Julian Barnes
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English
Description
Tony Webster has always made the very reasonable assumption that he could trust his memories, but when he's forced to revisit his past, everything he believes about himself and his life is challenged. The fact is that Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, never gave much thought to his past at all until his closest childhood friends' return with a vengeance -- one of them from the grave and another maddeningly present. Tony thought he'd left all this uncertainly...
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"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author ..., a novel about a young man on the cusp of adulthood and a woman who has long been there, a love story shot through with sheer beauty, profound sadness, and deep truth. Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This...
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English
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Geoffrey Braithwaite, nursing an infatuation with the long-dead author Flaubert, becomes obsessed with learning which of two stuffed parrots--both exhibited in museums as having served as inspiration for Flaubert while he was writing his novel "Un coeur simple"--is the one that really sat on the author's desk.
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"This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class on Culture and Civilization, taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil's grasp,...
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'I don't believe in God, but I miss him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.
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"1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on his predicament, his personal history, his parents, various women and wives, his children all of those hanging in the balance of his fate. And though a stroke of luck prevents...
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"From the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending-a rich, witty, revelatory tour of Belle ©poque Paris, via the remarkable life story of the pioneering surgeon, Samuel Pozzi. In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was...
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Jean Serjeant, the heroine of Julian Barnes's wonderfully provocative novel, seems ordinary, but has an extraordinary disdain for wisdom. And as Barnes-winner of the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending-follows her from her childhood in the 1920s to her flight into the sun in the year 2021, he confronts readers with the fruits of her relentless curiosity: pilgrimages to China and the Grand Canyon; a catalogue of 1940s sexual euphemisms; and...
12) Cross channel
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English
Description
Julian Barnes explores the narrow body of water containing the vast sea of prejudice and misapprehension which lies between England and France with acuity, humor, and compassion. For whether Barnes's English characters come to France as conquerors or hostages, laborers, athletes, or aesthetes, what they discover, alongside rich food and barbarous sexual and religious practices, is their “own” ineradicable Englishness. Introducing us to a plethora...
14) The porcupine
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English
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The story about the fall of Communism and the hold it retains on its successors.
15) Arthur & George
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English
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As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later--one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world's most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife--their fates become inextricably connected. In Arthur & George, Julian Barnes explores the grand...
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Deutsch
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Dmitri Schostakowitsch gehört zu den renommiertesten Komponisten seines Landes, als Stalin der Aufführung einer seiner Opern beiwohnt und schon in der Pause den Saal verlässt. Fortan gilt Schostakowitsch als zum Abschuss freigegebener Mann. Er entgeht der Säuberung, doch wie lebt es sich als Künstler unter ständiger Beobachtung? In welchem Verhältnis stehen Kunst und Unterdrückung, Diktatur und Kreativität zueinander, und ist es verwerflich,...
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Die erste Liebe hat lebenslange Konsequenzen, aber davon hat Paul im Alter von neunzehn keine Ahnung. Mit neunzehn ist er stolz, dass seine Liebe zur verheirateten, fast dreißig Jahre älteren Susan die gesellschaftlichen Konventionen sprengt. Er ist sich ganz sicher, in Susan die Frau fürs Leben gefunden zu haben, alles andere ist nebensächlich. Erst mit zunehmendem Alter wird Paul klar, dass die Anforderungen, die die Liebe an ihn stellt, größer...
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"Verlangen und Verlust, Freundschaft und Liebe, miteinander reden und aneinander vorbei - das sind die Themen, denen Julian Barnes mit gewohnt scharfer Beobachtungsgabe und unverwechselbarem Witz auf den Grund geht.
Ob der frisch geschiedene Immobilienmakler Vernon nicht akzeptieren kann, dass seine Freundin ein Geheimnis hat, das sie nicht preisgeben möchte, ob Phil und Joanna über Sex, Krebs, die Wirtschaft oder Orangenmarmelade diskutieren, ob...
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The Pedant in the Kitchen is a perfect comfort for anyone who has ever been defeated by a cookbook. The Pedant's ambition is simple. He wants to cook tasty, nutritious food; he wants not to poison his friends; and he wants to expand, slowly and with pleasure, his culinary repertoire
20) Elizabeth Finch
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Deutsch
Description
Eine Hommage an die Philosophie
Neil, gescheiterter Schauspieler, Vater und Ehemann, besucht im Abendstudium eine Vorlesung zu Kultur und Zivilisation und ist fasziniert von der stoischen und anspruchsvollen Professorin Elizabeth Finch. Er hat zwar immer wieder Affären, doch prägt das Ringen um ihre Anerkennung sein Leben. Auch nach Beendigung des Studiums bleiben die beiden in Kontakt. Als sie stirbt, erbt Neil ihre Bibliothek und stürzt sich...