
“Spanish Childhood” (1987) is the story of a republican family living in a small village in Andalusia. It spans the period after the Spanish Civil
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The new weather official arrives at his Antarctic island outpost only to find that the man he should be replacing is nowhere to be found. His only company is the Austrian lighthouse-keeper, who seems to have gone insane. What has happened? When
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Piñols second novel (after Cold Skin) is a fanciful metafiction that lampoons adventure stories while telling one with great enthusiasm. Nineteen-year-old orphan Tommy Thomson, a ghost writer struggling to make a living in WWI London, is
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The Tuaregs are the true sons of the desert. They can survive in the harshest of conditions like nobody else. The noble inmouchar Gacel Sayah, is the master of a large extension of the desert. One day, two fugitives arrive from the north and Gacel,
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Many books, documentaries and movies claim to chronicle daily life in Ancient Rome, but it's rare to find a narrative so encrusted in detail as this lively offering from an Italian author and television host. Adopting a first person plural voice,
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A "comedy of Japanese business manners", Fear and Trembling (Stupeur et tremblements) ignores Amélie's life outside work, staying focused on her place in the Yumimoto corporate ecology, on her relationships with colleagues and her
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Coincé dans un aéroport alors qu'il s'apprêtait à embarquer pour Barcelone, l'homme d'affaires Jérôme Angust se voit contraint de supporter, en plus du retard de son avion, la logorrhée d'un étrange individu,
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An eighty-three year old Nobel prize winner author of twenty-two novels is found passed out at his home. Two months before his death of a rare cartilage cancer journalists from all over the world came to interview the viscious fat old man, loathing
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The Book of Proper Names is set in contemporary Paris, its main character an orphan named Plectrude. Before the child's birth her nineteen-year-old mother shoots and kills her nineteen-year-old (and somewhat feckless) father because she hates the
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When the lonely sixteen-year-old university student Blanche meets the dazzling Christa, she is swept off her feet. Christa, who talks freely of her impoverished background in the Eastern Belgian town of Malmedy, claims to work in a bar with her
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The novel is set, almost entirely, in 1923 and on a small, isolated island, owned by the mysterious old Capitaine, Omer Loncours. A nurse, Françoise Chavaigne is summoned, to take care of the island's other noteworthy inhabitant, the
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The novel "Tokyo Fiancee" is filled with other such cultural tidbits about Japan and the Japanese, but that is not all you should be reading this for, it is also a tale of sweet but largely unrequieted love between the author, a Francophone Belgian,
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Amelie Nothomb has written several novels grounded firmly in autobiography, but these all focus on a relatively short time-span, a few years of her life. Though The Life of Hunger accelerates rapidly once the narrator reaches adolescence, the book
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This is another novel by Amelie Nothomb, in which she decides to ask the question “What if?”. What if somebody dies in your apartment? What if you don’t call an ambulance? What if you exchange his identity card and driving license
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