Линда Грант0.0 When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community - and that assumes they even have a community. A policeman,a documentary film maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many. The filmmaker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives - or do they? An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate - or have they? The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.
Бенджамин Балинт0.0 When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction.
Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts— brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.
“Thoughtful and provocative.” — Ruth Franklin, Wall Street Journal
“A tale pitting two Goliaths against one octogenarian David, untangled in exacting, riveting detail. . . . A must- read.” — Rebecca Schuman, Slate
“A gifted cultural historian with a scholarly sensibility.” — Lev Mendes, New York Times Book Review
Айелет Гундар-Гошен3.5 Frustrated, lonely 17-year-old Nofar has spent an uneventful summer serving ice-cream to indifferent customers. She extends her break moping about her drab life, unwittingly irritating the bitter ex-reality TV star Avishai Milner who is waiting to be served. When Nofar corrects his language after he complains about his wait, he insults and humiliates her. Deeply offended, Nofar rushes out to the backyard, and Avishai-who is still waiting for his change-chases after her. "Leave me alone!" she cries with all of her accumulated rage and hurt. Her screams quickly draw a crowd to the scene, and to her surprise everyone is convinced that Avishai tried to sexually assault her.
Now, for the first time in her life, Nofar finds herself the centre of attention. She is lavished with support from the community and the media, who rally round her as the victim of a scandalous attempted assault. Nofar, giddy with newfound power and acceptance, finds that lies slip easily from her tongue, trapping her in a moral dilemma with devastating consequences.
Дани Шапиро4.5 Перед вами интимная, трогательная книга Дани Шапиро "Семья. О генеалогии, отцовстве и любви". Эти блестящие мемуары затрагивают сложнейшие этические проблемы, связанные с генеалогическими тестами и донорством спермы. Что еще важнее, это глубокое философское исследование идентичности. Что делает нас такими, какие мы есть? Память, семейная история, биология, опыт или то неуловимое, что называется душой? Что определяет нас? Весной 2016 года писательница Дани Шапиро сделала генеалогический тест. Результат ее шокировал: отец, которого Дани обожала всю жизнь, не был ее биологическим отцом. Культура, в которой она выросла, не была ее культурой в полном смысле. Для воспитанной в традициях ортодоксального иудаизма Дани новость имела эффект разорвавшейся бомбы. Узнать тайну своего происхождения, обрести идентичность, примириться с собой стало для писательницы делом жизни. Что еще важнее, это стало для нее духовным путешествием, пунктом назначения которого был ответ на вопрос, кто я есть и как мне жить. В этой книге Дани Шапиро эмоционально и честно рассказывает о семейной тайне, которую ее родители хранили более пятидесяти лет. Через призму глубоко личных переживаний автор говорит о вопросах медицинской этики, на которые у общества пока нет ответов.
Gary Shteyngart0.0 A riotously satirical road trip through modern America from the brilliant author of Super Sad True Love Story and Absurdistan
Barry Cohen, master of the universe, has just had a very public meltdown involving a dinner party, an insider trading investigation and a $30,000 bottle of Japanese whisky. So he flees New York City, leaving behind his beautiful young wife and son, but remembering to bring his six favourite designer watches. Zig-zagging south through Trump's America on a Greyhound Bus pilgrimmage he is singularly unprepared for, Barry heads to Texas - to find his old college girlfriend and, with her, a shot at a second chance...
Lake Success marries the trademark Shteyngart wit with an astonishing emotional resonance, capturing the vivid eccentricity and contradictions of America right now while speaking to the universal human experience of love, belonging, and the pursuit of happiness.
George Szirtes0.0 "A truly remarkable book about identity, image and memory. It is fiercely compelling" EDMUND DE WAAL, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes
A poet's memoir of his mother that flows backwards through time, and through a tumultuous period of European history - a tender and yet unsparing autobiographical journey.
In July 1975, George Szirtes' mother, Magda, died in an ambulance, on her way to hospital after attempting to take her own life. She was fifty-one years old. This memoir is an attempt to make sense of what came before, to re-construct who Magda Szirtes really was. The Photographer at Sixteen moves from her death, spooling backwards through her years as a mother, through sickness and exile in England, the family's flight from Hungary in 1956, her time in two concentration camps, her girlhood as an ambitious photographer and her vanished family in Transylvania.
The woman who emerges, fleetingly, fragmentarily - with her absolutism, her contradictions, her beauty - is utterly captivating. What were the terrors and obsessions that drove her? The Photographer at Sixteen reveals a life that is at Magda Szirtes from the depths of the end to the comparable safety of the photographer's studio where she first appears as a small child. It is a book born of curiosity, guilt and love.
Говард Джейкобсон3.8 At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything – including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs.
Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he’s whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing – especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since.
There’s very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what’s left. Told with Jacobson’s trademark wit and style, Live a Little is in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender – a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.
