Books with category ✍️ Literary Fiction
Displaying 11 books

A Doll's House

2018

by Henrik Ibsen

A Doll's House (1879), is a masterpiece of theatrical craft which, for the first time portrayed the tragic hypocrisy of Victorian middle class marriage on the stage. The play ushered in a new social era and "exploded like a bomb into contemporary life".

The Student Edition contains these exclusive features:

  • A chronology of the playwright's life and work
  • An introduction giving the background of the play
  • Commentary on themes, characters. language and style
  • Notes on individual words and phrases in the text
  • Questions for further study
  • Bibliography for further reading.

Kentukis

Casi siempre comienza en los hogares. Ya se registran miles de casos en Vancouver, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Barcelona, Oaxaca, y se está propagando rápidamente a todos los rincones del mundo. Los kentukis no son mascotas, ni fantasmas, ni robots. Son ciudadanos reales, y el problema —se dice en las noticias y se comparte en las redes— es que una persona que vive en Berlín no debería poder pasearse libremente por el living de alguien que vive en Sídney; ni alguien que vive en Bangkok desayunar junto a tus hijos en tu departamento de Buenos Aires. En especial, cuando esas personas que dejamos entrar a casa son completamente anónimas.

Los personajes de esta novela encarnan el costado más real —y a la vez imprevisible— de la compleja relación que tenemos con la tecnología, renovando la noción del vouyerismo y exponiendo al lector a los límites del prejuicio, el cuidado de los otros, la intimidad, el deseo y las buenas intenciones. Kentukis es una novela deslumbrante, que potencia su sentido mucho más allá de la atracción que genera desde sus páginas.

Conversations with Friends

2018

by Sally Rooney

Conversations with Friends is a sharply intelligent novel about the complexities of friendship, love, and the unexpected connections that we forge in life.

Frances, the novel's twenty-one-year-old protagonist, is cool-headed and observant. A college student and aspiring writer in Dublin, she spends her nights performing spoken-word poetry with Bobbi, her charismatic best friend and former lover. When they catch the attention of Melissa, a well-known journalist, Frances finds herself drawn into a world of elegant homes, lively dinner parties, and holidays in Provence—alongside Melissa's handsome husband, Nick.

As Frances becomes unexpectedly closer to Nick, their flirtation evolves into a strange intimacy. Meanwhile, Frances grapples with her own vulnerabilities, her father's difficult nature, and her evolving relationship with Bobbi. She is forced to confront the desires of her body and the disorienting realities of her life, challenging her intellectual convictions and her way of living from moment to moment.

Written with a gem-like precision and deep insight, Conversations with Friends captures the exhilarating and sometimes painful experiences of youth, as well as the complex dynamics of female friendship. It is a testament to the power of Sally Rooney's storytelling—a narrative that is alive with humor, emotion, and the poignant realities of navigating adulthood.

The Great Believers

2018

by Rebecca Makkai

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

A Place for Us

A moving portrait of what it means to be an American family today, a novel of love, identity and belonging that eloquently examines what it means to be both American and Muslim.

An Indian-Muslim family is preparing for their eldest daughter's wedding. But as Hadia's marriage - one chosen of love, not tradition - gathers the family back together, there is only one thing on their minds- can Amar, the estranged younger brother of the bride, be trusted to behave himself after three years away? A Place for Us tells the story of one family and all family life- of coming to terms with the choices we make, of reconcingly past and present and of how the smallest decisions can lead to the deepest betrayals.

The Overstory

2018

by Richard Powers

The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us.

This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

Fresh Water for Flowers

Fresh Water for Flowers is a delightful, atmospheric, absorbing fairy tale full of poetry, generosity, and warmth. Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Random visitors, regulars, and, most notably, her colleagues—three gravediggers, three groundskeepers, and a priest—visit her as often as possible to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee that she offers them. Her daily life is lived to the rhythms of their hilarious and touching confidences.

Violette’s routine is disrupted one day by the arrival of a man—Julien Sole, local police chief—who insists on depositing the ashes of his recently departed mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger. It soon becomes clear that the grave Julien is looking for belongs to his mother’s one-time lover, and that his mother’s story of clandestine love is intertwined with Violette’s own secret past.

With Fresh Water for Flowers, Valérie Perrin has given readers a funny, moving, intimately told story of a woman who believes obstinately in happiness. Perrin has the rare talent of illuminating what is exceptional and poetic in what seems ordinary.

The Republic of False Truths

The Republic of False Truths offers an intense and gripping narrative that takes us into the heart of the Egyptian revolution. This globally-acclaimed novel provides an intimate look at the struggle for freedom in a country under the grip of a repressive regime.

In the bustling streets of Cairo in 2011, tensions mount as a revolution brews. Characters from all walks of life are drawn into the chaos: General Alwany, a high-ranking government official entrenched in the security apparatus, balances his piety and love for his family with his role in torturing state enemies; Asma, a young teacher, fights against the rampant corruption at her school; Ashraf, an unemployed actor, is swept into the heart of Tahrir Square through a fortuitous encounter; and Nourhan, a television personality, staunchly defends those in power.

Their lives intertwine as a new generation raises its voice, love crosses social divides, and the revolution gains momentum. Even as the old regime clings to power, individuals like General Alwany face pivotal moments when their own kin join the protests. Alaa Al Aswany crafts a deeply human portrait of the Egyptian Revolution, offering a compelling and passionate recount of his country's recent history.

An American Marriage

2018

by Tayari Jones

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined.

Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

The Immortalists

2018

by Chloe Benjamin

A deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.

It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children -- four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness -- sneak out to hear their fortunes. Their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy. Eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate. Bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality. The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. 

Casas vacías

2018

by Brenda Navarro

Casas vacías habla del dolor de las mujeres ante la desaparición de un hijo y de su propia vida. Es una novela que también cuestiona la maternidad y abre la posibilidad de un diálogo sobre cómo se enfrentan las maternidades no solicitadas y que son impuestas socialmente. La maternidad, que casi siempre asociamos con la felicidad, también puede ser una pesadilla: la de una mujer cuyo hijo desaparece en el parque donde estaba jugando, y la de aquella otra mujer que se lo lleva para criarlo como propio

Brenda Navarro ha conseguido un prodigio: caminar siempre, sin caerse nunca, sobre la delgada línea que separa –pero también une– el olvido y la memoria, la esperanza y la depresión, la vida privada y la vida pública, la pérdida y el encuentro, los cuerpos de las mujeres y el acto político. Casas vacías estremece de forma tan devastadora como ilumina: brillante y extrañamente esperanzadora.

Are you sure you want to delete this?