Книги, похожие на «Carol Shields, Duet»

Told with intimacy and ferocity and set in the passionate and crumbling Spanish Quarter of Naples, comes a poignant tale of first love – of a place, of a person – where languages and cultures collide while dreams soar and crash in spectacular ways. ‘Don’t forgive me, don’t answer, don’t be sad. Be happy, have babies, make mixed tapes, take pictures … it’s how I always love to think of you. And now and then, if you can and if you want to, remember me. ’ Several years after leaving Naples, Heddi receives an email from Pietro, her first love, admitting that he was wrong. Immediately, Heddi is transported back to her college days in that heartbreakingly beautiful city built on ruins and set against the cliffs of a sleeping volcano. Just the thought of the Spanish Quarter, the crumbling apartment she shared with friends and where she first met Pietro, still spark the pain of longing and a desire to belong. For Heddi’s tribe of university friends, Naples was the first taste of freedom and an escape from their familial obligations. But for Heddi it is the place where she searched for the roots she never had, while Pietro tried to escape his. For all of them Naples is a place that they’ll never forget: the setting of their unrestrained youth.

The second volume of Doris Lessing’s ‘Collected African Stories’, and a classic work from the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.‘As for these stories – when I write one, it is as if I open a gate into a landscape which is always there. Time has nothing to do with it. A certain kind of pulse starts beating, and I recognise it: it is time I wrote another story from that landscape, external and internal at the same time, which was once the Old Chief’s Country.’ Doris Lessing, from the PrefaceThis much-acclaimed collection of stories vividly evokes both the grandeur of Africa and the glare of its sun and the wide open space, as well as the great, irresolvable tensions between whites and blacks. Tales of poor white farmers and their lonely wives, of storm air thick with locusts, of ants and pomegranate trees, black servants and the year of hunger in a native village – all combine to present a powerful image of a continent which seems incorruptible in spite of all the people who plough, mine and plunder it to make their living. In Doris Lessing’s own words, ‘Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.’

A novel for those who loved Behind the Scenes at the Museum, The Poisonwood Bible and The Lovely Bones.Raped then murdered in Japanese occupied Hong Kong, 1942, Lin Shui’s ‘Hungry Ghost’ clings tenaciously to life. Holing up in a hospital morgue, destined to become a school, just in time she finds a host off whom to feed. It is 12-year-old Alice Safford, the deeply-troubled daughter of a leading figure in government. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak. There, the lethal mix of the two, embroiled in the family’s web of dark secrets and desperate lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest, riots, extremes of weather and the countdown to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly. She flees to England, then France, in a bid to escape the past, only to find her portable ‘Hungry Ghosts’ have accompanied her. It seems the peace she longs for is to prove far more elusive that she could ever have imagined.The Hungy Ghosts is a remarkable tour-de-force of the imagination, full of instantly memorable characters whose lives intermesh and boil over in a cauldron of domestic mayhem, unleashing unworldly spirits into the troubled air.