Sotto la Città

Un giorno di un piovoso e freddo autunno islandese un uomo di settant'anni viene ritrovato cadavere nel suo appartamento, ucciso con un violento colpo alla testa. Accanto al corpo, un misterioso biglietto scritto a mano, all'apparenza incomprensibile. All'agente Erlendur e ai due colleghi che lo affiancano sembra un caso quasi banale, " il tipico omicidio islandese " . Ma non appena cominciano a scavare un po più a fondo, scoprono che l'uomo, tale Holberg, ha un passato torbido alle spalle: negli anni Sessanta venne denunciato per stupro, ma non ci fu mai un processo. La donna che lo accusava ebbe una figlia, che morì a quattro anni di tumore al cervello. Da qui in poi le indagini si fanno serrate: Erlendur decide di far riesumare il corpo della bambina per effettuare una nuova autopsia, alla ricerca di una prova che la legherebbe indissolubilmente a Holberg. E quest'intuizione lo porta alla scoperta di una città sconosciuta e segreta, una Reykjavik sommersa, un suo doppio sotterraneo chiamato Città dei barattoli: la sezione della facoltà di Medicina in cui una volta venivano conservati organi umani a scopi scientifici e didattici, una realtà inquietante che riflette l'ossessione di un Paese per le malattie e per l'autoconservazione. A questo punto gli eventi precipitano e l'epilogo è drammatico: la risoluzione del caso non placa il senso di disagio che rimane nel presagire un futuro dai toni cupi, denso di dubbi e interrogativi su un tema più che mai attuale come la ricerca sul genoma umano e le implicazioni etiche e morali insite in questa ricerca.
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It is , and Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock have been granted leave to go on pilgrimage. Together they travel across Europe to Santiago de Compostela. But danger is never far away, and when a beautiful girl is found murdered on a hillside, the friends are among the first on the scene.

Baldwin and Simon lend their investigative skills to the enquiry, headed by the local pesquisidore. But the unexpected appearance of a face from Baldwin’s past could threaten the investigation, as well as the future of Baldwin himself. . .

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In The Very Model of a Man, Jacobson takes on the Hebrew scriptures and rewrites religious history with his customary brand of ink-black humour. Adam and Eve have just been expelled from the Garden of Eden by a furious God, and their first-born son Cain reflects bitterly on the family’s miserable existence in a bleak, half-formed world in which one angry foot-stamp can send new, unnamed species scurrying from the wet clay. To make matters worse, his new brother Abel is claiming all his mother’s attention, and a jealous and petulant Old Testament deity will stop at nothing to create upheaval within the first family.

Shifting between Cain’s post-Eden days, when righteous fire is just as likely to descend from the heavens as rapacious angels, to his vagrant-like existence in the city of Babel following Abel’s murder, The Very Model of a Man swipes ruthlessly through biblical conventions. Questioning thousands of years of doctrine, the word of God and the very nature of Jewishness, it is above all a thrilling and touching tale from one of our greatest living storytellers.

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One of the loveliest riddles of Austrian literature is finally available in English translation: Gert Jonke’s 1982 novel, , is an expedition through a world in constant nervous motion, where reality is rapidly fraying — flags refuse to stick to their poles, lids sidle off of their pots, tram tracks shake their stops away like fleas, and books abandon libraries in droves. Our cicerone on this journey through the possible (and impossible) is an “acoustical decorator” by the name of Burgmüller — a poetical gentleman, the lover of three women, able to communicate with birds, and at least as philosophically minded as his author: “Everything has suddenly become so transparent that one can’t see through anything anymore.” This enormously comic — and equally melancholic — tale is perhaps Jonke’s masterwork.<

There is a certain number of breaths each of us has to take, and no amount of care or carelessness can alter that.

This is the story of two lives. Claire is a young single mother working in one of England’s last surviving shoe factories, her adult life formed by a teenage relationship. Is she ready to move on from memory and the routine of her days? Arun, an older man in a western Indian town, makes hand-sewn chappals at home. A recovered alcoholic, now a grandfather, he negotiates the newfound indignities of old age while returning in thought to the extramarital affair he had years earlier.

These lives are woven through with the ongoing discipline of work and the responsibility and tedium of family life. Lives laced with the joys of old friendship, the pleasure of sex, and the redemptive kindness of one’s own children. This is the story of the living.

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Set in a bitterly benighted, mine-polluted corner of Virginia, follows a group of people bound together by alcohol, small-time crime, and music. There's Leon, a hapless bass player who can embroil himself in trouble just by getting out of bed in the morning. And his would-be girlfriend, Jennifer, who's living with Arnett, the town's most dangerous thug-and hoping Leon will help poison him. And there's Arnett himself, a psychopath for the ages-albeit so charming and deranged, so strikingly authentic, that he arrests the reader's attention at first sight and holds it fast. His mirror image, a singer-songwriter named Jones, has his own moral issues, though at least he's to be a good man. The bright if battered soul who pulls us through this story is Jennifer, struggling heroically to survive the endemic hopelessness and violence that have surrounded her since birth. Relentless? Yes. But nothing remotely gratuitous: only the pain and misery that inspire so much of the music these people love more than life itself.

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UNA VITA SENZA VIZIO E’ COME UN LIBRO SENZA INIZIO UNICA REGOLA: NON INNAMORARSI. MAI. DOPO IO TI GUARDO E IO TI SENTO, IL CAPITOLO CONCLUSIVO DELLA TRILOGIA. Elena ha perso tutto. La sua vita, ora, è una discesa agli inferi che culmina quando una mattina, sotto casa, viene investita da un’auto. Si risveglia in ospedale, e Leonardo è lì. Ha deciso di curare con la passione il suo dolore. Ma il passato è un demone che Leonardo non è ancora riuscito a sconfiggere...

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During the violence and chaos of the Lebanese Civil War, a car pulls up to a roadblock on a narrow side street in Beirut. After a brief and confused exchange, several rounds of bullets are fired into the car, killing everyone inside except for a small boy of four or five. The boy is taken to the hospital, adopted by one of the assassins, and raised in a new family. “My father used to kidnap and kill people …” begins this haunting tale of a child who was raised by the murderer of his real family. The narrator of doesn’t shy away from the horrible truth of his murderous father — instead he confronts his troubled upbringing and seeks to understand the distortions and complexities of his memories, his war-torn country, and the quiet war that rages inside of him.<

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An ATF raid, a moonshot gone wrong, a busload of female cancer victims determined to live life to the fullest — these are the compelling terrains Adam Johnson explores in his electrifying debut collection. A lovesick teenage Cajun girl, a gay Canadian astrophysicist, a teenage sniper on the LAPD payroll, a post-apocalyptic bulletproof-vest salesman — each seeks connection and meaning in landscapes made uncertain by the voids that parents and lovers should fill. With imaginative grace and verbal acuity, Johnson is satirical without being cold, clever without being cloying, and heartbreaking without being sentimental. He shreds the veneer of our media-saturated, self-help society, revealing the lonely isolation that binds us all together.<

Geheimnisse und Intrigen im Palast über den Wolken — wo Menschen und Götter um Macht und Einfluss ringen.

Natürlich befolgt Yeine Darr den Befehl ihres Großvaters, sich unverzüglich aus der Provinz zu seinem Palast zu begeben. Schließlich ist er der Herrscher über die ganze Welt. Doch als er sie zu seiner dritten Erbin ernennt, befindet sie sich unvermutet inmitten tödlicher Palastintrigen. Ihre einzige Hoffnung auf Überleben ist ein Bündnis mit Nahadoth – dem zwar versklavten, aber immer noch ebenso mörderischen wie verführerischen Gott der Finsternis.

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Nel mondo antico, c'era un esercito più temuto degli altri. Un esercito in grado di conquistare il mondo. Ma la Storia è capace di ribaltare anche il destino più glorioso.

401 a.C. Artaserse, re di Persia, governa un impero che si estende dalle coste dell'Egeo all'India settentrionale. Il suo dominio è assoluto, e per cinquanta milioni di sudditi una sua parola può valere la vita o la morte. Un'ombra però si staglia all'orizzonte del suo regno apparentemente così saldo: il fratello Ciro il Giovane, che reclama il trono, in nome del loro defunto padre Dario II. C'è un solo esercito che può aiutare Ciro nell'impresa: diecimila figli di Sparta i cui padri morirono alle Termopili o nelle guerre del Peloponneso, che adesso prestano il loro prezioso servizio come mercenari. I diecimila sono agguerriti, e Ciro è un generale generoso e intelligente. Al suo seguito gli spartani lottano con coraggio, finché Ciro compie un errore fatale e, nel tentativo di ammazzare il fratello con le sue mani, muore. Per i diecimila greci è l'inizio di un calvario: soli nel cuore di un impero nemico, senza un comandante, dovranno trovare la via per il mare, e per la libertà. Un uomo solo sarà in grado di condurli a destinazione, un ateniese, un uomo che non si riteneva, fino a quel momento, neanche un soldato. Senofonte. Solo grazie a lui il mondo moderno conoscerà la straordinaria storia dei leggendari diecimila e del loro ritorno a casa. Uno dei momenti più epici dell'intera storia greca prende vita meravigliosamente tra le pagine di questo romanzo, tra ferocia, eroismo, crudeltà, violenza e nobiltà.
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An ugly duckling as a child, Jodie Bentley had two dreams in life — to be beautiful and rich. She's achieved the first, with a little help from a plastic surgeon, and now she's working hard on the second. Her philosophy on money is simple: you can either earn it or marry it. Marrying is easy, it's getting rid of the husband afterwards that's harder, that takes real skill. But hey, practice makes perfect...

Detective Superintendent Roy Grace is feeling the pressure from his superiors, his previous case is still giving him sleepless nights, there have been major developments with his missing wife Sandy, and an old adversary is back. But worse than all of this, he now believes a Black Widow is operating in his city. One with a venomous mind... and venomous skills. Soon Grace comes to the frightening realization that he may have underestimated just how dangerous this lady is.

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