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THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE (2009)

Hardcover, 532 pages

Knopf

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“When the Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk was invited to give the annual Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard this fall, he chose as his title “The Naïve and the Sentimental Novelist.” Kemal, the protagonist and first-person narrator of Pamuk’s latest, “The Museum of Innocence” may be naive and sentimental — as well as willful and self-absorbed — but the author of this mesmerizing, brilliantly realized new novel is anything but. Pamuk, who has taught comparative literature at Columbia, became the first Turk to win a Nobel when he was awarded the 2006 literature prize. He is that rare thing, a creator of sophisticated, intensely literary fiction, who is also his country’s bestselling writer. In part, that’s because of his work’s accessibility and his willingness to adapt conventionally popular genres, like historical and detective stories, into multilayered, character-driven novels.” From LA Time

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The word that characterizes better Pamuk’s novels is “Symmetry”. Nothing is by chance in his novels. When he uses a word he apply it to a social and cultural context. He plan the number of chapters and how many characters will be in the story. He doesn’t belong to that group of writers struck by inspiration or muses. Love is the main character of this book, but love without clichés, as it is.

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U IS FOR UNDERTOW(2009)
Hardcover, 416 pages
Putnam
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Calling T is for Trespass “taut, terrifying, transfixing and terrific,” USA Today went on to ask, “What does it take to write twenty novels about the same character and manage to create a fresh, genre-bending novel every time?” It’s a question worth pondering. Through twenty excursions into the dark side of the human soul, Sue Grafton has never written the same book twice. And so it is with this, her twenty-first. Once again, she breaks genre formulas, giving us a twisting, complex, surprise-filled, and totally satisfying thriller.

It’s April, 1988, a month before Kinsey Millhone’s thirty-eighth birthday, and she’s alone in her office doing paperwork when a young man arrives unannounced. He has a preppy air about him and looks as if he’d be carded if he tried to buy booze, but Michael Sutton is twenty-seven, an unemployed college dropout. Twenty-one years earlier, a four-year-old girl disappeared. A recent reference to her kidnapping has triggered a flood of memories. Sutton now believes he stumbled on her lonely burial when he was six years old. He wants Kinsey’s help in locating the child’s remains and finding the men who killed her. It’s a long shot but he’s willing to pay cash up front, and Kinsey agrees to give him one day. As her investigation unfolds, she discovers Michael Sutton has an uneasy relationship with the truth. In essence, he’s the boy who cried wolf. Is his current story true or simply one more in a long line of fabrications?

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Grafton moves the narrative between the eighties and the sixties, changing points of view, building multiple subplots, and creating memorable characters. Gradually, we see how they all connect. But at the beating center of the novel is Kinsey Millhone, sharp-tongued, observant, a loner-”a heroine,” said The New York Times Book Review, “with foibles you can laugh at and faults you can forgive.”

In 2004 SUE GRAFTON received the Ross Macdonald Literary Award and in 2009, she was named co-Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

Robert Parker: Describe your writing process (e.g., I get up in the morning, have a martini to get my heart going…).

Sue Grafton: I take a 5.4-mile walk five days a week, so my writing schedule is often dictated by the weather. If it’s too hot or too cold, I walk first thing in the morning, come home, shower, dress, and reach my desk at 9:45 or so. I work until lunch, when I take a short break, returning to my desk until mid-to-late afternoon. If I haven’t done a morning walk, I walk when my work is done. Then I drink.

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INVISIBLE (2009)

Hardcover, 308 pages

Henry Holt

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“Paul Auster continues his career-long obsession with the interplay between fiction, reality, memory, and identity in INVISIBLE, the story of a young would-be poet at Columbia University who becomes caught up in the life of an enigmatic French intellectual and his ravishing girlfriend. Told alternately in the first, second, and third person, the novel is simultaneously a story of passion, murder, and revenge as well as a meditation on narrative and meaning.

“One of America’s greatest novelists” dazzlingly reinvents the coming-of-age story in his most passionate and surprising book to date Sinuously constructed in four interlocking parts, Paul Auster’s fifteenth novel opens in New York City in the spring of 1967, when twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice. With uncompromising insight, Auster takes us into the shadowy borderland between truth and memory, between authorship and identity, to produce a work of unforgettable power that confirms his reputation as “one of America’s most spectacularly inventive writers.”

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In an interview a few years ago Paul Auster said that he was an intuitive writer. When a new Auster’s novel hit the shelves one always expect some structure changes; pieces that need a reader to fall into place; autobiographical’ references so close that they muddle up with fiction. He said that his books always have an strangely outcome, they don’t resemble other books.

By reading Invisible (2009) you verify these elements. Auster shy away to be seen while the character of Walker dissolve in the voices that narrate him. ¿So, Auster start writing without knowing where the story is going?¿Or it’s just a premeditated narrative trick?

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QUEL CHE NON È STATO

Softcover 185 pages

Feltrinelli

FIRST EDITION

(Description in Italian) Micol ha preso la direzione sbagliata. Ha perso l’amore della sua vita, la passione che travolge una volta sola. Ora un libro riaccende la sua memoria. L’ha appena acquistato e nel risvolto di copertina – non ha dubbi – si fa cenno a un episodio che la riguarda. Legge il romanzo e ogni dettaglio coincide. Come mai il nome dell’autore non le dice nulla? In verità non lo conosce nessuno. forse si tratta di uno pseudonimo. Che fare? Una cosa è chiara: deve scoprire chi è. In quel raccponto c’è la sua storia d’amore con Manlio, tenero e affascinante, c’è la sua decisione di abbandonare la famiglia, c’è infine l’appuntamento al quale Manlio non si è mai presentato. Seguendo gli indizi disseminati nel romanzo Micol riesce a trovare una strada..

About the Author
Piero Degli Antoni was born in Bologna in 1960 and lives in Milan. He had published Novels and Misteries. Some of his titles are: La verità è un’altra (2002); L’Udienza è tolta (2004); La note di Peter Pan (2007)

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LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN (2009)

Hardcover, 368 pages

Random House

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“In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Let the Great World Spin is the critically acclaimed author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s.

Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own worth.

Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann’s powerful allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city’s people, unexpectedly drawn together by hope, beauty, and the ‘artistic crime of the century.’ A sweeping and radical social novel, Let the Great World Spin captures the spirit of America in a time of transition, extraordinary promise, and, in hindsight, heartbreaking innocence. Hailed as a ‘fiercely original talent’ (San Francisco Chronicle), award-winning novelist McCann has delivered a triumphantly American masterpiece that awakens in us a sense of what the novel can achieve, confront, and even heal

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In a recent reading at a Chelsea Bookstore, Colum McCann talked about literature, as the only thing that keep him going, besides his family. He mentioned Literature as a very close friend, something very cherished. It was a very fresh note next to common publishing industry glossary. This novel is a Symphony and was born from an image.

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