Showing results by narrator "Edoardo Ballerini" in All Categories

A struggling author is stuck at the airport, his flight endlessly delayed. As he kills time at the gate, he bumps into a former classmate of his, Jeff, who is waiting for the same flight. The charismatic Jeff invites the author to drinks in the first-class lounge, and there, swearing him to secrecy, begins telling him the fascinating and disturbing story of his gilded life, starting with a pivotal incident from his youth.

Tim Beckdolt, rangy and self-reliant, is as American as the frontier itself. But after spending eight treacherous months digging $175,000 in gold out of Desperation Peak - all he has left is desperation. Two sadistic strangers have taken his gold, and now they want to take his life. He's on the run - the target of a Devil’s Manhunt.

Joshua Cody, a brilliant young composer, was about to receive his PhD when he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer. Facing a bone marrow transplant and full radiation, he charts his struggle: the fury, the tendency to self-destruction, and the ruthless grasping for life and sensation; the encounter with beautiful Ariel, who gives him cocaine and a blow job in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; the detailed morphine fantasy complete with a bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. Moving effortlessly between references to Don Giovanni and the Rolling Stones, Ezra Pound and Buffalo Bill, and studded with pages from his own diaries and hospital notebooks, [sic] is a mesmerizing, hallucinatory glimpse into a young man’s battle against disease and a celebration of art, language, music, and life.

These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.

Auschwitz, 1944. Alfred Mendl's days are numbered. But he has little left to live for - his family were torn away from him, his life's work burned in front of his eyes - until a glimmer of hope arises as he watches a game of chess. To the guards Mendl is just another prisoner, but in fact he holds knowledge that only two people in the world possess. The other is working hard for the Nazi war machine. Four thousand miles away, in Washington, DC, intelligence lieutenant Nathan Blum decodes messages from occupied Poland.

Drawn to the ocean, 10-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small coastal village and listens to her father's stories about his pirate voyages and the mother she never knew. Since the loss of his wife, Helen, John has remained land-bound for their daughter, but when Tab contracts yellow fever, he turns to the sea once more. Desperate to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the salt air will heal her.

Attempting to make sense of the incredible upheaval of 2020—from the devastating impact of COVID-19 to the sudden loss of his father—Edoardo Nesi considers the changing global economy and its effect on our lives. He shares the stories of Alberto Magelli, a small textile entrepreneur; Livia Firth, a prominent advocate for sustainability; Elisa Martelli, a young Sangiovese winemaker; Enrico Giovannini, a leading economist and statistician; Rino Pratesi, a proud butcher from the heart of Tuscany; and more.

Sage Singer has a past that makes her want to hide from the world. But when she strikes up an unlikely friendship with Josef Weber, a quiet old man and respected pillar of the community, she feels that finally, she may have found someone she can open up to. Until Josef tells her the evil secret he's kept for sixty years…

1930s New York City. Three brothers grow up poor on the Lower East Side, until the death of their father forces them to find work to support their family. Each brother takes a different path. Twelve-year-old Morris Rabishevsky apprentices himself to a garment manufacturer with the aim of running the business. Sol, six years older, heads to accounting school but is forced to drop out. Scarred by a family tragedy, Harry falls under the spell of the charismatic Louis Buchalter, who in a few short years becomes the most ruthless mobster in town.

It's 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. Syvert Løyning returns home from military service to live with his mother and brother on the outskirts of a town in Southern Norway. One night, he dreams of his late father, and can't shake him from his mind. Searching through his father's belongings for clues and connections, he finds a cache of letters that lead to the Soviet Union.

One ordinary summer's day a young girl disappears while cycling to volleyball practice. Her abandoned bike is found in exactly the same place that another girl was assaulted and murdered 33 years previously. The perpetrator was never brought to justice, so the authorities suspect the same killer has struck again. The eeriness of the crime unsettles not only the police and public, but also someone who has been carrying a burden of guilt for many years.

Cristian has lived his entire life in the grip of a repressive dictatorship. The country is governed by fear. When the secret police blackmail him, Cristian has an impossible choice. Save the life of his sick grandfather by informing on his family, or risk his life—and all of theirs—by resisting? At 17, Cristian dreams of being free but doesn't know where to turn. In this climate of constant suspicion, can he trust his best friend, his girlfriend or even his family?

It's an age where high tech rules supreme. Computers do all the work while humans spend their lives enjoying drug-induced fantasies. Only a handful live and work in the traditional sense - managing the few affairs that still need attention. At the center of this system is the Mnemonist, the man who directs everything that happens. But now he has reached an advanced age and must carefully choose a dreamer capable of taking over his crucial position.

Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of the men in her life - her husband who has gone in search of water for the parched household, and her elder sons who have vanished after an explosive argument. Nora is biding her time with her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home, and her husband's 17-year-old cousin, who communes with spirits. Lurie is a former outlaw and a man haunted by ghosts.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination's power to shape our memories under time's seemingly intractable hold.

Proud grandmother Matelda Cabrelli always has something to say. But, as she faces the end of her life, she worries she's failed to tell the stories that matter. Most of all, she finds herself needing to tell the tale of her mother Domenica's two great loves. First, Domenica's childhood sweetheart: a boy from her own small coastal town of Viareggio. Second, a mysterious captain: an infatuation forged in the midst of WW2, and the father Matelda never knew.

The Silent Patient by way of Stephen King: Parker, a young, overconfident psychiatrist new to his job at a mental asylum, miscalculates catastrophically when he undertakes curing a mysterious and profoundly dangerous patient. In a series of online posts, Parker H., a young psychiatrist, chronicles the harrowing account of his time working at a dreary mental hospital in New England. Through this internet message board, Parker hopes to communicate with the world his effort to cure one bewildering patient.

February 1939, and Europe is on the brink of war. Charles Mossman is in a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, New York, reeling from the loss of his job and his failing marriage, whilst outside thousands of Nazi sympathisers are attending a hate-spewing rally. As he confronts one, Charles makes a horrendous mistake with deadly consequences....

Magnificent in scope, internationally lauded and transcendent, the novel in verse that inspired the sensational West End and Off-Broadway play of the same name. The Lehman Trilogy follows the epic rise and fall of three generations of that infamous family and through them tells the story of American ambition and hubris.

A gripping thriller from the bestselling Isabel Allende. For Amanda Martín and her friends, Ripper was all just a game. But when security guard Ed Staton is found dead in the middle of a school gym, the murder presents a mystery that baffles the San Francisco police, not least Amanda's father, Deputy Chief Martín. Amanda goes online, offering ‘The Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat' to her fellow sleuths as a challenge to their real-life wits. And so begins a most dangerous obsession.