The narrator of  The Zahir  is a bestselling novelist who lives in Paris and enjoys all the privileges money and celebrity bring. His wife of ten years, Esther, is a war correspondent who has disappeared along with a friend, Mikhail, who may or may not be her lover.Was Esther kidnapped, murdered, or did she simply escape a marriage that left her unfulfilled? The narrator doesn’t have any answers, but he has plenty of questions of his own. Then one day Mikhail finds the narrator and promises to reunite him with his wife. In his attempt to recapture a lost love, the narrator discovers something unexpected about himself.

This is the story of Brida, a young Irish girl, and her quest for knowledge. She has long been interested in various aspects of magic but is searching for something more. Her search leads her to people of great wisdom, who begin to teach Brida about the spiritual world. She meets a wise man who dwells in a forest, who teaches her about overcoming her fears and trusting in the goodness of the world; and a woman who teaches her how to dance to the music of the world, and how to pray to the moon. As Brida seeks her destiny, she struggles to find a balance between her relationships and her desire to become a witch. This enthralling novel incorporates themes that fans of Paulo Coelho will recognize and treasure—it is a tale of love, passion, mystery, and spirituality from the master storyteller.

In his latest international bestseller, the celebrated author of The Alchemist addresses the fundamental questions asked by millions: What am I doing here today? and Why do I go on living?Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything she could wish for: youth and beauty, plenty of attractive boyfriends, a fulfilling job, and a loving family. Yet something is lacking in her life. Inside her is a void so deep that nothing could possibly ever fill it. So, on the morning of November 11, 1997, Veronika decides to die. She takes a handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up.Naturally Veronika is stunned when she does wake up at Villete, a local mental hospital, where the staff informs her that she has, in fact, partially succeeded in achieving her goal. While the overdose didn't kill Veronika immediately, the medication has damaged her heart so severely that she has only days to live.The story follows Veronika through the intense week of self-discovery that ensues. To her surprise, Veronika finds herself drawn to the confinement of Villete and its patients, who, each in his or her individual way, reflect the heart of human experience. In the heightened state of life's final moments, Veronika discovers things she has never really allowed herself to feel before: hatred, fear, curiosity, love, and sexual awakening. She finds that every second of her existence is a choice between living and dying, and at the eleventh hour emerges more open to life than ever before.In Veronika Decides to Die, Paulo Coelho takes the reader on a distinctly modern quest to find meaning in a culture overshadowed by angst, soulless routine, and pervasive conformity. Based on events in Coelho's own life, Veronika Decides to Die questions the meaning of madness and celebrates individuals who do not fit into patterns society considers to be normal. Poignant and illuminating, it is a dazzling portrait of a young woman at the crossroads of despair and liberation, and a poetic, exuberant appreciation of each day as a renewed opportunity.

Paulo Coelho's masterpiece tells the mystical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different, and far more satisfying, listening to our hearts, of recognizing opportunity and learning to read the omens strewn along life's path, and, most importantly, to follow our dreams.

Humbert Humbert - scholar, aesthete and romantic - has fallen completely and utterly in love with Lolita Haze, his landlady's gum-snapping, silky skinned twelve-year-old daughter. Reluctantly agreeing to marry Mrs Haze just to be close to Lolita, Humbert suffers greatly in the pursuit of romance; but when Lo herself starts looking for attention elsewhere, he will carry her off on a desperate cross-country misadventure, all in the name of Love. Hilarious, flamboyant, heart-breaking and full of ingenious word play, Lolita is an immaculate, unforgettable masterpiece of obsession, delusion and lust.

In a Norwegian coastal town, society's carefully woven threads begin to unravel when an unsettling stranger named Johan Nagel arrives. With an often brutal insight into human nature, Nagel draws out the townsfolk, exposing their darkest instincts &amp; suppressed desires. At once arrogant &amp; unassuming, righteous &amp; depraved, Nagel seduces the entire community even as he turns it on its head--before disappearing as suddenly as he arrived.

One of the most important and controversial writers of the 20th century, Knut Hamsun made literary history with the publication in 1890 of this powerful, autobiographical novel recounting the abject poverty, hunger and despair of a young writer struggling to achieve self-discovery and its ultimate artistic expression. The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).

“Growth of the soil was something different, a thing to be procured at any cost; the only source, the origin of all. A dull and desolate existence? Nay, least of all. A man had everything; his powers above, his dreams, his loves, his wealth of superstition.”  Having spent most of a weekend driving through the woods in Värmland, close to the Norwegian border, reflecting on the strange way in which time seems to have stopped there in the remote countryside, I remembered my phase of passionate Lagerlöf and Hamsun reading. Those two understood the attraction and oppression of life lived on the harsh limits, dictated by nature's omnipresent volatility, and by a small community's shared values and superstitions, as well as power structures and intolerance, based on fear of things unknown.The landscape in which hardworking farmers settled is breathtakingly beautiful in summer: dark green woods, light green fields, flowers of all colours and shapes around the glittery blue waters of the lakes, farms spread out between small churches.But once you stop and talk to people (or spend time with relatives, as the case can be), the short time span of the beautiful summer sneaks into conversations within minutes. Even nowadays, dialogues circle around when the first flowers appeared this spring, when the last snow storm hit (in Stockholm, it was 11th May, and many apple trees - mine included - lost their budding flowers), how much rain is needed to make vegetables grow, but not rot over the short summer. Light hardly fades at night, but it is chilly, even in July, and people know instinctively that they have to catch each sun ray in order to steel themselves for winter.You can still find traces of Knut Hamsun's epic tale of the quiet, monosyllabic farmer life in Norway in the rural dialects, superstitions and conservative mindset. A foreigner would be recognised immediately, in these remote woods. There is something silently heroic in the constant fight against nature to make the soil fertile to feed hungry children, and Hamsun's love of his own cultural background shines through the prose on every page. However, his later identification with fascist Germany may also find an explanation in the worship of the Nordic, the fear of foreign influences, the focus on protecting national identity rather than accepting a range of new perspectives. The political stain of Hamsun's later years does not take away from his narrative power, but it should be mentioned as part of who he was, and what he developed into. Seeing both the brilliant writer and the Nazi supporter will give a nuanced picture of the different facets of life in Scandinavia at that time.It is neither idealistic nor monstrous, just shaped by the conditions under which people lived, worked and mingled with each other. Understanding the dynamics of remote farmer communities is still relevant, and Hamsun's sharp perceptions and colorful descriptions open up a a strangely closed world and make it accessible to a wider, international audience. Recommended!

Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death, that are his daily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an anonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, Senhor José sets off to follow the thread that may lead him to the woman-but as he gets closer, he discovers more about her, and about himself, than he would ever have wished.The loneliness of people's lives, the effects of chance, the discovery of love-all coalesce in this extraordinary novel that displays the power and art of José Saramago in brilliant form.

Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's brilliant new novel poses the question what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This, of course, causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially mass celebration. Flags are hung out on balconies; people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home—families are left to care for the permanently dying; life-insurance policies become meaningless; and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small "d," became human and were to fall in love?

From Nobel Prize–winning author José Saramago, a magnificent, mesmerizing parable of lossA city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" that spares no one. Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim.Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Herman Hesse's classic novel has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In this story of a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege to seek spiritual fulfillment. Hesse synthesizes disparate philosophies--Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualism--into a unique vision of life as expressed through one man's search for true meaning.

Steppenwolf is a poetical self-portrait of a man who felt himself to be half-human and half-wolf. This Faust-like and magical story is evidence of Hesse's searching philosophy and extraordinary sense of humanity as he tells of the humanization of a middle-aged misanthrope. Yet his novel can also be seen as a plea for rigorous self-examination and an indictment of the intellectual hypocrisy of the period. As Hesse himself remarked, "Of all my books Steppenwolf is the one that was more often and more violently misunderstood than any of the others".

Şeker Portakalı adlı romanıyla ülkemizde yediden yetmişe herkesin sevgilisi olan Brezilyalı yazar José Mauro de Vasconcelos'tan bir roman daha. Romanın başkişisi, damarlarında çingene kanı taşıyan yetim Chicao. Brezilya'nın uçsuz bucaksız kıraçlarında büyüyen Chicao, rüzgâr'ı ve deniz'i kardeşi bilir. Ateşli, güzel Joaninha'nın sevgilisi ve o kıyının en güçlü erkeği olur. José Mauro de Vasconcelos, o her zamanki şiirli sokulgan anlatımıyla, özsuyunu doğadan alan, sevgi ve özlem dolu, yaşamın içinden süzülüp gelmiş bir roman daha yaratıyor. Bu romanda rüzgâr canlanır, ışık ve müzik gereçlerinin, dans adımlarının ve yürek çarpıntılarının gürültüsüne dönüşür. Anlattığı toprakları ve o toprakların insanlarını çok iyi tanıyan yazar, onların duygularını, düşüncelerini, o topraklara bağlılıklarını ve o topraklardan kopuşlarını büyük bir ustalıkla yansıtıyor.

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