Literary Fiction Political

Stoyo Petkanov, the deposed Party leader, is placed on trial for crimes that range from corruption to political murder. Petkanov's guilt - and the righteousness of his opponents - would seem to be self-evident. But, as brilliantly imagined by Barnes, the trial of this cunning and unrepentant dictator illuminates the shadowy frontier between the rusted myths of the Communist past and a capitalist future in which everything is up for grabs.

Was wir sehen - und lieber nicht sehen wollen. Einen Sommer lang arbeitet Elise für das gesellige Paar Margaux und Philippe in deren Ferienhaus in der Normandie. Fasziniert von den vielen illustren Gästen in der Domaine de Tourgéville, vom Leben, Wesen und der Ehe der Leclercs, wird die junge Frau zur eindringlichen Beobachterin von Sein und Schein. Sie erlebt ein Panoptikum der menschlichen Täuschungen, begreift, dass das Streben nach Glück und die Bereitschaft zum Betrug zwei Seiten derselben Medaille sind.

Rosa and Esther march through downtown Detroit in August 1968 to protest the war in Vietnam. When a bloodied teenager reports that mounted police are beating protesters a few blocks away, the young women hurry to offer assistance. They try to stop the violence, but an officer is injured and the sisters are arrested. Rosa sees an opportunity to protest the war in court. Esther has an infant daughter and wants to avoid prison, which means accepting a plea bargain and testifying against her sister.

Una mujer acaba de perder a su marido y vela el cadáver durante la noche. Sobre la mesilla hay un libro - la Biblia - que la esposa hojea. Va leyendo los párrafos subrayados por el hombre que se ha ido para siempre. Una oleada de recuerdos le viene a la mente y empieza un lento, desordenado monólogo en el que la vida pugna por hacerse real otra vez. La pobre vida llena de errores y torpezas, de pequeños goces e incomprensiones. ¿Ha conocido Carmen alguna vez a Mario?

A novel of great humanity, compassion and astonishing immediacy, this unique debut portrays the emotional reality of contemporary life in the West Bank and the irreconcilable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A collage of narrative voices and different points of view are woven around the murder of two young people, one Israeli and one Palestinian. Brave and bold, this gorgeously written work of fiction introduces a large cast of characters in a setting where violence is routine, even normal, and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints.

Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places and stum­bles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who’s convinced he may start a revolution.

Thirty years after its great triumph in Vietnam, the US has again become mired in an endless foreign war overseas. Stories of super soldiers known as the Volunteers tuck in little American boys and girls every night. Yet domestic politics are aflame. Violent protests erupt throughout the nation; an ex-military watchdog group clashes with police while radical terrorists threaten to expose government experiments within the veteran rehabilitation colonies. Halfway between war and peace, the Volunteers find themselves waiting for orders in the vast American city-state, Empire City.

One autumn night, as a grad student named Matthew is walking home from the subway, a handsome skateboarder catches his eye. Leif, mesmerizing and enigmatic, invites Matthew to meet his friends, who are experimenting with tarot cards. It's easier to know what's in other people's minds than most people realize, the friends claim. Do they believe in telepathy? Can they actually do it? Though Matthew should be writing his dissertation on the poetry of kingship, he soon finds himself falling in love with Leif - a poet of the internet age.

When Robert Walter, popular mayor of Amsterdam, sees his wife toss her head back with laughter while chatting to one of his aldermen at a New Year's reception, he immediately suspects the worst. Despite their long and happy marriage, Robert is convinced that Sylvia is cheating on him - with the respectable alderman who is dedicated to the environment, no less. The man who wants to spoil the capital's skyline with wind turbines.

Fred is the sole offspring of Lenny Snyder, the famous (or notorious) pied piper of the counterculture, and in middle age he hates being reminded of it. But neither can he ignore any longer his psychedelically bizarre childhood. From infancy, for instance, he was called Freedom (in fact his given name) not only by those who should have known him but also by members of the burgeoning movement led by his father, who happily exploited having his wife and his toddling, then walking and talking, and finally observant son in tow.

Antonio M. Lugo Olea supo encender la imaginación y la esperanza de millones de mexicanos ofreciendo una lucha frontal contra la corrupción, la impunidad y la delincuencia organizada. También prometió hacer lo posible por terminar con la pobreza, la marginación y la injusticia. Los ciudadanos, hartos de gobiernos de ineptos y ladrones, con su voto llevaron a AMLO a la presidencia del país. Por si fuera poco, su partido también consiguió una avasalladora mayoría en el Congreso, vital para apoyarlo en todos sus proyectos.

Like many other 18-year-olds, Aden Sawyer is intently focused on a goal: escape from her hometown. Aden’s dream, however, is worlds removed from conventional fantasies of teen rebellion: She is determined to travel to Peshawar, Pakistan, to study Islam at a madrassa. To do so, she takes on a new identity, disguising herself as a young man named Suleyman. Aden fully commits to this new life, even burning her passport to protect her secret. But once she is on the ground, she finds herself in greater danger than she could possibly have imagined.

He was nine when the vines first wrapped themselves around him and burrowed into his skin. Now a college botany major, Jeremy is desperately looking for a way to listen to the plants and stave off their extinction. But when the grip of the vines becomes too intense and Health Services starts asking questions, he flees to Brooklyn, where fate puts him face to face with a group of climate-justice activists who assure him they have a plan to save the planet, and his plants....

When John Nelson abandoned his government job to join a scrappy band of activists, he didn't realize trying to save the world would be so hard. His ideals remain strong, but his optimism is wearing thin. Parts per Million, Julia Stoops' socially conscious, fast-paced debut novel, is set in Portland, Oregon, in 2002. As the trio dives into antiwar protests and investigates fraud at an elite university, Nelson falls in love with an unlikely houseguest, Deirdre, a photographer from Ireland - and a recovering addict.

Bluegrass musician, former journalist and editor, and now PhD in English, Mark Brumfeld has arrived at his 30s with significant debt and no steady prospects. His girlfriend Cassie - a punk bassist in an all-female band, who fled her Midwestern childhood for a new identity - finds work at a “new media” company. When Cassie refuses his marriage proposal, Mark leaves New York and returns to the basement of his childhood home in the Baltimore suburbs.

When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows. But these gilded lives and their fellow white Africans on the coast are under threat - Islamist terror attacks are on the rise and Rebecca knows more about this violence than she is prepared to reveal.

En el puerto de La Habana desembarca una mañana de principios de los años 50 un joven asturiano, Patricio, sin otro patrimonio que sus ganas de comerse el mundo y sin otro afán que dejar atrás una aldea aún envuelta en las sombras de una posguerra interminable.

Ulli is a young woman, half English and half German, squatting in a dismal, empty Berlin apartment one year after the war has ended. She's scraping together a living as an interpreter between Berlin-based GIs and the wide-eyed local girls eager to meet them. One night Ulli meets two American soldiers: Leo, handsome and ambitious and desperate to escape his small-town upbringing, and intellectual, asthmatic Isaac, whose refugee parents had fled Russia and then Paris for New York. Winter Kept Us Warm follows Ulli, Leo, and Isaac through the next six decades of their lives - from Berlin to postwar Manhattan, 1960s Los Angeles, and Morocco.

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife.

Every now and then, we come across a novel that moves us like no other, that seems like a miracle of the imagination, and that haunts us long after the book is closed. James Levine’s The Blue Notebook is that kind of book. It is the story of Batuk, an Indian girl who is taken to Mumbai from the countryside and sold into prostitution by her father; the blue notebook is her diary, in which she recalls her early childhood, records her life on the Common Street, and makes up beautiful and fantastic tales.