At a word from critic Ridley Groendal, plays closed overnight. Concert halls went silent. Books gathered dust on bookstore shelves. Thus, many sought revenge. But four were close enough to exact it. The playwright. The violinist. The author. The actress. All with a dark, longtime link to the victim. And to Father Koesler, who'd known Groendal since their school days. Who pulled the curtain down on Ridley? All Father Koesler has to go on are four incriminating letters -- and one burning question.<

All is not well at Detroit's St. Vincent's Hospital. The beds are used for more than convalescence. A nasty case of malpractice surfaces. An operating room is spectacularly blown up. Worst of all, Sister Eileen, the iron-willed nun who almost single-handedly keeps the inner-city hospital open, becomes the object of some violently unhealthy attention. Can Father Koesler make the correct diagnosis before the killer writes another murderous prescription?<

A cardinal is brutally murdered in his own church. Another is slain in the Vatican. A clue - the black imprint of a clenched fist - is left at the scene of each crime. Who's behind these sinister attacks? And is the ultimate target the Holy Office of the Pope himself?

On a detective's trail from Detroit to Dublin to Rome. Father Koesler, the sleuthing priest, plunges back into his own haunted past - and becomes an unholy candidate for assassination.

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Debiut powieściopisarski prozaika i poety, autora Powrotu do Breitenheide, opowiada o klęsce pokolenia, które schodzi ze sceny życia w obliczu nowego świata. Akcja tej pierwszej polskiej powieści o Erze Wodnika rozgrywa się w latach czterdziestych XXI wieku. U Kowalewskiego nie ma jednak futurystycznych wizji. Podobnie jak w swoich opowiadaniach, autor pozostaje pesymistycznym realistą. Bohater Bóg zapłacz! jest najzwyklejszym starym człowiekiem. Nieuleczalnie chory, trafia do szpitala, by zostać uśmierconym wedle przyjętej procedury. Bohaterowie Kowalewskiego z pasją rozprawiają o życiu. Dialogi są pełne egzystencjalnych sentencji i międzypokoleniowych sporów, a sceneria z przełomu lat 60. i 70. nabiera rangi symbolu minionego świata.

Książka otrzymała nagrodę Poznańskiego Przeglądu Nowości Wydawniczych i była nominowana do Nagrody Literackiej NIKE 2000. Wkrótce ukaże się węgierski przekład powieści.

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Gnój jest historią rodzinnego piekła, opowiadaną przez dziecko, które ma już to wszystko za sobą, potrafi zdobyć się na dystans, ale z jakichś przyczyn dzieckiem być nie przestaje.

Narrator opisuje rodzinny rytuał przemocy; metodyczne, przypominające tresurę bicie. Analizuje źródło rodzinnych tragedii; sytuację, w której metodyka nahaja spotyka się z konsekwentnym buntem.

Jest Gnój zarazem widzianą oczami dziecka barwną panoramą współczesnego Śląska, próbą zatrzymania jego niepowtarzalnego kolorytu, ukazania, na przykładzie tradycyjnej śląskiej rodziny, konfrontacji Śląska robotniczego, chacharskiego z tym inteligenckim, arystokratycznym

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Senność, nowa powieść Wojciecha Kuczoka to książka filmowa. Jej pierwszym szkicem był scenariusz pod tym samym tytułem, napisany na zamówienie reżyserki Magdaleny Piekorz. Adam jest młodym lekarzem naznaczonym piętnem tradycyjnego, prowincjonalnego wychowania. Rodzice lokują w nim wszystkie ambicje, jednak on, skrywający swój homoseksualizm i dręczony poczuciem winy, wie, że nigdy ich nie zadowoli. Robert to rozgoryczony autor jednej wybitnej książki. Pozostając pod dozorem żony i jej koszmarnej rodziny, od lat nie napisał ani słowa. Jego pracownia coraz bardziej staje się dla niego więzieniem. Róża była niegdyś wspaniałą i sławną aktorką teatralną, ale odkąd została żoną despotycznego karierowicza a aPana mężaa, cierpi na narkolepsję i całe dnie spędza w domowej samotni. zbieg okoliczności sprawia, że drogi bohaterów Senności, udręczonych własna niemocą, przecinają się. Czy te spotkania zmienią coś w ich życiua Czy uda im się przebudzić z długiego snua Przejmująca i brawurowo napisana powieść.Wojciech Kuczok obdarzony jest słuchem absolutnym do polszczyzny. Jego niezwykła inwencja językowa ma soczystość śląskiej gwary i swing wielkiej polskiej literatury. Czytanie Senności niesie radość obcowania ze słowem pisanym.

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Título original "Acts of Love" traducción de Montserrat Solanas<

"To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history…"

Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known-and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself-to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive.

What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed-and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign-and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

Parsing obscure signs and hidden texts, reading codes worked into the fabric of medieval monastic traditions-and evading the unknown adversaries who will go to any lengths to conceal and protect Vlad's ancient powers-one woman comes ever closer to the secret of her own past and a confrontation with the very definition of evil. Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel is an adventure of monumental proportions, a relentless tale that blends fact and fantasy, history and the present, with an assurance that is almost unbearably suspenseful-and utterly unforgettable.

Amazon.com Review

If your pulse flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian. The story opens in Amsterdam in 1972, when a teenage girl discovers a medieval book and a cache of yellowed letters in her diplomat father's library. The pages of the book are empty except for a woodcut of a dragon. The letters are addressed to: "My dear and unfortunate successor." When the girl confronts her father, he reluctantly confesses an unsettling story: his involvement, twenty years earlier, in a search for his graduate school mentor, who disappeared from his office only moments after confiding to Paul his certainty that Dracula-Vlad the Impaler, an inventively cruel ruler of Wallachia in the mid-15th century-was still alive. The story turns out to concern our narrator directly because Paul's collaborator in the search was a fellow student named Helen Rossi (the unacknowledged daughter of his mentor) and our narrator's long-dead mother, about whom she knows almost nothing. And then her father, leaving just a note, disappears also.

As well as numerous settings, both in and out of the East Bloc, Kostova has three basic story lines to keep straight-one from 1930, when Professor Bartolomew Rossi begins his dangerous research into Dracula, one from 1950, when Professor Rossi's student Paul takes up the scent, and the main narrative from 1972. The criss-crossing story lines mirror the political advances, retreats, triumphs, and losses that shaped Dracula's beleaguered homeland-sometimes with the Byzantines on top, sometimes the Ottomans, sometimes the rag-tag local tribes, or the Orthodox church, and sometimes a fresh conqueror like the Soviet Union.

Although the book is appropriately suspenseful and a delight to read-even the minor characters are distinctive and vividly seen-its most powerful moments are those that describe real horrors. Our narrator recalls that after reading descriptions of Vlad burning young boys or impaling "a large family," she tried to forget the words: "For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth." The reader, although given a satisfying ending, gets a strong enough dose of European history to temper the usual comforts of the closing words.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Considering the recent rush of door-stopping historical novels, first-timer Kostova is getting a big launch-fortunately, a lot here lives up to the hype. In 1972, a 16-year-old American living in Amsterdam finds a mysterious book in her diplomat father's library. The book is ancient, blank except for a sinister woodcut of a dragon and the word "Drakulya," but it's the letters tucked inside, dated 1930 and addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," that really pique her curiosity. Her widowed father, Paul, reluctantly provides pieces of a chilling story; it seems this ominous little book has a way of forcing itself on its owners, with terrifying results. Paul's former adviser at Oxford, Professor Rossi, became obsessed with researching Dracula and was convinced that he remained alive. When Rossi disappeared, Paul continued his quest with the help of another scholar, Helen, who had her own reasons for seeking the truth. As Paul relates these stories to his daughter, she secretly begins her own research. Kostova builds suspense by revealing the threads of her story as the narrator discovers them: what she's told, what she reads in old letters and, of course, what she discovers directly when the legendary threat of Dracula looms. Along with all the fascinating historical information, there's also a mounting casualty count, and the big showdown amps up the drama by pulling at the heartstrings at the same time it revels in the gruesome. Exotic locales, tantalizing history, a family legacy and a love of the bloodthirsty: it's hard to imagine that readers won't be bitten, too.

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When the started sinking, who would make it off alive? The two cousins who had been so eager to see their first iceberg? The maid who desperately tried to escape with the baby in her care? The young newlyweds who’d booked passage despite warnings not to?

One hundred years after that disastrous and emblematic voyage, Elizabeth Kaye reveals the extraordinary, little-known story behind one of the first lifeboats to leave the doomed ship.

Told in real time and in the actual voices of survivors, Kaye’s poignant, pulse-pounding narrative includes the story of the Countess of Rothes, the wealthiest woman on the ship, bound for California, where she and her husband planned to start an orange farm. It was the Countess, dressed in ermine and pearls, who took command of Lifeboat No. 8, rowing for hours through the black and icy water. In the words of one of the ’s crew, she was “more of a man than any we have on board.”

At the heart of Kaye’s tale is a budding romance between the Countess’s maid, Roberta Maioni, and the ’s valiant wireless operator, Jack Phillips. While Roberta made it safely onto Lifeboat No. 8, holding nothing but a photo of Jack she had run back to her cabin to retrieve, he remained on the ship, where he would send out the world’s first SOS signal. But would it be received in time to save his life?

Surviving that fateful night in the North Atlantic was not the end of the saga for those aboard Lifeboat No 8. Kaye reveals what happened to each passenger and crew member and how the legendary maritime disaster haunted them forever.

A century later, we’re still captivated by the and its passengers. With its skillful use of survivors’ letters, diaries, and testimonies, “Lifeboat No. 8” adds a dramatic new chapter to the ongoing story.

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