Cele mai bune cărți publicate în 2017
Finalul de an este mai mereu o perioadă de bilanț, de liste și topuri cu cele mai cele. În materie de carte, 2017 a fost:
The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body. From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm - called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo - and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Unfolding over a single night, Lincoln in the Bardo is written with George Saunders' inimitable humour, pathos and grace. Here he invents an exhilarating new form, and is confirmed as one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Deploying a theatrical, kaleidoscopic panoply of voices - living and dead, historical and fictional - Lincoln in the Bardo poses a timeless question: how do we live and love when we know that everything we hold dear must end?
When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, Rene, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject.
Rene chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work. Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, and, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up and with coloured hair. In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies.
A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world's greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.
The brilliant new novel by the author of the New York Times bestseller, Everything I Never Told You. Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principal is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs.Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family - and Mia's. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood - and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.
Historians love to write about rulers--kings, emperors, presidents--or about vast social forces--migration, industrialisation--but what if they are all missing the point? Thinking about our own lives, isn't it clear that what makes the world go round are families, colleagues, teams, associations: in other words, networks? Many old Italian towns have the same central structure: a large square where people gather and a tower where the town's elite ruled from. Throughout history you can express the battle between the two as a battle of networks - who knows who, who works with who: guilds, families, fellowships, clans, cabals all cooperating to make sometimes huge changes. Sometimes the power lies with those lurking in the tower and sometimes with those in the square.Access to information, to credit, to ideas, to news - all constantly shift. Whether in the Renaissance or in the present day what makes the world work is an astonishing tangle of networks - and this was as true for the effort that went into discovering the New World as it is now for fighting elections or just talking to friends online.In his enormously enjoyable new book, Niall Ferguson celebrates the myriad ways in which the battle between rival networks makes history happen.
'Spare, crystalline prose, mixing the real and the surreal and using old fairy-tale magic... An unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing - to fall in love - in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.
Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind - when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world . . .
This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. "A powerfully alive novel haunted by ghosts; a road trip where people can go but they can never leave; a visceral and intimate drama that plays out like a grand epic, Sing, Unburied, Sing is staggering" - Marlon James, Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing examines the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds. Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black and her children's father is white. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America. It is a majestic new work from an extraordinary and singular author.
The great Norse myths are woven into the fabric of our storytelling - from Tolkien, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff to Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics. They are also an inspiration for Neil Gaiman's own award-bedecked, bestselling fiction. Now he reaches back through time to the original source stories in a thrilling and vivid rendition of the great Norse tales. Gaiman's gods are thoroughly alive on the page - irascible, visceral, playful, passionate - and the tales carry us from the beginning of everything to Ragnar'k and the twilight of the gods. Galvanised by Gaiman's prose, Thor, Loki, Odin and Freya are irresistible forces for modern readers and the crackling, brilliant writing demands to be read aloud around an open fire on a freezing, starlit night.
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
'In a country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians.' - Financial Times
'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting.' - The Times
'A beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities... The first post-Brexit novel.' - Guardian
A breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both.
Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.
Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .
'Terrific, extraordinary, playful... There is an awful lot to lift the soul' - Daily Mail
'Bold and brilliant.' Observer
'A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' - Washington Post. The first novel in 20 years from the Booker-prize winning author of The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years - the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, 'normalcy' is declared. Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love-and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts. 'A novel that demands and rewards the reader's concentration, this is a dazzling return to form' - Independent. 'This novel is a freedom song. Every page has the stamp of Roy's originality. Such brutality, such beauty' - Amitva Kumar, the author of Immigrant, Montana.
Ne-am bucura să ne spuneți ce alte cărți publicate în 2017 ar mai trebui să includem în acest top. Iar dacă vreți să consultați lista completă de titluri (cu prețuri reduse până la -60%), o puteți găsi aici.
- anul diversității (The Hate U Give de Angie Thomas, The Underground Railroad de Colson Whitehead, Homegoing de Yaa Gyasi);
- al literaturii feministe (Option B de Sheryl Sandberg și Adam Grant, Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls de Francesca Cavallo și Elena Favilli, Hunger de Roxane Gay);
- dar și al romanelor Young Adult cu teme contemporane și dificile cum ar fi abuzul sau afecțiunile mintale (Turtles All the Way Down de John Green, My Absolute Darling de Gabriel Tallent, History is All You Left Me de Adam Silvera);
- se remarcă și câteva titluri de gen - thriller (The Book of Mirrors de E.O. Chirovici), fantasy (La Belle Sauvage de Philip Pullman) sau SF (Artemis de Andy Weir);
- și avem parte și de non-ficțiune de excepție (When Breath Becomes Air de Paul Kalanithi, The Square and the Tower de Niall Ferguson, Homo Deus de Yuval Noah Harari)
- plus ceva memorii (Finding My Virginity de Richard Branson) și biografii (Leonardo Da Vinci de Walter Isaacson).
Cele mai bune cărți publicate în 2017
Lincoln in the Bardo de George Saunders
The extraordinary first novel by the bestselling, Folio Prize-winning, National Book Award-shortlisted George Saunders, about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his eleven year old son, Willie, at the dawn of the Civil War The American Civil War rages while President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son lies gravely ill. In a matter of days, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy's body. From this seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of realism, entering a thrilling, supernatural domain both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself trapped in a transitional realm - called, in Tibetan tradition, the bardo - and as ghosts mingle, squabble, gripe and commiserate, and stony tendrils creep towards the boy, a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Unfolding over a single night, Lincoln in the Bardo is written with George Saunders' inimitable humour, pathos and grace. Here he invents an exhilarating new form, and is confirmed as one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Deploying a theatrical, kaleidoscopic panoply of voices - living and dead, historical and fictional - Lincoln in the Bardo poses a timeless question: how do we live and love when we know that everything we hold dear must end?
The Golden House de Salman Rushdie
When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society. The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, Rene, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject.
Rene chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden: the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work. Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat: the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, and, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up and with coloured hair. In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies.
A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world's greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.
Little Fires Everywhere de Celeste Ng
The brilliant new novel by the author of the New York Times bestseller, Everything I Never Told You. Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer: how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down. In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is meticulously planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colours of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principal is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother- who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than just tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the alluring mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past, and a disregard for the rules that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.When the Richardsons' friends attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town and puts Mia and Mrs.Richardson on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Mrs. Richardson becomes determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs to her own family - and Mia's. Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of long-held secrets and the ferocious pull of motherhood - and the danger of believing that planning and following the rules can avert disaster, or heartbreak.
The Square and the Tower de Niall Ferguson
Historians love to write about rulers--kings, emperors, presidents--or about vast social forces--migration, industrialisation--but what if they are all missing the point? Thinking about our own lives, isn't it clear that what makes the world go round are families, colleagues, teams, associations: in other words, networks? Many old Italian towns have the same central structure: a large square where people gather and a tower where the town's elite ruled from. Throughout history you can express the battle between the two as a battle of networks - who knows who, who works with who: guilds, families, fellowships, clans, cabals all cooperating to make sometimes huge changes. Sometimes the power lies with those lurking in the tower and sometimes with those in the square.Access to information, to credit, to ideas, to news - all constantly shift. Whether in the Renaissance or in the present day what makes the world work is an astonishing tangle of networks - and this was as true for the effort that went into discovering the New World as it is now for fighting elections or just talking to friends online.In his enormously enjoyable new book, Niall Ferguson celebrates the myriad ways in which the battle between rival networks makes history happen.
Exit West de Mohsin Hamid
'Spare, crystalline prose, mixing the real and the surreal and using old fairy-tale magic... An unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
An extraordinary story of love and hope from the bestselling, Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Nadia and Saeed are two ordinary young people, attempting to do an extraordinary thing - to fall in love - in a world turned upside down. Theirs will be a love story but also a story about how we live now and how we might live tomorrow, of a world in crisis and two human beings travelling through it.
Civil war has come to the city which Nadia and Saeed call home. Before long they will need to leave their motherland behind - when the streets are no longer useable and the unknown is safer than the known. They will join the great outpouring of people fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world . . .
Sing, Unburied, Sing de Jesmyn Ward
This wrenching new novel by Jesmyn Ward digs deep into the not-buried heart of the American nightmare. "A powerfully alive novel haunted by ghosts; a road trip where people can go but they can never leave; a visceral and intimate drama that plays out like a grand epic, Sing, Unburied, Sing is staggering" - Marlon James, Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2015. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing examines the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power - and limitations - of family bonds. Jojo is thirteen years old and trying to understand what it means to be a man. His mother, Leonie, is in constant conflict with herself and those around her. She is black and her children's father is white. Embattled in ways that reflect the brutal reality of her circumstances, she wants to be a better mother, but can't put her children above her own needs, especially her drug use. When the children's father is released from prison, Leonie packs her kids and a friend into her car and drives north to the heart of Mississippi and Parchman Farm, the State Penitentiary. At Parchman, there is another boy, the ghost of a dead inmate who carries all of the ugly history of the South with him in his wandering. He too has something to teach Jojo about fathers and sons, about legacies, about violence, about love. Rich with Ward's distinctive, lyrical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America. It is a majestic new work from an extraordinary and singular author.
Norse Mythology de Neil Gaiman
The great Norse myths are woven into the fabric of our storytelling - from Tolkien, Alan Garner and Rosemary Sutcliff to Game of Thrones and Marvel Comics. They are also an inspiration for Neil Gaiman's own award-bedecked, bestselling fiction. Now he reaches back through time to the original source stories in a thrilling and vivid rendition of the great Norse tales. Gaiman's gods are thoroughly alive on the page - irascible, visceral, playful, passionate - and the tales carry us from the beginning of everything to Ragnar'k and the twilight of the gods. Galvanised by Gaiman's prose, Thor, Loki, Odin and Freya are irresistible forces for modern readers and the crackling, brilliant writing demands to be read aloud around an open fire on a freezing, starlit night.
The Underground Railroad de Colson Whitehead
Praised by Barack Obama and an Oprah Book Club Pick, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead won the National Book Award 2016.
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.
In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.
Autumn de Ali Smith
'In a country apparently divided against itself, a writer such as Smith is more valuable than a whole parliament of politicians.' - Financial Times
'Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting.' - The Times
'A beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities... The first post-Brexit novel.' - Guardian
A breathtakingly inventive new novel from the Man Booker-shortlisted and Baileys Prize-winning author of How to be both.
Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.
Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .
'Terrific, extraordinary, playful... There is an awful lot to lift the soul' - Daily Mail
'Bold and brilliant.' Observer
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness de Arundhati Joy
'A great tempest of a novel... which will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion' - Washington Post. The first novel in 20 years from the Booker-prize winning author of The God of Small Things, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on a journey of many years - the story spooling outwards from the cramped neighbourhoods of Old Delhi into the burgeoning new metropolis and beyond, to the Valley of Kashmir and the forests of Central India, where war is peace and peace is war, and where, from time to time, 'normalcy' is declared. Anjum, who used to be Aftab, unrolls a threadbare carpet in a city graveyard that she calls home. A baby appears quite suddenly on a pavement, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. The enigmatic S. Tilottama is as much of a presence as she is an absence in the lives of the three men who loved her. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is at once an aching love story and a decisive remonstration. It is told in a whisper, in a shout, through tears and sometimes with a laugh. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, mended by love-and by hope. For this reason, they are as steely as they are fragile, and they never surrender. This ravishing, magnificent book reinvents what a novel can do and can be. And it demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy's storytelling gifts. 'A novel that demands and rewards the reader's concentration, this is a dazzling return to form' - Independent. 'This novel is a freedom song. Every page has the stamp of Roy's originality. Such brutality, such beauty' - Amitva Kumar, the author of Immigrant, Montana.
Ne-am bucura să ne spuneți ce alte cărți publicate în 2017 ar mai trebui să includem în acest top. Iar dacă vreți să consultați lista completă de titluri (cu prețuri reduse până la -60%), o puteți găsi aici.