Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Decameron

  Giovanni Boccaccio

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  Set against the shadow of the Black Plague, The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio is a radiant tapestry of love, wit, tragedy, and the triumph of the human spirit. When Florence is ravaged by pestilence, ten young nobles — seven women and three men — flee to a countryside villa to escape the horrors of the city. Over ten days, they pass the time by telling one hundred stories: tales of romance and folly, devotion and deception, virtue and vice. 
  From the poetic tragedy of “Griselda” to the romantic daring of “Cymon and Iphigenia” and the moral allegory of “The Three Rings,” Boccaccio captures the full spectrum of human experience — earthy, wise, and profoundly moving. 
  Narrated with grace and warmth by Mary Ellin Kurtz, this timeless masterpiece invites listeners into a world where storytelling itself becomes an act of survival — and of joy.

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  The Sleeping Car Porter

  Suzette Mayr

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  FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA'S INSTAGRAM 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 
  WINNER OF THE 2022 GILLER PRIZE 
  WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION 
  FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION 
  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022 
  OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE 
  THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 
  CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION 
  WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE 
  SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE 
  When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair 
  The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment. 
  Baxter’s name isn’t George. But it’s 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he’ll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with “George.” 
  On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter’s memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can’t part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor. 
  "Suzette Mayr brings to life –believably, achingly, thrillingly –a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly one hundred years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate –and eerily contemporary. The sleeping car porter in this sleek, stylish novel is named R.T. Baxter –called George by the people upon whom he waits, as is every other Black porter. Baxter’s dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with his secret life as a gay man, and in Mayr’s triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but into and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters, and, finally, into a beautifully rendered radiance." – 2022 Giller Prize Jury

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  Murder on the Rhône

  Ashley Gardner, Jennifer Ashley

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  In June, 1820, I travel to Lyon to attend a wedding, looking forward to sunny strolls on the city’s two rivers and sampling the region’s food. Instead, I soon spy a man from my past who stirs painful and enraging memories. 
  I find the same man bent over a corpse on one of the city’s bridges one morning, holding a blood-soaked knife, but he insists he is innocent of the murder. I’d like him to be responsible, but my experience investigating problems of this sort tells me he is not. 
  Suspicion, unfortunately, falls on the family my daughter is about to marry into, whose high standing and respect from the townspeople will not help them against the gendarmes determined to solve the crime. 
  When I look into the matter, I dredge up dark things from that family’s past that they will do anything to keep me from discovering …

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  O Pioneers!

  Willa Cather

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  "O Pioneers!" is one of Willa Cather's most celebrated novels, published in 1913. It's the first book in her "Great Plains Trilogy" and is set in the rural farming community of Hanover, Nebraska, at the turn of the 20th century. The story focuses on the life of Alexandra Bergson, a strong-willed young woman who inherits her father's farm and must navigate the challenges of frontier life. Cather paints a rich portrait of the American Midwest, exploring themes of immigration, the relationship between people and the land they inhabit, and the enduring spirit of the pioneers who sought to tame it.

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  Ravage & Son

  Jerome Charyn

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  A master storyteller's novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early twentieth-century Manhattan 
   
   
   
  Ravage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan's Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror. 
   
   
   
  Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish "Mr. Hyde," a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man. 
   
   
   
  A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

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  Igifu

  Scholastique Mukasonga

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  The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. 
  Scholastique Mukasonga’s five autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. 
  In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or “igifu,” gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent’s bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba’s mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. 
  The writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk, and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Mukasonga sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

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