Author: Robert WilsonPublisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Detective and mystery stories
Languages : en
Pages : 458
Book Description
A girl's death leads Inspector Zé Coelho to unsolved crimes from Portugal's past.
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
Author: Richard ZimlerPublisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1590208064
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 351
Book Description
International Bestseller: “A moody, tightly constructed historical thriller . . . a good mystery story and an effective evocation of a faraway time and place.” —The New York Times After Jews living in sixteenth-century Portugal are dragged to the baptismal font and forced to convert to Christianity, many of these New Christians persevere in their Jewish prayers and rituals in secret and at great risk; the hidden, arcane practices of the kabbalists, a mystical sect of Jews, continue as well. One such secret Jew is Berekiah Zarco, an intelligent young manuscript illuminator. Inflamed by love and revenge, he searches, in the crucible of the raging pogrom, for the killer of his beloved uncle Abraham, a renowned kabbalist, discovered murdered in a hidden synagogue along with a young girl in dishabille. Risking his life in streets seething with mayhem, Berekiah tracks down answers among Christians, New Christians, Jews, and the fellow kabbalists of his uncle, whose secret language and codes by turns light and obscure the way to the truth he seeks. A marvelous story, a challenging mystery, and a telling tale of the evils of intolerance, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon both compels and entertains. “The story moves quickly . . . a literary and historical treat.” —Library Journal ''Remarkable . . . The fever pitch of intensity Zimler maintains is at times overwhelming but never less than appropriate to the Hieronymous Bosch-like landscape he describes. Simultaneously, though, he is able to capture, within the bedlam, quiet moments of tenderness and love.” —Booklist (starred review)
Author: Robert WilsonThe Hidden Assassins
Author: Robert WilsonPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0156032562
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 549
Book Description
As Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón investigates a faceless, mutilated corpse, the beautiful city of Seville is rocked by a massive explosion. The discovery of a mosque in the basement of a devastated apartment building confirms everybody's terrorist fears. Panic sweeps the city and the region goes on red alert. As more bodies are dragged from the rubble, the media interest and political pressure intensify and Falcón suspects that all is not what it appears to be. Just as he comes close to cracking the conspiracy, he makes the most terrifying discovery of all and the race is on to prevent a catastrophe far beyond Spain's borders. A masterful thriller, The Hidden Assassins is fiction of the highest order.
Lisbon
Author: Neill LocheryPublisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586488805
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345
Book Description
Lisbon had a pivotal role in the history of World War II, though not a gun was fired there. The only European city in which both the Allies and the Axis power operated openly, it was temporary home to much of Europe's exiled royalty, over one million refugees seeking passage to the U.S., and a host of spies, secret police, captains of industry, bankers, prominent Jews, writers and artists, escaped POWs, and black marketeers. An operations officer writing in 1944 described the daily scene at Lisbon's airport as being like the movie "Casablanca," times twenty. In this riveting narrative, renowned historian Neill Lochery draws on his relationships with high-level Portuguese contacts, access to records recently uncovered from Portuguese secret police and banking archives, and other unpublished documents to offer a revelatory portrait of the War's back stage. And he tells the story of how Portugal, a relatively poor European country trying frantically to remain neutral amidst extraordinary pressures, survived the war not only physically intact but significantly wealthier. The country's emergence as a prosperous European Union nation would be financed in part, it turns out, by a cache of Nazi gold.
Night Train to Lisbon
Author: Pascal MercierPublisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555849237
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448
Book Description
The bestselling novel of love and sacrifice under fascist rule, and “a treat for the mind. One of the best books I have read in a long time” (Isabel Allende). Raimund Gregorius, a professor of dead languages at a Swiss secondary school, lives a life governed by routine. Then, an enigmatic Portuguese woman stirs his interest in an obscure, and mind-expanding book of philosophy that opens the possibility of changing Raimund’s existence. That same night, he takes the train to Lisbon to research the book’s phantom author, Amadeu de Prado, a renowned physician whose principles led him to confront Salazar’s dictatorship. Raimund, now obsessed with unlocking the mystery behind the man, is determined to meet all those on whom Prado left an indelible mark. Among them: his eighty-year-old sister, who maintains her brother’s house as if it were a museum; an elderly cleric and torture survivor confined to a nursing home; and Prado’s childhood friend and eventual partner in the Resistance. The closer Raimund comes to the truth of Prado’s life, and eventual fate, an extraordinary tale takes shape amid the labyrinthine memories of Prado’s intimate circle of family and friends, working in utmost secrecy to fight dictatorship, and the betrayals that threaten to expose them. “A meditative, deliberate exploration of loneliness, language and the human condition” (The San Diego Union-Tribune), Night Train to Lisbon “call[s] to mind the magical realism of Jorge Amado or Gabriel Garcia Marquez . . . allusive and thought-provoking, intellectually curious and yet heartbreakingly jaded,” and inexorably propelled by the haunting mystery at its heart (The Providence Journal). Night Train to Lisbon was adapted into Bille August’s award-winning 2013 film starring Jeremy Irons, Lena Olin, Christopher Lee, and Charlotte Rampling.
The Virgin Suicides
Author: Jeffrey EugenidesPublisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307401936
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family’s fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Author: José SaramagoPublisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547540345
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323
Book Description
A proofreader realizes his power to edit the truth on a whim, in a “brilliantly original” novel by a Nobel Prize winner (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Raimundo Silva is a middle-aged, celibate clerk, proofing manuscripts for a respectable publishing house. Fluent in Portuguese, he has been assigned to work on a standard history of the country, and the twelfth-century king who laid siege to Lisbon. In a moment of subversive daring, Raimundo decides to change just one single word of text—a capricious revision that completely undoes the past. When discovered, his insolent disregard for facts appalls his employers—save for his new editor, Maria Sara. She suggests that Rainmundo take his transgressions even further. Through Rainmundo and Maria’s eyes, what transpires is an alternate view of history and a colorful reinvention of a debatable truth. It’s a serpentine journey through time where past and present converge, fact becomes myth, and fiction and reality blur—especially for Rainmundo and Maria themselves, who begin to find themselves erotically drawn to each other. “Walter Mitty has nothing on Raimundo Silva . . . this hypnotic tale is a great comic romp through history, language and the imagination.” —Publishers Weekly Translated by Giovanni Pontiero
The Company of Strangers
Author: Robert WilsonPublisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547625421
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 499
Book Description
A poignant, “top rank” espionage thriller spanning from WWII to the Cold War from the award-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon (The Guardian). Portugal, 1944. Recruited by British intelligence to help uncover Nazi secrets of atomic warfare, math prodigy Andrea Aspinall soon disappears into the crowds of Lisbon, hiding behind a new identity. Karl Voss, an attaché for German intelligence, arrives in the city under the purported agenda of helping the Reich, all the while secretly working to save his beloved home country from annihilation under their reign. Two lost souls meet in a city filled with haunting secrets and deadly lies, desperately trying to find love amid assassination attempts, shifting loyalties, and heartbreaking betrayals. And when tragedy strikes, the repercussions last for decades, leading one of them on a quest, twenty-four years later, back into a sinister world of espionage long thought left behind. Hailed as both “a heartrending tale, unfolded with loving patience and rising tension” (Kirkus Reviews) and “an evocative and compelling thriller” (Publishers Weekly), The Company of Strangers is a provocative and moving take on the classic espionage narrative, exploring what happens when the allegiances of heart and head oppose each other.
Small Memories
Author: José SaramagoPublisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547541546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 133
Book Description
The Nobel Prize–winning author of Blindness recalls the days of his youth in Lisbon and the Portuguese countryside in this charming memoir. José Saramago was eighteen months old when he moved from the village of Azinhaga with his father and mother to live in Lisbon. But he would return to the village throughout his childhood and adolescence to stay with his maternal grandparents, illiterate peasants in the eyes of the outside world, but a fount of knowledge, affection, and authority to young José. Small Memories traces the formation of a man who emerged, against all odds, as one of the world’s most respected writers. Shifting between childhood and his teenage years, between Azinhaga and Lisbon, this mosaic of memories looks back into the author’s boyhood: the tragic death of his older brother at the age of four; his mother pawning the family’s blankets every spring and buying them back in time for winter; his grandparents bringing the weaker piglets into their bed on cold nights; and Saramago’s early encounters with literature, from teaching himself to read to poring over a Portuguese-French conversation guide, not realizing that he was in fact reading a play by Molière.
