Books Previews 1-2 Settembre
agosto 30, 2010 by Silbietta
Le nuove uscite di settembre si preannunciano ricche di avventura! Iniziamo con i romanzi presenti nelle librerie a partire dal 1 e 2 settembre.
Un titolo su tutti? Pirates of the Levant, di Arturo Perez-Reverte…per sentirsi ancora un pochino in vacanza!
THRILLERS
- Pirates of the Levant: Captain Alatriste, Book 6 by Arturo Perez-Reverte
384 pages Publisher: Putnam Books ISBN-13: 9780399156649
Book Description: This was a time when Spain was revered, feared, and hated in the easterly seas; when the devil had no color, no name, and no flag; and when the only thing needed to summon hell on earth (or sea) was a Spaniard and his sword.
Accompanied by his faithful foster son, Íñigo, Captain Alatriste accepts a job as a mercenary aboard a Spanish galleon. The ship sets sail from Naples on a journey that will take them to some of the most remote – and wretched – outposts of the empire: Morocco, Algeria, and finally to Malta for a stunning and bloody battle on the high seas that will challenge even the battle-hardened Alatriste’s resolve.
Now seventeen, Íñigo is almost ready to leave Alatriste, his foster father and fellow soldier. But will age and experience bring wisdom, or is he likely to repeat many of his mentor’s mistakes?
- I’d Know You Anywhere by Laura Lippman
384 pages Publisher: William Morrow ISBN-13: 9780061706554
Book Description: If Washington, D.C. housewife Eliza Benedict sometimes seems preoccupied, it’s easy to imagine why: As a teenager a quarter century ago, she was kidnapped by a serial rapist and murderer. That maniac is now sitting on death row and he is making one last macabre effort to reach out to her. Can she ignore it? And what will happen to her children if she does? Predator and prey; an intense mystery with which every parent can identify.
NOVELS
- Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett Thomas
384 pages Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt ISBN-13: 9780151013913
Book Description: Can a story save your life?
Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend’s only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting.
But who wants to live forever?
Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what’s the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever?
Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas’s trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.
- The Good Daughters by Joyce Maynard
288 pages Publisher: William Morrow ISBN-13: 9780061994319
Book Description: They were born on the same day, in the same hospital, into families that could hardly have been less alike. Ruth is an artist and a romantic, with a rich and passionate imaginative life. Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in what she can see or hear or touch. Yet these two very different women share the same struggle to make sense of their place in a world in which neither of them has ever truly felt she belonged. Told in the alternating voices of Ruth and Dana, “The Good Daughters” follows these birthday sisters as they make their way through the decades, from the 1950s to the present. Master storyteller Joyce Maynard chronicles the unlikely ways the two women’s lives intersect – from childhood and adolescence to first loves, first sex, marriage, and parenthood; from the deaths of parents to divorce, the loss of home, and the loss of a beloved partner – until an unavoidable moment when a long-held secret from the past alters everything…
- Vestments by John Reimringer
304 pages Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN-13: 9781571310804
Book Description: Let me begin today, illumined by Thy light, to destroy this part of the natural man which lives in me in its entirety, the obstacle that constantly keeps me from Thy Love. Taught this prayer as a boy by his grandfather, James Dressler recites it each time he’s tempted by earthly desires.
Originally drawn to the priesthood by the mystery, purity, and sensual fabric of the Church, as well as by its promise of a safe harbor from his tempestuous home, James finds himself – just a few years after his ordination – attracted again to his first love, Betty García. Torn between these opposing desires, and haunted by his familial heritage, James finds himself at a crossroads. Exploring age-old and yet urgently contemporary issues in the Catholic Church, and infused throughout by a rich sense of the history and vibrant texture of St. Paul, and infused throughout by a rich sense of the history and vibrant texture of St. Paul, this is an utterly honest and subtly lyrical novel.
- The Gendarme by Mark T. Mustian
304 pages Publisher: Putnam Books ISBN-13: 9780399156342
Book Description: What would you do if the love of your life, and all your memories, were lost – only to reappear, but with such shocking revelations that you wish you had never remembered…
Emmett Conn is an old man, near the end of his life. A World War I veteran, he’s been affected by memory loss since being injured during the war. To those around him, he’s simply a confused man, fading in and out of senility. But what they don’t know is that Emmett has been beset by memories, of events he and others have denied or purposely forgotten.
In Emmett’s dreams he’s a gendarme, escorting Armenians from Turkey. A young woman among them, Araxie, captivates and enthralls him. But then the trek ends, the war separates them. He is injured. Seven decades later, as his grasp on the boundaries between past and present begins to break down, Emmett sets out on a final journey, to find Araxie and beg her forgiveness.
Mark Mustian has written a remarkable novel about the power of memory – and the ability of people, individually and collectively, to forget. Depicting how love can transcend nationalities, politics, and religion, how racism creates divisions where none truly exist, and how the human spirit fights to survive even in the face of hopelessness, The Gendarme is a transcendent novel.
HISTORICAL FICTION
- Emily Hudson: A Novel by Melissa Jones
368 pages Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books ISBN-13: 9780670021802
Book Description: After the start of the Civil War, Emily Hudson – an orphan who lost her family to consumption and fever – finds herself the begrudged guest at the home of her relatives in Newport. Emily’s longing to be an artist is dismissed by her puritanical uncle, who wants nothing more than to rid himself of her through marriage. Her only friend is her aesthete cousin, William, an ailing young writer. When a promising engagement to the eligible Captain Lindsay is broken, William rescues Emily from an uncertain future by taking her to England. Lonely and desperate to escape her cousin-once her confidante, now her obsessively controlling patron-Emily sets out alone to meet her destiny in the eternal city of Rome.
Reminiscent of the novels of Edith Wharton, Emily Hudson is an exquisitely told tale about a heroine struggling to be true to herself, and also find love in a society where only marriage or an independent income guaranteed a woman the freedom to do as she pleased.
MYSTERIES
- An Impartial Witness: A Bess Crawford Mystery by Charles Todd
352 pages Publisher: William Morrow ISBN-13: 9780061791789
Book Description: World War I nurse Bess Crawford, introduced in A Duty to the Dead, returns in an exciting new mystery in which a murder draws her inexorably into the sights of a cunning killer …
It is the early summer of 1917. Bess Crawford has returned to England from the trenches of France with a convoy of severely wounded men. One of her patients is a young pilot who has been burned beyond recognition, and who clings to life and the photo of his wife that is pinned to his tunic.
While passing through a London train station, Bess notices a woman bidding an emotional farewell to an officer, her grief heart-wrenching. And then Bess realizes that she seems familiar. In fact, she’s the woman in the pilot’s photo, but the man she is seeing off is not her husband.
Back on duty in France, Bess discovers a newspaper with a drawing of the woman’s face on the front page. Accompanying the drawing is a plea from Scotland Yard seeking information from anyone who has seen her. For it appears that the woman was murdered on the very day Bess encountered her at the station.
Granted leave to speak with Scotland Yard, Bess becomes entangled in the case. Though an arrest is made, she must delve into the depths of her very soul to decide if the police will hang an innocent man or a vicious killer. Exposing the truth is dangerous—and will put her own life on the line.
TEEN’S BOOKS
- The White Horse Trick by Kate Thompson
416 pages Publisher: Greenwillow Books ISBN-13: 9780062004161
Book Description: The world is drowning.
Freak storms and devastating hurricanes sweep across the countryside. No one has enough food or firewood – electricity is an option only for the tyrannical Commander – and then the Commander begins stealing young children away. Pup’s little brother is one of the missing.
Determined to save his brother, Pup confronts the Commander and finds himself “volunteered” for a special force. One that will slip through the barriers of time into a land where the sun never sets … just as another boy from Kinvara did long ago. With the future of both realms at stake, the fairies and humans must take drastic measures to stop the destruction. But not everyone wants the human race to survive.
The thrilling conclusion to the story that began in the acclaimed The New Policeman.
(Fonte: Bookbrowse).
