検索キーワード： 世界文学

Travancore, côte de Malabar, 1900. Une fillette monte à bord d'un bateau qui la conduit à la cérémonie de son mariage. Son futur époux est un bon parti, mais elle découvre bientôt que sa famille est frappée d'une étrange malédiction : à chaque nouvelle génération, au moins une personne meurt noyée — ironie du sort particulièrement cruelle dans cette région du Kerala où l'eau est omniprésente, modelant la terre en un entrelacs de lagons et de lacs, accompagnant les existences de son chant feutré, reliant toute chose dans le temps et dans l'espace.

Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, this is an explosive collection from the incomparable imagination of Samanta Schweblin, a master of the short story. A gripping blend of the raw, the astonishing and the tragic, every story is as perfectly unexpected as a snare: tightly, exquisitely wound, ready to snap at a touch.

A gripping and revealing new biography of one of the greatest of modern poets, the queer, Greek-Egyptian Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), whose admirers have ranged from E M Forster, T S Eliot and Virginia Woolf to Jackie Onassis, Leonard Cohen and Stephen Fry.

Teresa is everything he wants. She is beautiful, charming, rebellious, and born with every advantage in life. He has only ever existed on the margins. A poor immigrant from Murcia, earning his living stealing and selling motorbikes, he could only ever dream of being with the daughter of the Catalan bourgeoisie. When their desires take hold, they must face the realities of a world designed to keep them apart.

In 1970s Brazil, two teenage sisters are thrust into a chaotic world. Fear and hunger stalk them in a sugarcane town choked by a constant rain of ash, a testament to the ravaged environment in which they are trying to grow. With only each other for comfort, they set out to search for their missing mother and the father they’ve never known.

Cinnamon Beach is a multicultural tragicomedy, told from three female perspectives, in which an American writer living in Japan returns to South Carolina to scatter the ashes of her brother while trying to maintain the "perfect-family" facade she created from afar, and support her Indian American sister-in-law who wants a future which might upset everyone. Sparks fly at an impromptu book-signing when the author reconnects with her college friend, now a famous African American country music star, and her daughter who is deaf finds ways to communicate with a secret first-love.

When a young woman from Tokyo contacts the Go-Between to request a meeting with a deceased TV star who once helped her, she doesn’t expect a teenage boy to show up. Dressed in a designer duffel coat and carrying a tattered notebook, Ayumi Shibuya, our mysterious intermediary, offers an extraordinary service: he reunites the living with their dearly departed. Meeting his clients at a luxury hotel, Ayumi lays down the ground rules: each reunion is a one-time arrangement that the dead can refuse; the service is entirely free, and the meeting must take place during a full moon.

It’s 1963, two years since Barbara Feldman’s husband died. Raising two kids, she’s finally emerging from her cocoon of grief. Not yet a butterfly, but she’s anxious to spread her wings. Then one day her mother-in-law, Ruth, shows up on her doorstep with five suitcases, expecting a room of her own with a suitable mattress. Abrasive and stuck in her ways yet well meaning, Mother Ruth arrives without warning to help with the children. How can Barbara say no to a woman who is not only a widow herself but also a grieving mother?

Eighteen-year-old Salomon Destin graduates high school and anxiously trades life on Guadeloupe in the Caribbean for France to continue his studies. Strasbourg is his new home. He’s carving out a promising new path for himself. And most of all, he’s left behind the disorder of so much family drama, including that of a dissolute father, a mother who turns a blind eye to the chaos, his troubled and aimless brother Junior, and Salomon’s inherited obligations as peacekeeper.

When Cy Adler died, nobody saw it coming, least of all his daughter, Cammy. Almost thirty, slightly aimless, and living in a basement apartment in Astoria, Cammy is forced to slum it back to River Hill, her one-square-mile New Jersey hometown, to sit shiva. Cammy’s fraught relationship with her high-strung mother, Beth, never made coming home easy. Now, with her beloved father gone and pompous Rabbi Wiener buzzing around, she would rather be anywhere but crammed in her childhood bedroom, in a house filled with a smorgasbord of food brought over by consoling guests.

As the youngest and most rebellious daughter of the overly protective Luna family, Gabriela Luna Valdés claws after her freedom in any way she can. This time, her hunger for adventure has led her aboard a windswept ship bearing for her homeland, away from a mob of fumbling British suitors. But Gabby can’t escape her father’s expectation that she settle down to find a proper husband—a compromise she’s unwilling to make.

Once in a faraway kingdom there was a man prophesied to be the chosen one, who would defeat a great villain, the Eternal Khan, and save the kingdom. But then the Eternal Khan died . . . and the prophecy was broken. For Jian, the fated hero, this could have been a moment to succumb to despair. But instead, he chose to create his own destiny. He studied under Taishi, his curmudgeonly but beloved mentor, to become a great warrior.

The Last Prophet is a novel based on the extraordinary life of the prophet Muhammad, one-time shepherd and outcast revolutionary. This desert master’s discipline and principles would later become the basis for Islam, which today claims two billion followers.

Twenty-two years ago, Claire Campbell’s older sister, Natalie, disappeared shortly after her eighteenth birthday. Days later, her blood was found in a car, a man was arrested, and the case was swiftly closed. In the decades since, Claire has attempted to forget her traumatic past by moving to the city and climbing the ranks as an investigative journalist... until an unexpected call from her father forces her to come back home and face it all anew.

Annis est encore une enfant quand sa mère est vendue à un autre propriétaire. Et n'est guère plus âgée quand son maître, qui est aussi l'homme qui a violé sa mère, se débarrasse d'elle avec d'autres esclaves. Lors de leur terrible marche vers les plantations de La Nouvelle-Orléans, Annis tente de se raccrocher à la vie et aux enseignements de sa mère : se battre, toujours, avec les armes et les sagesses qu'elle lui a transmises.

Un soir, Amani, soixante-sept ans, femme de ménage à la retraite dans une cité HLM paisible en bordure de forêt, s'en va. Père et fils tentent de comprendre ce qui a poussé le pilier de leur famille à disparaître. Il pressent que ce départ est lié à l'histoire de ses parents, orphelins émigrés de Tunisie.

Dans ce village, c'est du corps des femmes qu'on tire l'argent qui fait vivre les familles. Car ici, on vend une denrée précieuse : le lait maternel. Sylvaine, son propre enfant à peine sevré, accueille chez elle comme tant d'autres une « petite de la ville ». Mais une nuit, en pleine forêt, elle découvre un bébé abandonné dans une clairière et à ses côtés un carnet qui raconte son histoire.

Written immediately before Ágota Kristóf's acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.

À la mort de sa mère, Youssef, un professeur marocain exilé en France depuis un quart de siècle, revient à Salé, sa ville natale, à la demande de ses sœurs, pour liquider l'héritage familial. À travers lui, les voix du passé résonnent et l'interpellent, dont celle de Najib, son ami et amant de jeunesse au destin tragique, happé par le trafic de drogue et la corruption d'un colonel de l'armée du roi Hassan II.

As a firefighter, Ava sees the devastation caused when homes are ruined. If she uncovers precious possessions that escaped a blaze unscathed, she returns them to their owner. When Cassie and her son lose everything in a fire, they have nothing and nowhere to go. On impulse, Ava offers them refuge by staying with her. After three failed rounds of IVF, Ava and her husband are divided on how to start their own family. Needing to find answers about her own adoption and birth family, Ava embarks on a journey to Ireland with Cassie by her side for support.