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La novela trata sobre lo que podría ser el contacto con una cultura extraterrestre inteligente, sobre cómo se vería afectada la especie humana al conocer que no estamos solos en el universo, lo que sería un gran cambio en la historia de la humanidad. La protagonista, Eleanor Arrowayw, dirige el proyecto Argus del SETI, dedicado a captar emisiones de radio provenientes del espacio.
Un día, sus radiotelescopios captan una señal compuesta por una serie de números primos, lo que se considera evidencia de una inteligencia extraterrestre. La señal, además, contiene instrucciones para construir una compleja máquina. Una vez construida, cinco tripulantes, incluida la propia Ellie, son transportados a través de varios agujeros de gusano (ellos creen que es por medio de agujeros negros) a un punto en el centro de la Vía Láctea, específicamente en la constelación de Lyra y en Vega donde se reúnen con extraterrestres que adoptan la forma de un ser querido para cada uno de ellos.
Al volver a la Tierra, descubren que su viaje apenas ha durado veinte minutos de tiempo real, y que no quedan pruebas grabadas, por lo que son acusados de fraude y sometidos a frecuentes interrogatorios.
En una especie de epílogo, Ellie actuando según una sugerencia de los emisores de la señal, trabaja en un programa para encontrar patrones ocultos en los decimales del número pi. Finalmente encuentra oculto en la representacion en base 11 un patrón especial en el que los números dejan de variar de forma aleatoria y comienzan a aparecer unos y ceros en una secuencia. La única forma de ocultar semejante mensaje en pi es que el propio creador del universo lo hubiera hecho. Por lo que Ellie empieza una nueva búsqueda análoga al SETI en el aparente ruido de los números irracionales. Esta parte de la trama fue completamente omitida en el film realizado sobre la novela.
A gripping novel about one man's dogged pursuit of a serial killer against the opposition of Stalinist state security forces, Child 44 is at once suspenseful and provocative. Tom Rob Smith's remarkable debut thriller powerfully dramatizes the human cost of loyalty, integrity, and love in the face of totalitarian terror.
A decorated war hero driven by dedication to his country and faith in the superiority of Communist ideals, Leo Demidov has built a successful career in the Soviet security network, suppressing ideological crimes and threats against the state with unquestioning efficiency. When a fellow officer's son is killed, Leo is ordered to stop the family from spreading the notion that their child was murdered. For in the official version of Stalin's worker's paradise, such a senseless crime is impossible – an affront to the Revolution. But Leo knows better: a murderer is at large, cruelly targeting children, and the collective power of the Soviet government is denying his existence.
Leo's doubt sets in motion a chain of events that changes his understanding of everything he had previously believed. Smith's deftly crafted plot delivers twist after chilling twist, as it lays bare the deceit of the regime that enveloped an impoverished people in paranoia. In a shocking effort to test Leo's loyalty, his wife, Raisa, is accused of being a spy. Leo's refusal to denounce her costs him his rank, and the couple is banished from Moscow. Humiliated, renounced by his enemies, and deserted by everyone save Raisa, Leo realizes that his redemption rests on finding the vicious serial killer who is eviscerating innocent children and leaving them to die in the bleak Russian woods.
The narrative unfolds at a breathless pace, exposing the culture of fear that turns friends into foes and forces families to hide devastating secrets. As Leo and Raisa close in on the serial killer, desperately trying to stay a step ahead of the government's relentless operatives, the reader races with them through a web of intrigue to the novel's heart-stopping conclusion.
Na planetě Sarakš přistane průzkumné kosmické plavidlo ze Země. Jeho posádku tvoří jediný muž, mladík jménem Maxim Kammerer. Povoláním je progresor, tedy člověk, který zkoumá vývoj jednotlivých objevených civilizací a pokud je to možné, snaží se do tohoto vývoje citlivě zasáhnout tak, aby se ona civilizace vyhnula katastrofám, jakými museli ve svých dějinách projít Pozemšťané. Jeho loď je však okamžitě po přistání zničena a on se ocitá sám na světě, který je ovládán celoplanetárním šílenstvím. Bratři Strugačtí se zkrátka také v Obydleném ostrově zabývají svou oblíbenou myšlenkou oprávněnosti vývozu revoluce či třeba jen intelektuální zkušenosti. A tak je Maxim na konci románu překvapen, že jeho počínání na Sarakši ani zdaleka nebylo tak správné a v pořádku, jak si po celou dobu sám představoval.
Michael Berg tiene quince años. Un día, regresando a s casa del colegio, empieza a encontrarse mal y una mujer acude en su ayuda. La mujer se llama Hanna y tiene treinta y seis años. Unas semanas después, el muchacho, agradecido, le lleva a su casa un ramo de flores. Este será el principio de una relación erótica en la que, antes de amarse, ella siempre le pide a Michael que le lea en voz alta fragmentos de Schiller, Goethe, tolstoi, Dickens… El ritual se repite durante varios meses, hasta que un día Hanna desaparece sin dejar rastro.
Siete años después Michael, estudiante de Derecho, acude al juicio contra cinco mujeres acusadas de criminales de guerra nazis y de ser las responsables de la muerte de varias personas en el campo de concentración del que eran guardianas. Una de las acusadas era Hanna. Y Michael se debate entre los gratos recuerdos y la sed de justicia, trata de comprender que llevó a Hanna a cometer esas atrocidades, trata de descubrir a la mujer que amó.
Bernhard Schlink ha escrito una deslumbrante novela sobre el amor, el horror y la piedad, sobre las heridas abiertas de la historia, sobre una generación de alemanes perseguida por un pasado que no vivieron directamente, pero cuyas sombras se ciernen sobre ellos.
`Una historia inolvidable sobre el amor, el honor y la compasión` (Neal Ascherdson, The Bookseller)
`Nadie ni nada es inocente para el ánimo del narrador en los dédalos verbales del infierno` (Robert Saladrigas, La Vanguardia)
`Un relato sobrio y conmovedor acerca de la seducción y el peso de la culpa…Irreprochable maestría` (Marcos Giralt Torrente, El País)
“Arresting, philosophically elegant, morally complex… Mr. Schlink tells this story with marvelous directness and simplicity, his writing stripped bare of any of the standard gimmicks of dramatization.” – The New York Times
“The best novel I read this year… an unforgettable short tale about love, horror and mercy.”
– Neil Ascherson, Independent on Sunday Books of the Year
“Breathtaking… a novel that sucks you in with its power, so that once you start to read, you cannot put it down. Truly exciting.” – Focus Munich
“One of the most successful, one of the richest, one of the most overwhelming novels I have read for a very long time… entirely new and profoundly original.” – Jorge Semprun, Le Journal du Dimanche
“Superb.” – Le Monde
***
Originally published in Switzerland, and gracefully translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway, The Reader is a brief tale about sex, love, reading, and shame in postwar Germany. Michael Berg is 15 when he begins a long, obsessive affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. He never learns very much about her, and when she disappears one day, he expects never to see her again. But, to his horror, he does. Hanna is a defendant in a trial related to Germany 's Nazi past, and it soon becomes clear that she is guilty of an unspeakable crime. As Michael follows the trial, he struggles with an overwhelming question: What should his generation do with its knowledge of the Holocaust? "We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable… Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt? To what purpose?"
The Reader, which won the Boston Book Review's Fisk Fiction Prize, wrestles with many more demons in its few, remarkably lucid pages. What does it mean to love those people-parents, grandparents, even lovers-who committed the worst atrocities the world has ever known? And is any atonement possible through literature? Schlink's prose is clean and pared down, stripped of unnecessary imagery, dialogue, and excess in any form. What remains is an austerely beautiful narrative of the attempt to breach the gap between Germany 's pre- and postwar generations, between the guilty and the innocent, and between words and silence.
From 1096 to 1500, European Christians fought to recreate the Middle East, Muslim Spain, and the pagan Baltic in the image of their God. The Crusades are perhaps both the most familiar and most misunderstood phenomena of the medieval world, and here Christopher Tyerman seeks to recreate, from the ground up, the centuries of violence committed as an act of religious devotion.
The result is a stunning reinterpretation of the Crusades, revealed as both bloody political acts and a manifestation of a growing Christian communal identity. Tyerman uncovers a system of belief bound by aggression, paranoia, and wishful thinking, and a culture founded on war as an expression of worship, social discipline, and Christian charity.
This astonishing historical narrative is imbued with figures that have become legends--Saladin, Richard the Lionheart, Philip Augustus. But Tyerman also delves beyond these leaders to examine the thousands and thousands of Christian men--from Knights Templars to mercenaries to peasants--who, in the name of their Savior, abandoned their homes to conquer distant and alien lands, as well as the countless people who defended their soil and eventually turned these invaders back. With bold analysis, Tyerman explicates the contradictory mix of genuine piety, military ferocity, and plain greed that motivated generations of Crusaders. He also offers unique insight into the maturation of a militant Christianity that defined Europe's identity and that has forever influenced the cyclical antagonisms between the Christian and Muslim worlds.
Drawing on all of the most recent scholarship, and told with great verve and authority,is the definitive account of a fascinating and horrifying story that continues to haunt our contemporary world.
From Publishers Weekly
This is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old as the standard work. Tyerman (), lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University, demolishes our simplistic misconceptions about that series of ferocious campaigns in the Middle East, Muslim Spain and the pagan Baltic between 1096 and 1500. Abjuring sentimentality and avoiding clichés about a rapacious West and an innocent East, Tyerman focuses on the crusades' very human paradoxes: "the inspirational idealism; utopianism armed with myopia; the elaborate, sincere intolerance; the diversity and complexity of motive and performance." The reader marvels at the crusaders' inextinguishable devotion to Christ even while shuddering at their delight in massacring those who did not share that devotion. In the end, Tyerman says, what killed crusading was neither a lack of soldierly enthusiasm nor its failure to retain control of Jerusalem, but the loss of Church control over civil societies at home and secular authorities who felt that religion was not sufficient cause for war and that diplomacy was a more rational method of deciding international relations.is that very rare thing: a readable and vivid history written with the support of a formidable scholarly background, and it deserves to reach a wide audience. 16 color illus.
Review
Christopher Tyerman has crafted a superb book whose majestic architecture compares with Runciman's classic study of the Crusades…He is an entertaining as well as reliable guide to the bizarre centuries-long episode in which Western Christianity willfully ignored its Master's principles of love and forgiveness.
--Diarmaid MacCulloch, author of
This is a magisterial work. In , the Crusades are not just emblematic episodes in a troubled history of Europe's encounter with Islam. Tyerman shows that they are, with all their contradictions—tragedy and tomfoolery, idealism and cynicism, piety and savagery—fundamentally and inescapably human.
--Paul M. Cobb, Associate Professor of Islamic History, Fellow of the Medieval Institute, University of Notre Dame
Tyerman's wonderful book is contemporary medieval history-writing at the top of its game. It is also the finest history of the Crusades that anyone has ever written, fully informed by its predecessors and by the excellent scholarship of the past half century. Trenchantly written on the grand scale and full of vivid detail, clear argument, and sharp judgment,shows how the entire apparatus of crusade became tightly woven into European institutional and social life and consciousness, offering a highly original perspective on all of early European history and on European relations with non-Europeans. It shows no patience with ignorant mythologizing, modern condescension, or cultural instrumentalism.. In short, it constitutes a crusade history for the twenty-first century—and just in time.
--Edward M. Peters, Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
At a time when interest in the Middle East and the Crusades has reached a new height, Christopher Tyerman has made a significant contribution to the ever-growing shelves of books devoted to this subject. Tyerman's well-written book focuses heavily on the development of ideas about holy war from antiquity onward and on the crusade to the East from the eleventh to the sixteenth century. It is based on a careful reading of both primary and secondary sources and will prove an important resource for a broad audience of scholars, students, and general readers. The comparison with Runciman's history leaps out from the pages of this large volume and the temptation to address it will no doubt seduce others, but this volume is Tyerman through and through.
--James M. Powell, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, Syracuse University
This is likely to replace Steven Runciman's 50-year-old as the standard work. Tyerman, lecturer in medieval history at Oxford University, demolishes our simplistic misconceptions about that series of ferocious campaigns in the Middle East, Muslim Spain and the pagan Baltic between 1096 and 1500...is that very rare thing: a readable and vivid history written with the support of a formidable scholarly background, and it deserves to reach a wide audience.
Challenging traditional conceptions of the Crusades, e.g., the failure to retain Jerusalem, Tyerman believes that it was the weakening of papal power and the rise of secular governments in Europe that finally doomed the crusading impulse. This is a marvelously conceived, written, and supported book.
Un grupo industrial farmacéutico ha encargado al detective privado Gerhard Selb, de 68 años, que busque a un pirata informático que pone en jaque el sistema informático de la empresa que dirige su cuñado. A lo largo de la resolución del caso deberá enfrentarse a su propio pasado como joven y resuelto fiscal nazi, y encontrar una solución particular para esclarecer dos asesinatos cuya herramienta ingenua había sido.
Gerhard Self, the dour, seventy-something sleuth, is back in a new chapter in the wonderful series of mysteries by the bestselling author of The Reader.
When Gerhard Self happens upon one of the most intriguing cases of his career, he can't resist. From the start, the job is an unusual one: Herr Welker, partial owner of the German bank Weller and Welker desperately wants to write a history of his bank, but he has one problem – a silent partner, whose name does not appear anywhere in the bank's records. Welker wants Self to track this silent partner down. Shortly after he takes the job, Self is accosted by a man who frantically hands him a suitcase full of money and speeds off in a car, only to crash into a tree, dying instantly. Perplexed, but more determined than ever, Self follows the money. Soon he finds himself traveling to eastern Germany – shortly after the fall of communism – battling Nazi youth, and closing in on a money laundering ring with connections to the Russian mafia.
Der amerikanische Privatdetektiv John Gowers ist schon viel herumgekommen, als ihn eine Mörderjagd 1867 bis ans Ende der Welt führt – von Australien bis ins abenteuerliche Neuseeland. Dort gerät er in die blutigen Wirren der letzten Maorikriege, ausgetragen zwischen den neuseeländischen Ureinwohnern und den europäischen Siedlern. Doch weder der deutsche Söldnerführer von Tempsky noch seine Kontrahenten Titokowaru und Te Kooti Arikirangi können den »Investigator« von der unerbittlichen Verfolgung seines Ziels abbringen.
Ein Gefangenenaufstand, den der Amerikaner unterstützt, erinnert ihn an ein düsteres Kapitel der Vergangenheit, und er führt in eine zehn Jahre vergangene, noch dunklere Zeit – in der John Gowers als junger Mississippilotse nicht nur die Liebe, sondern auch den Tod kennenlernte …
Daniel Twardowski alias Christoph Becker, geboren 1962, studierte Literatur-und Medienwissenschaften. Nach diversen Tätigkeiten, unter anderem als Universitätsdozent und Aktfotograf, lebt der Autor heute als freier Schriftsteller in Marburg. 2003 erhielt er den Förderpreis zum Literaturpreis Ruhrgebiet, 2005 das DaimlerChrysler-Stipendium der Casa di Goethe in Rom, 2006 den Oberhausener Literaturpreis und 2007 den Deutschen Kurzkrimipreis für »Nachtzug«.
The tenth installment of this universally beloved and best-selling series finds Precious Ramotswe in personal need of her own formidable detection talents.
Mma Ramotswe's ever-ready tiny white van has recently developed a rather disturbing noise. Of course, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni-her estimable husband and one of Botswana 's most talented mechanics-'"is the man to turn to for help. But Precious suspects he might simply condemn the van and replace it with something more modern. And as usual, her suspicions are well-founded: without telling her, he sells the van and saddles his wife with a new, characterless vehicle… a situation that must be remedied. And so she sets out to find the van, unaware, for the moment, that it has already been stolen from the man who bought it, making recovery a more complicated process than she had expected.
In the meantime, all is not going smoothly for Mma Makutsi in her engagement to Mr Phuti Radiphuti (to make matters worse, Violet Sephotho, who could not have gotten more than fifty percent on her typing final at the Botswana Secretarial School, is involved). And finally, the proprietor of a local football team has enlisted the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency to help explain its dreadful losing streak: surely someone must be fixing the games, it can't just be a case of unskilled players.
And as we know, there are few mysteries that can't be solved and fewer problems that can't be fixed when Precious Ramotswe puts her mind to it.
New York, 1865. Privatdetektiv John Gowers hat Caroline, die verschwundene Tochter seines Auftraggebers Senator Gordon F. Blandon, ausfindig gemacht: allerdings als Prostituierte. Als Gowers sein Honorar bei Senator Blandon einfordert, weigert sich dieser, dem Detektiv zu glauben – und ihn zu bezahlen. Daraufhin verkauft Gowers sein Beweisfoto einer großen Zeitung und hat in Blandon nun einen mächtigen Feind. Gowers ist klar, dass er die Stadt besser verlassen sollte.
Da kommt ihm der Auftrag der jungen Britin Emmeline Thompson gerade recht. Ihr Vater Samuel hat sich angeblich während einer Passage auf dem britischen Segelschiff erhängt: Er befand sich auf dem Weg zu seinem neuen Posten als Gouverneur von St. Helena, als er eines Morgens am Mast des Schiffes baumelte. Emmeline glaubt jedoch nicht an einen Selbstmord. Gowers nutzt die gute Gelegenheit, New York zu verlassen, und nimmt den Auftrag gerne an. Als Emmelines Bruder Daniel getarnt, schifft er sich auf der mit nach St. Helena ein. Gowers hat kaum mit seinen Nachforschungen begonnen, da geschehen zwei weitere brutale Morde …
Daniel Twardowski, geboren 1962, studierte Literatur-und Medienwissenschaft und lebt als freier Schriftsteller in Marburg. 2003 erhielt er den Förderpreis zum Literaturpreis Ruhrgebiet, 2005 das DaimlerChrysler-Stipendium der Casa di Goethe in Rom, 2006 den Oberhausener Literaturpreis und 2007 den Deutschen Kurzkrimipreis für »Nachtzug«. Daniel Twardowski wird durch die vertreten.
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