to his dream job at the New York Times, which became a nightmare when he found himself a faulty cog in a vast machine. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality.

In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.]]> 416 J.R. Moehringer 0786888768 Jan 0 to-read 3.96 2005
author: J.R. Moehringer
name: Jan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> 18114067
Why exactly Charley Bordelon’s late father left her eight hundred sprawling acres of sugarcane land in rural Louisiana is as mysterious as it was generous. Recognizing this as a chance to start over, Charley and her eleven-year-old daughter, Micah, say good-bye to Los Angeles.

They arrive just in time for growing season but no amount of planning can prepare Charley for a Louisiana that’s mired in the past: as her judgmental but big-hearted grandmother tells her, cane farming is always going to be a white man’s business. As the sweltering summer unfolds, Charley must balance the overwhelming challenges of her farm with the demands of a homesick daughter, a bitter and troubled brother, and the startling desires of her own heart.

Penguin has a rich tradition of publishing strong Southern debut fiction—from Sue Monk Kidd to Kathryn Stockett to Beth Hoffman. In Queen Sugar, we now have a debut from the African American point of view. Stirring in its storytelling of one woman against the odds and intimate in its exploration of the complexities of contemporary southern life, Queen Sugar is an unforgettable tale of endurance and hope.]]> 372 Natalie Baszile 0670026131 Jan 0 to-read 3.71 2014
author: Natalie Baszile
name: Jan
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> 9125646
Each night, Sisi, Ama, Efe, and Joyce stand in the windows of Antwerp’s red-light district, promising to make men’s desires come true—if only for half an hour. Pledged to the fierce Madam and a mysterious pimp named Dele, the girls share an apartment but little else—they keep their heads down, knowing that one step out of line could cost them a week’s wages. They open their bodies to strangers but their hearts to no one, each focused on earning enough to get herself free, to send money home or save up for her own future.

Then, suddenly, a murder shatters the still surface of their lives. Drawn together by tragedy and the loss of one of their own, the women realize that they must choose between their secrets and their safety. As they begin to tell their stories, their confessions reveal the face in Efe’s hidden photograph, Ama’s lifelong search for a father, Joyce’s true name, and Sisi’s deepest secretsâ€�-and all their tales of fear, displacement, and love, concluding in a chance meeting with a handsome, sinister stranger.

On Black Sisters Street marks the U.S. publication debut of Chika Unigwe, a brilliant new writer and a standout voice among contemporary African authors. Raw, vivid, unforgettable, and inspired by a powerful oral storytelling tradition, this novel illuminates the dream of the West—and that dream’s illusion and annihilation—as seen through African eyes. It is a story of courage, unity, and hope, of women’s friendships and of bonds that, once forged, cannot be broken.]]> 258 Chika Unigwe 1400068339 Jan 0 to-read 3.88 2007
author: Chika Unigwe
name: Jan
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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]]> 20342617
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned.

Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice.

One of EJI’s first clients was Walter McMillian, a young Black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching â€� a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.]]> 336 Bryan Stevenson Jan 0 to-read 4.62 2014
author: Bryan Stevenson
name: Jan
average rating: 4.62
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2020/10/24
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]]> 8683812
Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanwhile, strives to hold on to her sense of self as the demands of life with Ernest grow costly and her roles as wife, friend, and muse become more challenging. Despite their extraordinary bond, they eventually find themselves facing the ultimate crisis of their marriage—a deception that will lead to the unraveling of everything they’ve fought so hard for.

A heartbreaking portrayal of love and torn loyalty, The Paris Wife is all the more poignant because we know that, in the end, Hemingway wrote that he would rather have died than fallen in love with anyone but Hadley.]]> 314 Paula McLain 0345521307 Jan 4 3.81 2011
author: Paula McLain
name: Jan
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2018/12/29
date added: 2018/12/29
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]]> 13493444 290 Edward Wilson 1906413991 Jan 0 4.13 2011
author: Edward Wilson
name: Jan
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at: 2018/11/26
date added: 2018/11/26
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]]> 22750625
Beautifully observed and remarkably crafted, written with emotion and empathy, these stories are nothing short of perfection. A masterclass in the genre, from an author who deservedly lays claim to being one of the major fiction writers of our time.]]> 448 Alice Munro Jan 5 4.06 2011
author: Alice Munro
name: Jan
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2018/09/09
date added: 2018/09/09
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]]> 77156
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.

From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.]]> 301 Kent Haruf 0375705856 Jan 5 4.02 1999
author: Kent Haruf
name: Jan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1999
rating: 5
read at: 2018/08/25
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]]> 469571 302 Cormac McCarthy 0679744398 Jan 0 4.04 1992
author: Cormac McCarthy
name: Jan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1992
rating: 0
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]]> 39832183 #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE ON NETFLIX - A remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German Occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written inside a book by Charles Lamb...

As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers all.

Juliet begins a remarkable correspondence with the society's members, learning about their island, their taste in books, and the impact the recent German occupation has had on their lives. Captivated by their stories, she sets sail for Guernsey, and what she finds will change her forever.

Written with warmth and humor as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written word in all its guises and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.]]> 291 Mary Ann Shaffer 1984801813 Jan 4 4.27 2008
author: Mary Ann Shaffer
name: Jan
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/18
date added: 2018/08/18
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]]> 1052621 375 William Trevor 0670839337 Jan 4 4.02 1991
author: William Trevor
name: Jan
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1991
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/18
date added: 2018/08/18
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Of the two, I preferred 'My House in Umbria' to 'Reading Turgenev' . . .. even though all the praise on the book cover was for Turgenev!
]]> 23664710 “Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?â€�

That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It’s a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad stop, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal.

Reacher has no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, and there’s something about Chang . . . so he teams up with her and starts to ask around. He thinks: How bad can this thing be? But before long he’s plunged into a desperate race through LA, Chicago, Phoenix, and San Francisco, and through the hidden parts of the internet, up against thugs and assassins every step of the way—right back to where he started, in Mother’s Rest, where he must confront the worst nightmare he could imagine.

Walking away would have been easier. But as always, Reacher’s rule is: If you want me to stop, you’re going to have to make me.]]> 428 Lee Child 0593073894 Jan 3 3.93 2015
author: Lee Child
name: Jan
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2018/08/12
date added: 2018/08/12
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Beach read and enjoyable . . .
]]> 256274
A love story and a war story, a tragicomic tale of a city under siege and a dying way of life, The Singapore Grip completes the “Empire Trilogyâ€� that began with Troubles and the Booker prize-winning Siege of Krishnapur.]]> 584 J.G. Farrell 1590171365 Jan 4 3.96 1978
author: J.G. Farrell
name: Jan
average rating: 3.96
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/09
date added: 2018/08/09
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]]> 1337648 Book Allan Sealy 0385410336 Jan 5 3.09 1988
author: Allan Sealy
name: Jan
average rating: 3.09
book published: 1988
rating: 5
read at: 2018/07/21
date added: 2018/07/21
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]]> 18749 A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,â€� Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.

With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.

Epic, ambitious, and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a remarkable novel about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race—and the ways in which love can complicate them all. Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise and the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place, bringing us one of the most powerful, dramatic, and intensely emotional pictures of modern Africa that we have ever had.]]> 435 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 1400044162 Jan 5 4.34 2006
author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
name: Jan
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2006
rating: 5
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date added: 2018/07/02
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]]> 26795307 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

ÌęMoonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.â€� It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.

ÌęFrom the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,â€� the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.]]> 430 Michael Chabon 0062225553 Jan 0 3.77 2016
author: Michael Chabon
name: Jan
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2018/06/11
date added: 2018/06/10
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]]> 19494 212 John Le Carré Jan 5 4.07 1963
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2018/04/09
date added: 2018/04/09
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]]> 52372 224 Susan Sontag 0141187166 Jan 5 3.87 1973
author: Susan Sontag
name: Jan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2018/01/25
date added: 2018/01/25
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]]> 7604 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141182537.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Dolores Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.]]> 368 Vladimir Nabokov 0679723161 Jan 0 3.87 1955
author: Vladimir Nabokov
name: Jan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1955
rating: 0
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]]> 4934
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.]]> 796 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0374528373 Jan 0 4.36 1880
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Jan
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1880
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/01/07
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]]> 12505 667 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0679642420 Jan 0 4.22 1869
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Jan
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1869
rating: 0
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date added: 2018/01/07
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]]> 497164 Camera Lucida was first published in 1979. Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Roland Barthes presents photography as being outside the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind, and rendering death and loss more acutely than any other medium. This groundbreaking approach established Camera Lucida as one of the most important books of theory on this subject, along with Susan Sontag's On Photography.]]> 119 Roland Barthes 0374521344 Jan 4 3.99 1980
author: Roland Barthes
name: Jan
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2018/01/07
date added: 2018/01/07
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]]> 34688024 480 Alaa Al Aswany 0857862219 Jan 5 3.79 2013
author: Alaa Al Aswany
name: Jan
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2017/08/27
date added: 2017/12/11
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]]> 34338496
Venice, 1945. The war may be waning, but the city known as La Serenissima is still occupied and the people of Italy fear the power of the Third Reich. One night, under a canopy of stars, a fisherman named Cenzo comes across a young woman’s body floating in the lagoon and soon discovers that she is still alive and in trouble.

Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Giulia is on the run from the Wehrmacht. Cenzo chooses to protect Giulia rather than hand her over to the Nazis. This act of kindness leads them into the world of Partisans, random executions, the arts of forgery and high explosives, Mussolini’s broken promises, the black market and gold, and, everywhere, the enigmatic maze of the Venice Lagoon.

With Martin Cruz Smith’s trademark suspense, action, and breathtaking romance during World War II Italy, The Girl from Venice is “a gripping evocation of a beautiful nation and of two people, trapped in the lunacy of war and the bravery it can inspireâ€� ( The Seattle Times ).]]> 320 Martin Cruz Smith 1439140243 Jan 4 3.38 2016
author: Martin Cruz Smith
name: Jan
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/09
date added: 2017/12/09
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]]> 28214365
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.]]> 322 Ann Patchett 0062491792 Jan 4 3.81 2016
author: Ann Patchett
name: Jan
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/11/12
date added: 2017/11/12
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]]> 6433752 The Lacuna is a poignant story of a man pulled between two nations as they invent their modern identities.

Born in the United States, reared in a series of provisional households in Mexico—from a coastal island jungle to 1930s Mexico City—Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers who put him to work in the kitchen, errands he runs in the streets, and one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. He discovers a passion for Aztec history and meets the exotic, imperious artist Frida Kahlo, who will become his lifelong friend. When he goes to work for Lev Trotsky, an exiled political leader fighting for his life, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution, newspaper headlines and howling gossip, and a risk of terrible violence.

Meanwhile, to the north, the United States will soon be caught up in the internationalist goodwill of World War II. There in the land of his birth, Shepherd believes he might remake himself in America's hopeful image and claim a voice of his own. He finds support from an unlikely kindred soul, his stenographer, Mrs. Brown, who will be far more valuable to her employer than he could ever know. Through darkening years, political winds continue to toss him between north and south in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach—the lacuna—between truth and public presumption.

With deeply compelling characters, a vivid sense of place, and a clear grasp of how history and public opinion can shape a life, Barbara Kingsolver has created an unforgettable portrait of the artist—and of art itself. The Lacuna is a rich and daring work of literature, establishing its author as one of the most provocative and important of her time.]]> 508 Barbara Kingsolver 0060852577 Jan 5 3.80 2009
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Jan
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2009
rating: 5
read at: 2017/11/08
date added: 2017/11/08
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]]> 4397 The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized—and sometimes outraged—millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.
Ìę
The Grapes of WrathÌęsummed up its era in the way thatÌęUncle Tom’s CabinÌęsummed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that “The Battle Hymn of the Republicâ€� be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book—which takes its title from the first verse: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.â€� At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

This edition contains an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert Demott.]]> 464 John Steinbeck 0143039431 Jan 5 3.99 1939
author: John Steinbeck
name: Jan
average rating: 3.99
book published: 1939
rating: 5
read at: 2017/10/09
date added: 2017/10/11
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]]> 13722330
In Second World War Poland, a young prisoner closes his eyes and pictures going to bat on a sunlit English cricket ground.

Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away.

In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands - suddenly and with awe - the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading to her.

On a summer evening in the Catskills in 1971, a skinny girl steps out of a Chevy with a guitar and with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls.

A few years from now, in Italy, a gifted scientist discovers links between time and the human brain and between her lover's novel and his life.

Throughout the five masterpieces of fiction that make up A Possible Life, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection. Between soldier and lover, parent and child, servant and master, and artist and muse, important pleasures and pains are born of love, separations and missed opportunities. These interactions - whether successful or not - also affect the long trajectories of characters' lives.

Provocative and profound, Sebastian Faulks's dazzling new novel journeys across continents and centuries not only to entertain with superb old-fashioned storytelling but to show that occasions of understanding between humans are the one thing that defines us - and that those moments, however fluid, are the one thing that endures.]]> 304 Sebastian Faulks 0805097309 Jan 4 3.46 2012
author: Sebastian Faulks
name: Jan
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2012
rating: 4
read at: 2017/09/08
date added: 2017/09/08
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]]> 11741 Housekeeping is the story of Ruth and her younger sister, Lucille, who grow up haphazardly, first under the care of their competent grandmother, then of two comically bumbling great-aunts, and finally of Sylvie, their eccentric and remote aunt. The family house is in the small Far West town of Fingerbone set on a glacial lake, the same lake where their grandfather died in a spectacular train wreck, and their mother drove off a cliff to her death. It is a town "chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather, and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere." Ruth and Lucille's struggle toward adulthood beautifully illuminates the price of loss and survival, and the dangerous and deep undertow of transience.]]> 219 Marilynne Robinson 0312424094 Jan 4 3.82 1980
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Jan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/31
date added: 2017/08/31
shelves:
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]]> 1331653 For Dr. Alfred Jones, life is a quiet mixture of civil service at the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and marriage to Mary—an ambitious, no-nonsense financier. But a strange turn of fate from an unexpected direction forces Jones to upend his existence and spend all of his time in pursuit of another man’s ludicrous dream. Can there be salmon in the Yemen? Science says no. But if resources are limitless and the visionary is inspired, maybe salmon fishing in the Yemen isn’t impossible. Then again, maybe nothing is.]]> 329 Paul Torday Jan 4 3.52 2007
author: Paul Torday
name: Jan
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2017/08/27
date added: 2017/08/27
shelves:
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]]> 29972327 784 Orhan Pamuk 0571276008 Jan 5 4.04 2014
author: Orhan Pamuk
name: Jan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2017/08/21
date added: 2017/08/21
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]]> 29662443
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.

Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth, visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command, interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, meeting with two former heads of the KGB, watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.

Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.]]> 310 John Le Carré 0241976871 Jan 0 4.03 2016
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at: 2017/07/08
date added: 2017/07/08
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]]> 2156 249 Jane Austen 0192802631 Jan 5 4.15 1817
author: Jane Austen
name: Jan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1817
rating: 5
read at: 2017/06/04
date added: 2017/06/04
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Persuasion, my favorite I think of the Austen novels, never fails to enchant.
]]> 18712884 The Lie is an enthralling, heart-wrenching novel of love, memory and devastating loss by one of the UK’s most acclaimed storytellers.

Cornwall, 1920, early spring.
A young man stands on a headland, looking out to sea. He is back from the war, homeless and without family. Behind him lie the mud, barbed-wire entanglements and terror of the trenches. Behind him is also the most intense relationship of his life.

Daniel has survived, but the horror and passion of the past seem more real than the quiet fields around him. He is about to step into the unknown. But will he ever be able to escape the terrible, unforeseen consequences of a lie?]]> 304 Helen Dunmore 0099559285 Jan 4 3.52 2014
author: Helen Dunmore
name: Jan
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/15
date added: 2017/06/03
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]]> 883995 206 Barry Unsworth 0393315606 Jan 4 3.75 1995
author: Barry Unsworth
name: Jan
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2017/03/06
date added: 2017/06/03
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]]> 6015062
England, 1766: After a long voyage from the East Indies, a ship docks in Bristol, England, and rumor quickly spreads about its unusual cargo—some say a mermaid is on board. A crowd forms, hoping to catch a glimpse of the magical creature. One crate after another is unpacked: a zebra, a leopard, and a baboon. There's no mermaid, but in the final two crates is something almost as magical—a pair of young elephants, in poor health but alive.

Seeing a unique opportunity, a wealthy sugar merchant purchases the elephants for his country estate and turns their care over to a young stable boy, Tom Page. Tom's family has long cared for horses, but an elephant is something different altogether. It takes time for Tom and the elephants to understand one another, but to the surprise of everyone on the estate, a remarkable bond is formed.

The Elephant Keeper, the story of Tom and the elephants, in Tom's own words, moves from the green fields and woods of the English countryside to the dark streets and alleys of late-eighteenth-century London, reflecting both the beauty and the violence of the age. Nicholson's lush writing and deft storytelling complement a captivating tale of love and loyalty between one man and the two elephants that change the lives of all who meet them.]]> 298 Christopher Nicholson 0061651605 Jan 4 3.39 2008
author: Christopher Nicholson
name: Jan
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2008
rating: 4
read at: 2017/04/22
date added: 2017/06/03
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]]> 28390369
Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and stubborn roots, about how we are shaped by these things and how we can survive them. Moving from northwest London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.]]> 453 Zadie Smith 0241144159 Jan 4 3.55 2016
author: Zadie Smith
name: Jan
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2017/05/24
date added: 2017/06/03
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]]> 792450 290 Edmund Keeley 0810119390 Jan 0 4.28 1999
author: Edmund Keeley
name: Jan
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1999
rating: 0
read at: 2017/04/13
date added: 2017/04/13
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]]> 4605 482 Jane Smiley 2743604913 Jan 4 3.47 1995
author: Jane Smiley
name: Jan
average rating: 3.47
book published: 1995
rating: 4
read at: 2017/01/13
date added: 2017/01/13
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]]> 43944 The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed.

By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born IrĂšne NĂ©mirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française—the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis—she'd begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read NĂ©mirovsky's literary masterpiece

The first part, "A Storm in June," opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, "Dolce," we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate, and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.]]> 431 IrĂšne NĂ©mirovsky 1400096278 Jan 5 3.82 2004
author: IrĂšne NĂ©mirovsky
name: Jan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2004
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/12/29
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]]> 4954833 Hauntingly beautiful and heartbreaking, Colm TĂłibĂ­n's sixth novel, Brooklyn, is set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a new life for herself.

Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When an Irish priest from Brooklyn offers to sponsor Eilis in America--to live and work in a Brooklyn neighborhood "just like Ireland"--she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her charismatic sister behind.

Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm. He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her future.]]> 262 Colm TĂłibĂ­n 1439138311 Jan 4 3.71 2009
author: Colm TĂłibĂ­n
name: Jan
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2009
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/12/29
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]]> 22501028 From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning author--now in the fiftieth year of her remarkable career--a brilliantly observed, joyful and wrenching, funny and true new novel that reveals, as only she can, the very nature of a family's life.
ÌęÌęÌęÌęÌę"It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon." This is the way Abby Whitshank always begins the story of how she fell in love with Red that day in July 1959. The whole family--their two daughters and two sons, their grandchildren, even their faithful old dog--is on the porch, listening contentedly as Abby tells the tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different too: Abby and Red are growing older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them, and the fate of the house so lovingly built by Red's father. Brimming with the luminous insight, humor, and compassion that are Anne Tyler's hallmarks, this capacious novel takes us across three generations of the Whitshanks, their shared stories and long-held secrets, all the unguarded and richly lived moments that combine to define who and what they are as a family.]]> 358 Anne Tyler 0385683421 Jan 4 3.39 2015
author: Anne Tyler
name: Jan
average rating: 3.39
book published: 2015
rating: 4
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]]> 52380 In America touches on themes of sex and revolution, the fate of nature, art and the collector's obsessions, and, above all, love.
]]> 432 Susan Sontag Jan 3 3.64 1992
author: Susan Sontag
name: Jan
average rating: 3.64
book published: 1992
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2016/12/11
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]]> 24728470 M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer's craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith's life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith.

Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.]]> 256 Patti Smith 1101875100 Jan 5 4.00 2015
author: Patti Smith
name: Jan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2016/11/27
date added: 2016/11/27
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]]> 2294328
War is coming to Europe. French and German intelligence operatives are locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn into a world of abduction, betrayal, and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.

Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amid an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters - Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence; the mysterious and sophisticated Dr. Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier's brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.]]> 266 Alan Furst 1400066026 Jan 3 3.87 2008
author: Alan Furst
name: Jan
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2016/11/26
date added: 2016/11/26
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]]> 2279
The life of Harry S. Truman is one of the greatest of American stories, filled with vivid characters—Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Wallace Truman, George Marshall, Joe McCarthy, and Dean Acheson—and dramatic events. In this riveting biography, acclaimed historian David McCullough not only captures the man—a more complex, informed, and determined man than ever before imagined—but also the turbulent times in which he rose, boldly, to meet unprecedented challenges. The last president to serve as a living link between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, Truman’s story spans the raw world of the Missouri frontier, World War I, the powerful Pendergast machine of Kansas City, the legendary Whistle-Stop Campaign of 1948, and the decisions to drop the atomic bomb, confront Stalin at Potsdam, send troops to Korea, and fire General MacArthur. Drawing on newly discovered archival material and extensive interviews with Truman’s own family, friends, and Washington colleagues, McCullough tells the deeply moving story of the seemingly ordinary “man from Missouriâ€� who was perhaps the most courageous president in our history.]]> 1120 David McCullough 0671869205 Jan 5 4.15 1992
author: David McCullough
name: Jan
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1992
rating: 5
read at: 2016/11/26
date added: 2016/11/26
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]]> 8722
Burr is a portrait of perhaps the most complex and misunderstood of the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. Burr retains much of his political influence if not the respect of all. And he is determined to tell his own story. As his amanuensis, he chooses Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, a young New York City journalist, and together they explore both Burr's past and the continuing political intrigues of the still young United States.]]> 430 Gore Vidal 0375708731 Jan 5 4.07 1973
author: Gore Vidal
name: Jan
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1973
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/01
date added: 2016/10/31
shelves:
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]]> 3388 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is set in the early days of the second world war, before Benito Mussolini invaded Greece. Dr Iannis practices medicine on the island of Cephalonia, accompanied by his daughter, Pelagia, to whom he imparts much of his healing art. Even when the Italians do invade, life isn’t so bad—at first anyway. The officer in command of the Italian garrison is the cultured Captain Antonio Corelli, who responds to a Nazi greeting of “Heil Hitlerâ€� with his own “Heil Pucciniâ€�, and whose most precious possession is his mandolin. It isn't long before Corelli and Pelagia are involved in a heated affair--despite her engagement to a young fisherman, Mandras, who has gone off to join Greek partisans. Love is complicated enough in wartime, even when the lovers are on the same side. And for Corelli and Pelagia, it becomes increasingly difficult to negotiate the minefield of allegiances, both personal and political, as all around them atrocities mount, former friends become enemies and the ugliness of war infects everyone it touches.

British author Louis de BerniĂšres is well known for his forays into magical realism in such novels as The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman. Here he keeps it to a minimum, though certainly the secondary characters with whom he populates his island—the drunken priest, the strongman, the fisherman who swims with dolphins—would be at home in any of his wildly imaginative Latin American fictions. Instead, de BerniĂšres seems interested in dissecting the nature of history as he tells his ever-darkening tale from many different perspectives. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin works on many levels, as a love story, a war story and a deconstruction of just what determines the facts that make it into the history books.]]> 437 Louis de BerniĂšres 067976397X Jan 4 3.97 1994
author: Louis de BerniĂšres
name: Jan
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2016/10/31
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]]> 233093 Have a ball with Dr. Seuss and the Cat in the Hat in this classic picture book...but don't forget to clean up your mess!

Then he said That is that.
And then he was gone
With a tip of his hat.

A dreary day turns into a wild romp when this beloved story introduces readers to the Cat in the Hat and his troublemaking friends, Thing 1 and Thing 2 � And don't forget Fish! A favorite among kids, parents and teachers, this story uses simple words and basic rhyme to encourage and delight beginning readers.

Originally created by Dr. Seuss himself, Beginner Books are fun, funny, and easy to read. These unjacketed hardcover early readers encourage children to read all on their own, using simple words and illustrations. Smaller than the classic large format Seuss picture books like The Lorax and Oh, The Places You'll Go!, these portable packages are perfect for practicing readers ages 3-7, and lucky parents too!]]> 61 Dr. Seuss 039480001X Jan 5 4.19 1957
author: Dr. Seuss
name: Jan
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1957
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/10/30
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]]> 4948
One sunny Sunday, the caterpillar was hatched out of a tiny egg. He was very hungry. On Monday, he ate through one apple; on Tuesday, he ate through three plums--and still he was hungry. When full at last, he made a cocoon around himself and went to sleep, to wake up a few weeks later wonderfully transformed into a butterfly!

The brilliantly innovative Eric Carle has dramatized the story of one of Nature's commonest yet loveliest marvels, the metamorphosis of the butterfly. This audiobook will delight as well as instruct the very youngest listener.]]> 26 Eric Carle 0241003008 Jan 5 4.33 1969
author: Eric Carle
name: Jan
average rating: 4.33
book published: 1969
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2016/10/30
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]]> 1226522 352 Myles Hildyard 0747581207 Jan 5 3.89 2005
author: Myles Hildyard
name: Jan
average rating: 3.89
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at: 2016/01/01
date added: 2016/10/30
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]]> 10927555
In the early twentieth century, a struggling Joseph Conrad wrote his great novel Nostromo, about a South American republic he named Costaguana. It was inspired by the geography and history of Colombia, where Conrad spent only a few days. But in Juan Gabriel VĂĄsquez's novel The Secret History of Costaguana, we uncover the hidden source- and one of the great literary thefts.

On the day of Joseph Conrad's death in 1924, the Colombian-born José Altamirano begins to write and cannot stop. Many years before, he confessed to Conrad his life's every delicious detail-from his country's heroic revolutions to his darkest solitary moments. Conrad stole them all. Now Conrad is dead, but the slate is by no means clear- Nostromo will live on and Altamirano must write himself back into existence. As the destinies of real empires collide with the murky realities of imagined ones, Våsquez takes us from a flourishing twentieth-century London to the lawless fury of a blooming Panama and back.

Tragic and despairing, comic and insightful, The Secret History of Costaguana is a masterpiece of historical invention. It will secure Juan Gabriel VĂĄsquez's place among the most original and exuberantly talented novelists working today.]]> 304 Juan Gabriel VĂĄsquez 1594488037 Jan 3 3.63 2007
author: Juan Gabriel VĂĄsquez
name: Jan
average rating: 3.63
book published: 2007
rating: 3
read at: 2016/10/21
date added: 2016/10/21
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]]> 15178899 Since his retirement from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn has occasionally been enticed to return to work by former colleagues who seek his help when they need to solve a particularly puzzling crime. They ask because Leaphorn, aided by officers Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito, always delivers.

But this time the problem is with an old case of Joe's--his "last case," unsolved, is one that continues to haunt him. And with Chee and Bernie just back from their honeymoon, Leaphorn is pretty much on his own.

The original case involved a priceless, one-of-a-kind Navajo rug supposedly destroyed in a fire. Suddenly, what looks like the same rug turns up in a magazine spread. And the man who brings the photo to Leaphorn's attention has gone missing. Leaphorn must pick up the threads of a crime he'd thought impossible to untangle. Not only has the passage of time obscured the details, but it also appears that there's a murderer still on the loose.

New York Times bestselling author Tony Hillerman is at the top of his form in this atmospheric and riveting novel set amid the rugged beauty of his beloved Southwest.]]> 220 Tony Hillerman 0313357021 Jan 0 4.41 2006
author: Tony Hillerman
name: Jan
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2006
rating: 0
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date added: 2016/10/13
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]]> 3591262
Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Yet it will be love, not politics—their passion for the same woman—that will tear them apart and force Marion, fresh out of medical school, to flee his homeland. He makes his way to America, finding refuge in his work as an intern at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him—nearly destroying him—Marion must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.

An unforgettable journey into one man’s remarkable life, and an epic story about the power, intimacy, and curious beauty of the work of healing others.
(front flap)]]> 560 Abraham Verghese 0375414495 Jan 5 4.32 2009
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Jan
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2009
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/09/11
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]]> 27574
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide when he was twelve years old. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and its community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation.
(back cover)]]> 560 Amos Oz 015603252X Jan 4 4.26 2002
author: Amos Oz
name: Jan
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/09/11
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]]> 1536168 754 Saraf Sujit 0340899700 Jan 5 3.56 2007
author: Saraf Sujit
name: Jan
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2007
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/09/11
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]]> 114447 A sweeping, colourful adventure from the acclaimed author of White Tears

Discover Hari Kunzru's smash-hit debut novel

This is the extraordinary story of a child conceived in a wild monsoon night, a boy destined to be an outsider, a man with many names and no name.

Born into luxury but disinherited and cast out onto the streets of Agra, Pran Nath must become a chameleon. Chasing his fortune, he will travel from the red light district of Bombay to the green lawns of England to the unmapped African wilderness. He will play many different roles -- a young prize in a brothel, the adopted son of Scottish missionaries, the impeccably educated young Englishman headed for Oxford -- in order to find the role that will finally fit.

Daring and riotously inventive, The Impressionist is an odyssey of self-discovery: a tale of the many lives one man can live, and of the universal search for true identity.]]> 482 Hari Kunzru 0141008288 Jan 4 3.64 2002
author: Hari Kunzru
name: Jan
average rating: 3.64
book published: 2002
rating: 4
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]]> 22919293
Intimate, funny and deeply moving, NOT FORGETTING THE WHALE is the story of a man on a journey to find a place he can call home.]]> 369 John Ironmonger 0297872036 Jan 5 4.03 2015
author: John Ironmonger
name: Jan
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2015
rating: 5
read at: 2016/01/01
date added: 2016/08/28
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]]> 891671
Into this uncertain world comes Harry Brett: a traumatized veteran of Dunkirk turned reluctant spy for the British Secret Service. Sent to gain the confidence of old school friend Sandy Forsyth, now a shady Madrid businessman, Harry finds himself involved in a dangerous game � and surrounded by memories.

Meanwhile Sandy's girlfriend, ex-Red Cross nurse Barbara Clare, is engaged in a secret mission of her own � to find her former lover Bernie Piper, a passionate Communist in the International Brigades, who vanished on the bloody battlefields of the Jarama.]]> 549 C.J. Sansom 0330411985 Jan 3 3.84 2006
author: C.J. Sansom
name: Jan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2016/01/01
date added: 2016/08/28
shelves:
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]]> 246 244 Henry Miller 0811201090 Jan 4 4.00 1941
author: Henry Miller
name: Jan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1941
rating: 4
read at: 2016/08/28
date added: 2016/08/28
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]]> 401224 229 Wright Morris 0803282672 Jan 3 3.69 1980
author: Wright Morris
name: Jan
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1980
rating: 3
read at: 2016/08/28
date added: 2016/08/28
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]]> 22253753
Trapped in a London apartment, Beth remembers a transgressive love affair in 1960s Paris. The most famous writer in Russia takes his last breath in a stationmaster's cottage, miles from Moscow. A young woman who is about to marry a rich aristocrat instead begins a torrid relationship with a construction worker. A father, finally free of his daughter's demands, embarks on a long swim from his Canadian lakeside retreat. A middle-aged woman cares for her injured mother at Christmas. And in the grandest house of all, Danni the Polish housekeeper catches the eye of an enigmatic visitor, Daphne du Maurier.

Rose Tremain awakens the senses in this magnificent and diverse collection of short stories. In her precise yet sensuous style, she lays bare the soul of her characters - the admirable, the embarrassing, the unfulfilled, the sexy, and the adorable - to uncover a dazzling range of human emotions and desires.]]> 240 Rose Tremain 039324671X Jan 2 3.55 2014
author: Rose Tremain
name: Jan
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2014
rating: 2
read at: 2016/08/24
date added: 2016/08/24
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]]> 91873 Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next.

Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse.

As always, Dorothy Allison is provocative, confrontational, and brutally honest. Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, steeped in the hard-won wisdom of experience, expresses the strength of her unique vision with beauty and eloquence.]]> 94 Dorothy Allison Jan 5 4.13 1995
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Jan
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1995
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/08/21
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]]> 68797
Ten years earlier, Delia left the husband who turned on her, abandoned her two daughters, one an infant, and fled to California. But Delia is pulled back to Georgia: to a world of convenience stores and biscuit factories, kudzu and deep-rooted Baptism-to make a deal with the man she paid a high price to leave. She brings her third daughter, Cissy, with her. And as the lives of Delia, Cissy, Amanda, and Dede converge, Delia's past uncoils into the present with a ferocity that brings all four women to terms with themselves and with one another.

Told in the incantatory and unforgettable voice of one of America's greatest storytellers, Cavedweller is a sweeping novel of the human spirit that maps a world of "lost" and "known" caves, the unexplored recesses of the heart, and the lives of four women at a place where violence, and what redeems it, intersect.

Cavedweller is the long-awaited, greatly anticipated second novel from a beloved author with a strong and loyal audience.]]> 434 Dorothy Allison 0452279690 Jan 5 3.74 1998
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Jan
average rating: 3.74
book published: 1998
rating: 5
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]]> 25354 320 Dorothy Allison 0452287057 Jan 5 4.14 1992
author: Dorothy Allison
name: Jan
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1992
rating: 5
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date added: 2016/08/21
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]]> 151928 280 Pat Barker Jan 4 4.03 1993
author: Pat Barker
name: Jan
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1993
rating: 4
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date added: 2016/08/21
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]]> 151926 Ìę
The Ghost Road is the culminating masterpiece of Pat Barker's towering World War I fiction trilogy. The time of the novel is the closing months of the most senselessly savage of modern conflicts. In France, millions of men engaged in brutal trench warfare are all "ghosts in the making." In England, psychologist William Rivers, with severe pangs of conscience, treats the mental casualties of the war to make them whole enough to fight again. One of these, Billy Prior, risen to the officer class from the working class, both courageous and sardonic, decides to return to France with his fellow officer, poet Wilfred Owen, to fight a war he no longer believes in. Meanwhile, Rivers, enfevered by influenza, returns in memory to his experience studying a South Pacific tribe whose ethos amounted to a culture of death. Across the gulf between his society and theirs, Rivers begins to form connections that cast new light on his--and our--understanding of war.

Combining poetic intensity with gritty realism, blending biting humor with tragic drama, moving toward a denouement as inevitable as it is devastating, The Ghost Road both encapsulates history and transcends it. It is a modern masterpiece
Ìę]]> 288 Pat Barker 0452276721 Jan 4 4.10 1995
author: Pat Barker
name: Jan
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1995
rating: 4
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]]> 5872 Regeneration, one in Pat Barker's series of novels confronting the psychological effects of World War I, focuses on treatment methods during the war and the story of a decorated English officer sent to a military hospital after publicly declaring he will no longer fight. Yet the novel is much more. Written in sparse prose that is shockingly clear—the descriptions of electronic treatments are particularly harrowing—it combines real-life characters and events with fictional ones in a work that examines the insanity of war like no other. Barker also weaves in issues of class and politics in this compactly powerful book. Other books in the series include The Eye in the Door and the Booker Award winner The Ghost Road.]]> 256 Pat Barker 0140236236 Jan 4 4.04 1991
author: Pat Barker
name: Jan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1991
rating: 4
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]]> 44171 288 John Le Carré 0743431707 Jan 4 3.72 1965
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1965
rating: 4
read at: 2016/06/11
date added: 2016/08/19
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]]> 25242224 The Guardian about the Neapolitan novels in 2014. Against the backdrop of a Naples that is as seductive as it is perilous and a world undergoing epochal change, Elena Ferrante tells the story of a lifelong friendship between two women with unmatched honesty and brilliance.

The Story of the Lost Child is the concluding volume in the dazzling saga of two women � the brilliant, bookish Elena, and the fiery, uncontainable Lila. Both are now adults, with husbands, lovers, aging parents, and children. Their friendship has been the gravitational center of their lives. Both women fought to escape the neighborhood in which they grew up � a prison of conformity, violence, and inviolable taboos. Elena married, moved to Florence, started a family, and published several well-received books. In this final novel she has returned to Naples, drawn back as if responding to the city's obscure magnetism. Lila, on the other hand, could never free herself from the city of her birth. She has become a successful entrepreneur, but her success draws her into closer proximity with the nepotism, chauvinism, and criminal violence that infect the neighborhood. Proximity to the world she has always rejected only brings her role as its unacknowledged leader into relief. For Lila is unstoppable, unmanageable, unforgettable.

The four volumes in this series constitute a long remarkable story that readers will return to again and again, and each return will bring with it new revelations.]]> 473 Elena Ferrante 1609452860 Jan 5 4.47 2014
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Jan
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2016/08/19
date added: 2016/08/19
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]]> 7552716
In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate - a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance - to his family's modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne's autograph album will change their and their families' lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried - until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

Rich with Hollinghurst's signature gifts - haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism - The Stranger's Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.]]> 564 Alan Hollinghurst 0330483242 Jan 3 3.35 2011
author: Alan Hollinghurst
name: Jan
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2016/07/12
date added: 2016/07/12
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]]> 1735330 New York Times bestseller (The New York Times Book Review) inspired an Emmy Award–winning series starring Olivia Colman and Tom Hiddleston! In the wake of the Cold War, British veteran Jonathan Pine collides with a powerful arms dealer â€� and will stop at nothing to bring down the dangerous criminal empire. Read by the author.]]> 597 John Le CarrĂ© 0340937688 Jan 5 3.82 1993
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1993
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/24
date added: 2016/06/24
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]]> 29068299

From the Trade Paperback edition.]]> 250 Christos Ikonomou 0914671367 Jan 5 3.84 2010
author: Christos Ikonomou
name: Jan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 5
read at: 2016/06/04
date added: 2016/06/04
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]]> 68210 Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations, from the Civil War to the 20th century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart. In the words of Kirkus, it is a novel "as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." GILEAD tells the story of America and will break your heart.]]> 247 Marilynne Robinson 031242440X Jan 4 3.84 2004
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Jan
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2004
rating: 4
read at: 2016/06/04
date added: 2016/06/04
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]]> 20575411
Lila, homeless and alone after years of roaming the countryside, steps inside a small-town Iowa church - the only available shelter from the rain - and ignites a romance and a debate that will reshape her life. She becomes the wife of a minister, John Ames, and begins a new existence while trying to make sense of the life that preceded her newfound security.

Neglected as a toddler, Lila was rescued by Doll, a canny young drifter, and brought up by her in a hardscrabble childhood. Together they crafted a life on the run, living hand to mouth with nothing but their sisterly bond and a ragged blade to protect them. Despite bouts of petty violence and moments of desperation, their shared life was laced with moments of joy and love. When Lila arrives in Gilead, she struggles to reconcile the life of her makeshift family and their days of hardship with the gentle Christian worldview of her husband which paradoxically judges those she loves.

Revisiting the beloved characters and setting of Robinson's Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead and Home, a National Book Award finalist, Lila is a moving expression of the mysteries of existence that is destined to become an American classic.]]> 261 Marilynne Robinson 0374187614 Jan 5 3.95 2014
author: Marilynne Robinson
name: Jan
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2016/02/11
date added: 2016/04/14
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]]> 17333319
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution.

Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only TĂłti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard.

Riveting and rich with lyricism, Burial Rites evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place, and asks the question, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?]]> 336 Hannah Kent 0316243914 Jan 3 4.00 2013
author: Hannah Kent
name: Jan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2016/04/14
date added: 2016/04/14
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]]> 17465515 My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker's James Wood described as "large, captivating, amiably peopled ... a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal," Ferrante proves herself to be one of Italy's most accomplished storytellers. She writes vividly about a specific neighborhood of Naples from the late-1950s through to the current day and about two remarkable young women who are very much the products of that place and time. Yet in doing so she has created a world in which readers will recognize themselves and has drawn a marvelously nuanced portrait of friendship.

In The Story of a New Name, Lila has recently married and made her entrée into the family business; Elena, meanwhile, continues her studies and her exploration of the world beyond the neighborhood that she so often finds stifling. Love, jealousy, family, freedom, commitment, and above all friendship: these are signs under which both women live out this phase in their stories. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila, and the pressure to excel is at times too much for Elena. Yet the two young women share a complex and evolving bond that is central to their emotional lives and is a source of strength in the face of life's challenges. In these Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante, the acclaimed author of The Days of Abandonment, gives readers a poignant and universal story about friendship and belonging.]]> 471 Elena Ferrante Jan 5 4.47 2012
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Jan
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2012
rating: 5
read at: 2015/10/31
date added: 2016/03/06
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]]> 138685 456 C.J. Sansom 0330411969 Jan 5 4.05 2003
author: C.J. Sansom
name: Jan
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2003
rating: 5
read at: 2016/01/09
date added: 2016/01/09
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]]> 16181775
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance. So when an acquaintance informs him that he would make a “wonderfulâ€� husband, his first reaction is shock. Yet he must concede to the statistical probability that there is someone for everyone, and he embarks upon The Wife Project. In the orderly, evidence-based manner with which he approaches all things, Don sets out to find the perfect partner. She will be punctual and logical—most definitely not a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker, or a late-arriver.

Yet Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is also beguiling, fiery, intelligent—and on a quest of her own. She is looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might be able to help her with. Don's Wife Project takes a back burner to the Father Project and an unlikely relationship blooms, forcing the scientifically minded geneticist to confront the spontaneous whirlwind that is Rosie—and the realization that love is not always what looks good on paper.

The Rosie Project is a moving and hilarious novel for anyone who has ever tenaciously gone after life or love in the face of overwhelming challenges.]]> 292 Graeme Simsion 1476729085 Jan 3 4.00 2013
author: Graeme Simsion
name: Jan
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 3
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date added: 2015/12/29
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]]> 23156040 418 Elena Ferrante Jan 4 4.38 2013
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Jan
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2015/12/29
date added: 2015/12/29
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]]> 622855
George Smiley was simply doing a favor for Miss Ailsa Brimley, and old friend and editor of a small newspaper. Miss Brimley had received a letter from a worried reader: "I'm not mad. And I know my husbad is trying to kill me." But the letter had arrived too late: its scribe, the wife of an assistant master at the distinguished Carne School, was already dead.

So George Smiley went to Carne to listen, ask questions, and think. And to uncover, layer by layer, the complex network of skeletons and hatreds that comprised that little English institution.]]> 146 John Le Carré 0743431685 Jan 4 3.57 1962
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1962
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/18
date added: 2015/10/18
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Smiley . . . what's not to like!
]]> 46460
George Smiley had liked Samuel Fennan, and now Fennan was dead from an apparent suicide. But why? Fennan, a Foreign Office man, had been under investigation for alleged Communist Party activities, but Smiley had made it clear that the investigation -- little more than a routine security check -- was over and that the file on Fennan could be closed. The very next day, Fennan was found dead with a note by his body saying his career was finished and he couldn't go on. Smiley was puzzled...]]> 144 John Le Carré 0743431677 Jan 4 3.78 1961
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1961
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/10/07
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]]> 13586707 331 Elena Ferrante Jan 4 3.91 2011
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Jan
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2015/10/07
date added: 2015/10/07
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]]> 18989 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy begins George Smiley's chess match of wills and wits with Karla, his Soviet counterpart.

It is now beyond a doubt that a mole, implanted decades ago by Moscow Centre, has burrowed his way into the highest echelons of British Intelligence. His treachery has already blown some of its most vital operations and its best networks. It is clear that the double agent is one of its own kind. But which one? George Smiley is assigned to identify him. And once identified, the traitor must be destroyed.]]> 379 John Le Carré 0743457900 Jan 5 4.04 1974
author: John Le Carré
name: Jan
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1974
rating: 5
read at: 2015/09/28
date added: 2015/09/28
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]]> 18773666
Kim Philby was the greatest spy in history, a brilliant and charming man who rose to head Britain’s counterintelligence against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War—while he was secretly working for the enemy. And nobody thought he knew Philby like Nicholas Elliott, Philby’s best friend and fellow officer in MI6. The two men had gone to the same schools, belonged to the same exclusive clubs, grown close through the crucible of wartime intelligence work and long nights of drink and revelry. It was madness for one to think the other might be a communist spy, bent on subverting Western values and the power of the free world.

But Philby was secretly betraying his friend. Every word Elliott breathed to Philby was transmitted back to Moscow—and not just Elliott’s words, for in America, Philby had made another powerful friend: James Jesus Angleton, the crafty, paranoid head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton's and Elliott’s unwitting disclosures helped Philby sink almost everyÌęimportant Anglo-American spy operation for twenty years, leading countless operatives to their doom. Even as the web of suspicion closed around him, and Philby was driven to greater lies to protect his cover, his two friends never abandoned him—until it was too late. The stunning truth of his betrayal would have devastating consequences on the two men who thought they knew him best, and on the intelligence services he left crippled in his wake.

Told with heart-pounding suspense and keen psychological insight, and based on personal papers and never-before-seen British intelligence files, A Spy Among Friends is Ben Macintyre’s best book yet, a high-water mark in Cold War history telling.]]> 368 Ben Macintyre 0804136637 Jan 4 4.14 2014
author: Ben Macintyre
name: Jan
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/09/14
date added: 2015/09/14
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]]> 15838544
Now, fifty years later, Laurel is a successful and well-regarded actress living in London. The family is gathering at Greenacres farm for Dorothy’s ninetieth birthday. Realizing that this may be her last chance, Laurel searches for answers to the questions that still haunt her from that long-ago day, answers that can only be found in Dorothy’s past.

Dorothy’s story takes the reader from pre-WWII England through the blitz, to the â€�60s and beyond. It is the secret history of three strangers from vastly different worlds - Dorothy, Vivien, and Jimmy - who meet by chance in wartime London and whose lives are forever entwined. The Secret Keeper explores longings and dreams and the unexpected consequences they sometimes bring. It is an unforgettable story of lovers and friends, deception and passion that is told - in Morton’s signature style - against a backdrop of events that changed the world.]]> 597 Kate Morton Jan 3 4.26 2012
author: Kate Morton
name: Jan
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2012
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/30
date added: 2015/08/30
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The story is presented by various voices which keeps the storyline moving. Surprise ending . . . sort of. Good beach read.
]]> 9477628 The epic story of Jerusalem told through the lives of the men and women who created, ruled and inhabited it.

Jerusalem is the universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths; it is the prize of empires, the site of Judgement Day and the battlefield of today’s clash of civilizations. From King David to Barack Obama, from the birth of Judaism, Christianity and Islam to the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is the epic history of 3,000 years of faith, slaughter, fanaticism and coexistence.

How did this small, remote town become the Holy City, the ‘centre of the worldâ€� and now the key to peace in the Middle East? In a gripping narrative, Simon Sebag Montefiore reveals this ever-changing city in its many incarnations, bringing every epoch and character blazingly to life. Jerusalem’s biography is told through the wars, love affairs and revelations of the men and women â€� kings, empresses, prophets, poets, saints, conquerors and whores â€� who created, destroyed, chronicled and believed in Jerusalem.

Drawing on new archives, current scholarship, his own family papers and a lifetime’s study, Montefiore illuminates the essence of sanctity and mysticism, identity and empire in a unique chronicle of the city that many believe will be the setting for the Apocalypse. This is how Jerusalem became Jerusalem, and the only city that exists twice â€� in heaven and on earth.]]> 752 Simon Sebag Montefiore 0297852655 Jan 5 4.07 2011
author: Simon Sebag Montefiore
name: Jan
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2011
rating: 5
read at: 2015/08/22
date added: 2015/08/24
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What a remarkable book! Wonderfully researched and presented, entertaining and illuminating at the same time.
]]> 3162006
Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women.

Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice.

Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there...

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.]]> 355 Chris Cleave 0340963409 Jan 3 3.69 2008
author: Chris Cleave
name: Jan
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/24
date added: 2015/08/24
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]]> 6948436
Nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it so we will just say this:

This is the story of two women.

Their lives collide one fateful day, and one of them has to make a terrible choice.

Two years later, they meet again - the story starts there...

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell your friends about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.]]> 271 Chris Cleave 1416589643 Jan 3 3.76 2008
author: Chris Cleave
name: Jan
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2015/08/17
date added: 2015/08/19
shelves:
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]]> 174685 Before Kelso can learn the location of the diary, Rapava disappears, and Kelso's search for the former bodyguard leads him to the man's daughter, a whore selling herself in the new Moscow of drugs, corruption, and the Russian mafia. With an unscrupulous American journalist hot on their heels, a major of the new KGB close behind, and the shadowy Mamantov following them all, the two follow a trail that leads from Moscow's seedy underbelly to the industrial city of Archangel, where Russia once built her fleets of submarines, to a remote camp on the edge of the Siberian nothingness, and finally to a shocking conclusion that bites like the wind blowing off the tundra. What Kelso sees as the coup of his career might turn out to be the catalyst for an actual coup in Russia. There is a legacy behind the diary, a legacy of evil and death, and Fluke Kelso is unwittingly about to unleash it on the world.

]]> 415 Robert Harris 0515127485 Jan 4 3.81 1998
author: Robert Harris
name: Jan
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1998
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/15
date added: 2015/08/15
shelves:
review:
gripping read; perfect beach book
]]> 6261277
Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn't bother him. But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.

His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is well, something quite different.

We all know a Liam. In fact, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. Which is why Anne Tyler's lovely novel resonates so deeply.]]> 277 Anne Tyler 0307272400 Jan 4 3.32 2009
author: Anne Tyler
name: Jan
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2009
rating: 4
read at: 2015/08/11
date added: 2015/08/11
shelves:
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]]> 156538
In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell skillfully fuses individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale creates one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.]]> 521 Elizabeth Gaskell 0140620192 Jan 5 4.14 1855
author: Elizabeth Gaskell
name: Jan
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1855
rating: 5
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date added: 2015/08/09
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]]> 7479
Faulks' heroine is Mary Van der Linden, a pretty, reserved Englishwoman whose husband, Charlie, is posted to the British embassy in Washington. One night at a cocktail party Mary meets Frank Renzo, a reporter who has covered stories from the fall of Dienbienphu to the Emmett Till murder trial in Mississippi. Slowly, reluctantly, they fall in love. Their ensuing affair, in all its desperate elation, plays out against a backdrop that ranges from the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to the smoke-filled rooms of the Kennedy campaign. A romance in the grand tradition that is also a neon-lit portrait of America at its apogee, On Green Dolphin Street is Sebastian Faulks at the peak of his powers.]]> 368 Sebastian Faulks 0375704566 Jan 4 3.59 2001
author: Sebastian Faulks
name: Jan
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2001
rating: 4
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date added: 2015/08/09
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]]> 7480 Birdsong, comes a haunting historical novel of passion, loss, and courage set in France between the two world wars. This Vintage Original edition marks its first appearance in the United States.

On a rainy night in the 1930s, Anne Louvet appears at the run-down Hotel du Lion d'Or in the village of Janvilliers.ÌęÌęShe is seeking a job and a new life, one far removed from the awful injustices of her past. As Anne embarks on a torrential love affair with a married veteran of the Great War, The Girl at the Lion d'Or fashions an unbreakable spell of narrative and atmosphere that evokes French masters from Flaubert to Renoir.ÌęÌęÌęÌę]]> 246 Sebastian Faulks 0375704531 Jan 4 3.60 1989
author: Sebastian Faulks
name: Jan
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2015/08/09
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