Jeanne, fille de Simon-Jacques et d'Adélaïde des Vauds, est une aristocrate qui, à ses dix-sept ans, quitte le couvent. Elle s'en va donc de chez elle ; ses parents lui lèguent un château pour y vivre. Elle rencontre Julien de Lamare quelques jours après sa sortie du couvent. Ce dernier trompe Jeanne avec sa domestique, qui tombe enceinte, puis avec une voisine qui se disait amie de Jeanne.

Elle accouche prématurément de son premier enfant, Paul, qui connaît des problèmes de santé. Paul part suivre des études au collège du Havre. Jeanne se retrouve ainsi seule après la mort du baron, de la baronne et de sa tante. Alors qu'elle est rongée par la tristesse et qu'elle tombe dans une dépression que la solitude n'adoucit pas, Jeanne retrouve par hasard Rosalie, son ancienne domestique.

À cause des dépenses abusives de son fils qui ne cesse de s'endetter, Jeanne se trouve en difficultés financières. Elle vend alors le château, qui pourtant lui tient énormément à cœur, et emménage ailleurs avec Rosalie.

Los santos inocentes es un relato a un tiempo realista, poético y trágico que contiene algunas de las mejores páginas del gran novelista de Valladolid. La historia de unos seres humillados, sometidos al capricho de un amo que se cree propietario de sus vidas.

Una magnífica novela que inspiró una de las mejores películas del cine español.

Longue confession, Le Lys dans la vallée dépeint l’amour passionné et quasi incestueux d’un jeune homme au sortir de l’adolescence, Félix de Vandenesse, pour une femme mûre, Madame de Mortsauf. À travers elle, Balzac dresse le portrait d’une aristocratie décadente : héritiers de la maladie suspecte de leur père, ses enfants sont condamnés à une vie fébrile, tandis qu’elle leur sacrifie son bonheur.

Félix n’a jamais connu ni l’amour maternel ni celui des femmes : attiré par l’entrave qui pèse sur le corps et la vie de cette mère, il s’ouvre à un érotisme étrange et morbide. Félix et Henriette, ces deux êtres qui souffrent, s’unissent pour opposer à la violence du monde le refuge d’un amour impossible.

Parfois comparée à la princesse de Clèves, en raison de son refus de se donner à celui qu’elle aime, Henriette de Mortsauf en constitue véritablement l’envers monstrueux. Chasteté ne rime pas toujours avec vertu : alors que Félix épuise son ardeur à dérober cette volupté oppressée, le jeune homme est la proie du désir rapace que nourrit la maladie pour la santé, la mort pour la vie.

Pourchassant l’odeur obsédante du lys, Balzac débusque le désir jusqu’en cette vallée qu’on ne traverse qu’au prix d’une fièvre d’amour et d’agonie.

This poetic novel, by the acclaimed author of John Dollar, describes America at the brink of the Atomic Age. In the years between the two world wars, the future held more promise than peril, but there was evidence of things unseen that would transfigure our unquestioned trust in a safe future.

Fos has returned to Tennessee from the trenches of France. Intrigued with electricity, bioluminescence, and especially x-rays, he believes in science and the future of technology. On a trip to the Outer Banks to study the Perseid meteor shower, he falls in love with Opal, whose father is a glassblower who can spin color out of light.

Fos brings his new wife back to Knoxville where he runs a photography studio with his former Army buddy Flash. A witty rogue and a staunch disbeliever in Prohibition, Flash brings tragedy to the couple when his appetite for pleasure runs up against both the law and the Ku Klux Klan. Fos and Opal are forced to move to Opal's mother's farm on the Clinch River, and soon they have a son, Lightfoot.

But when the New Deal claims their farm for the TVA, Fos seeks work at the Oak Ridge Laboratory—Site X in the government's race to build the bomb. And it is there, when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, that Fos's great faith in science deserts him.

Their lives have traveled with touching inevitability from their innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the new world of manmade suns. Hypnotic and powerful, Evidence of Things Unseen constructs a heartbreaking arc through twentieth-century American life and belief.

T.J. Newton is an extraterrestrial who arrives on Earth with a desperate mission of mercy. In his quest to save his home planet, he discovers a world filled with loneliness and despair, leading to a tragic end.

Newton, an alien disguised as a human, lands in Kentucky and begins to patent advanced technology from his planet, Anthea. His goal is to amass the wealth needed to build a spaceship to rescue the last survivors of his devastated world.

However, instead of finding the help he seeks, Newton encounters self-destruction and succumbs to human afflictions like alcoholism, abandoning his mission. This poignant tale explores the human condition and the existential loneliness that resides within us all.

Olivia dreamed of a sun-filled love, a happy life. Then she entered Foxworth Hall...

V.C. Andrews' thrilling new novel spins a tale of dreadful secrets and dark, forbidden passions—of the time before Flowers in the Attic began. Long before terror flowered in the attic, thin, spinsterish Olivia came to Virginia as Malcolm Foxworth's bride. At last, with her tall handsome husband, she would find the joy she has waited for, longed for.

But in the gloomy mansion filled with hidden rooms and festering desires, a stain of jealous obsession begins to spread... an evil that will threaten her children, two lovely boys and one very special, beautiful girl. For within one innocent child, a shocking secret lives... a secret that will taint the proud Foxworth name, and haunt all their lives forever!

Angels tells the story of two born losers. Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.

So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards, and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral through rape, alcohol, drugs, and crime, to madness and death.

From the author of Tree of Smoke, this novel offers a vivid portrayal of America's dispossessed, lighting the trek with wit and a personal metaphysics that defiantly takes on the world.

La Mort est mon métier presents the pseudo-memoirs of Rudolf Höß (renamed Rudolf Lang in the book), the notorious commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp during World War II.

The story begins in 1913 when Rudolf Lang is just 13 years old. Raised in a misunderstood and highly normative Catholic environment, Rudolf's father, a merchant and military man, pressures him to become a priest to atone for his own past sins. Rudolf initially believes in God until a pivotal incident shatters his faith, leading to a strained relationship with his father.

As World War I erupts, a young Lang embarks on a military career, experiencing the harsh realities of war. After the war, he faces unemployment and family rejection, almost leading to suicide. Instead, he joins the Nazi party, eventually rising through the ranks to become the commandant of Auschwitz.

Under the orders of Reichsführer Himmler, Lang is tasked with the grim duty of exterminating 500,000 individuals annually. The camp evolves into a death factory, and Lang becomes a key figure in the Holocaust, overseeing the murder of millions.

Throughout the book, Lang is portrayed as devoid of personal feelings, driven solely by orders from his superiors. Even after the war, when imprisoned and sentenced to death, he claims he was merely following orders. The narrative concludes with Lang feeling betrayed by Himmler, who avoided accountability through suicide, leaving Lang to shoulder the blame.

This chilling tale offers a stark look into the mind of a man who played a pivotal role in one of history's darkest chapters, highlighting the psychological complexities and moral voids within.

Les Enfants Terribles holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction. Written in a French style that long defied successful translation, Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing.

The book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation. Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies.

What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy.

Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

6. August 1945, 8 Uhr 15 Minuten - die kleine Sadako Sasaki erlebt den Atombombenabwurf über Hiroshima scheinbar unbeschadet.

10 Jahre später: Sadako, eine begeisterte Radfahrerin, wird bei einem Rennen von einer plötzlichen Schwäche befallen und es stellt sich heraus, dass sie an der Strahlenkrankheit leidet.

Einer japanischen Tradition zufolge wird jedem, der tausend Papierkraniche faltet, ein sehnlicher Wunsch in Erfüllung gehen. Sadako klammert sich an diese Legende und an das Leben, selbst als die Ärzte sie aufgegeben haben. Unbeirrt arbeitet sie an den Kranichen, doch beim 990. versagen ihre Kräfte ...