Kirjahaku

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, Barcelona Dreaming is made up of three stories that are linked by time and place, and also by the moving, unexpected interactions of a rich cast of characters.

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, Barcelona Dreaming is made up of three stories that are linked by time and place, and also by the moving, unexpected interactions of a rich cast of characters.The stories are narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love, all of whose lives will be changed forever. Underpinning the novel, and casting a long shadow, is a crime committed against a young Moroccan immigrant.Exploring themes of addiction, racism, celebrity, immigration, and self-delusion, and fuelled by a longing for the unattainable and a nostalgia for what is about to be lost, Barcelona Dreaming is a love letter to one of the world's most beautiful cities and a powerful and poignant fable for our uncertain times.

"Katherine Carlyle is a masterpiece." --Philip Pullman, best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy " T]his road trip through a snow dome of mesmeric hallucinations is Thomson at his best." --Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize Katherine Carlyle is Rupert Thomson's breakthrough novel. Written in the beautifully spare, lucid, and cinematic prose Thomson is known for, and powered by his natural gift for storytelling, it uses the modern techniques of IVF to throw new light on the myth of origins. It is a profound and moving novel about identity, the search for personal meaning, and how we are loved. Unmoored by her mother's death and feeling her father to be an increasingly distant figure, Katherine Carlyle abandons the set course of her life and starts out on a mysterious journey to the ends of the world. Instead of going to college, she disappears, telling no one where she has gone. What begins as an attempt to punish her father for his absence gradually becomes a testing ground of his love for her, a coming-to-terms with the death of her mother, and finally the mise-en-sc ne for a courageous leap to true empowerment.

In this timely and explosive novel, an academic's seemingly mundane midlife crisis takes an alarming turn after his visit to a Greek monastery. It's February 2019. Philip Notman, an acclaimed historian with a German wife and a troubled nineteen-year-old son, is on his way back from a conference in Norway when he has an unexpected and disturbing experience that completely alters his view of the life that he has been living and the world that surrounds him. Believing that In s, an attractive Spanish sociologist whom he met at the conference, can shed light on what he is feeling, he travels to C diz to see her. But his journey doesn't end there. Is he thinking of leaving his wife, whom he still loves, or is he trying to change a reality that he appears to find unbearable? Is he on a quest for a simpler and more authentic existence or is he utterly self-deluded? And if he is in denial about what he is doing, how far will he go to avoid facing the truth? In this highly original and unsettling novel, one of the UK's most celebrated writers portrays an ordinary man in an extraordinary dilemma, a dilemma that will push him to the very edge of annihilation and disaster.

In his first venture into non-fiction, the celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable memoirs of recent years. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers receive word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents' legacies, the three brothers move back into their father's house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. This Party's Got to Stop works Thomson's memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterize blood relationships.

Zummo - a 17th-century prodigy and creator of figures so realistic they look as though they might draw breath - has spent his life fleeing his past. Summoned to the Medici court by the Grand Duke, a man of holy devotions and hidden longings, Zummo finds himself in a city riddled with hypocrisy and contradictions, where adulterers are publicly flogged, while within the palace walls members of the court indulge their nefarious pleasures. Commissioned by the Grand Duke to sculpt a life-size Venus from wax, Zummo scours the streets for inspiration. But 1690s Florence is a place of unforseen dangers and secrets still more devastating than his own, and when a young woman's body is found on the banks of the Arno, Zummo suspects that the source of vice has its bed in the Medici court. As he proceeds with his creation, he begins to wonder whether this perfect woman will be his salvation or his downfall. Set in a Florence blighted by corruption and austerity, Secrecy is a tour de force of whispered pleasures and startling revelations. It is a scintillating, breathtaking read from a novelist at the height of his powers.

Billy Tyler en midaldrende engelsk politibetjent bliver sendt ud til kapellet på et sygehus i Suffolk. Han skal i de næste tolv timer - fra syv aften til syv morgen - holde vagt over liget af en berygtet barnemorderske. Overvåge og sørge for at der ikke sker noget som Billys overordnede udtrykker det. Som garvet betjent er Billys tilgang til opgaven naturligvis strengt professionel. Det er jo bare en opgave. Men efterhånden som natten skrider frem begynder den døde kvindes tilstedeværelse alligevel at krybe ind under huden på ham. Samtidig trænger Billys egne bekymringer sig på: Karrieren i politiet er for længst gået i stå ægteskabet knager og problemerne med en handicappet datter gør ikke tingene nemmere.En morders død er baseret på en virkelig historie der tager sin begyndelse i 1960´erne hvor en ung kvinde sammen med sin kæreste torterede og myrdede fem mindre børn. Parret blev idømt livstidsstraf. Kvinden døde i november 2002 efter et langt liv i fængsel. Aviserne var fulde af artikler om kvinden som blev omtalt som "en syg morder" - "et monster" - og hendes navn synonymt med ondskab.

A literary tour de force that traces the real-life love affair of two extraordinary women, recreating the surrealist movement in Paris and the horrors of the world wars with a singular incandescence and intimacy. In the years preceding World War I, two young women meet, by chance, in a provincial town in France. Suzanne Malherbe, a shy seventeen-year-old with a talent for drawing, is completely entranced by the brilliant but troubled Lucie Schwob, who comes from a family of wealthy Jewish intellectuals. They embark on a clandestine love affair, terrified they will be discovered, but then, in an astonishing twist of fate, the mother of one marries the father of the other. As "sisters" they are finally free of suspicion, and, hungry for a more stimulating milieu, they move to Paris at a moment when art, literature, and politics blend in an explosive cocktail. Having reinvented themselves as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, they move in the most glamorous social circles--meeting everyone from Hemingway to Dal --and produce provocative photographs that still seem avant-garde today. In the 1930s, with the rise of anti-Semitism and fascism, they leave Paris for Jersey, and it is on this idyllic island that they confront their destiny, creating a campaign of propaganda against Hitler's occupying forces that will put their lives in jeopardy. Brilliantly imagined, profoundly thought-provoking, and ultimately heartbreaking, Never Anyone But You infuses life into a forgotten history as only great literature can.

One night a boy who comes to be called Thomas Parry is taken from his family, caught up in a comprehensive unraveling of what had been a united kingdom. Reacting to their country's inexorable decline into consumerism, turpitude, racism, and violence, the powers that be establish four independent republics based on the perceived nature of the citizens assigned to each. These new partitions are reinforced with concrete barricades and razor wire. Renamed, relocated, and granted favored status, Thomas enjoys one success after another until, working as a devoted civil servant, he suddenly falls out of the system entirely.