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José Saramago has passed away. He was my favorite writer :sad:

During the Napoleonic Wars, a French officer participating in the conquest of Saragossa finds a diary. Shortly afterwards he’s captured. However one of the Spanish officers notices the diary and identifies himself as one of the descendents of the diary’s owner. He saves the Frenchman for having...

The poet Richard Cadogan returns to Oxford, where he studied, in pursuit of adventure and excitement. Arriving late at night he is drawn to a toyshop whose door stands ajar. Inside he finds a dead woman. He runs for the police, but when they return the toyshop has disappeared and in its place...

Deborah Davis’ Strapless tells the story of the creation of American painter John Singer Sargent’s most famous painting, Madame X. It’s a story that starts in antebellum New Orleans and ends in Bohemian Paris. Amélie Avegno is an American beauty who travels to Paris and quickly becomes one of...

G. K. Chesterton is a very special writer. He seems to write about the least important things: murders, anarchist conspiracies, kidnappings and all types of crimes imaginable. His ‘Father Brown’ stories chronicle the exploits of a detective priest. In The Man Who Was Thursday, a young man...

Fifteen-year-old Melanie loses her parents when they’re travelling in America. Without resources, she and her younger brothers, Jonathon and five-year-old Victoria, move to London and get used to living in Uncle Philip’s home. This is Angela Carter’s basic plot for her novel about the...

Hi, I was wondering if anyone could recommend me some novels by Sparks or by writers who have themes and a style similar to his. I'm looking for emotionally-charged novels, which may deal with romantic relationships, and that are so good they make you cry. I'm at complete loss in this type of...

Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo receives an assignment to the old Bastiani Fortress, on the frontier, where the desert starts and goes on for miles until disappearing inside a thick mist. Young Drogo is disheartened because he yearns for military glory, for the romantic death on the battlefield, and...

Scores, the music from movies, constitutes something like 80% of what I listen to every day. I can't stand lyrics myself, I figure they're second-rate poems, and in the end what I really want is pure sound. So film scores are the closest to my ideal of music. I love peaceful, meditative sounds...

In this novel Casares returns to the topics of time and memory that made The Invention of Morel such a fascinating experience. It’s 1927 and Emilio Gauna, a lowlife mechanic from Buenos Aires wins a thousand pesos at the horse tracks: being young and having no responsibilities, family or love...

The ‘Father Brown’ stories must constitute the most unusual collection of detective fiction yet written. The mysteries G.K. Chesterton builds are some of the most whimsical, surreal, absurd, unlikely crimes ever imagined, which defy logical solution. And yet what is most incredible is that they...

In this short novella Italo Svevo introduces us to Mario Samigli, a 60-year-old country writer who considers himself a literary master for having written and self-published a novel in his twenties that no one has really read. Poor Mario dreams of having his novel published outside Italy and...

In 1902 an aspiring poet named Franz Kappus sent a letter to his idol, Rainer Maria Rilke, asking him to evaluate some of his poetry. In the course of this relationship Rilke would send ten letters to Kappus, which the young poet collected and published after Rilke's death. In these letters...

Hauntings is a collection of supernatural short-stories that remains on the threshold between the fantastic and the psychological. Perhaps ghosts and strange forces do exist here, but they’re always invited by the obsessions, hatreds and passions of the living. In the first story, Amour...

When I think Franz Kafka has no more secrets for me, I read Letter to his Father and lose myself in awe. This short letter, no longer than a novella, may well be Kafka’s most perfect work: short, clear, full of feeling, encompassing his pessimistic worldview, explaining his oeuvre. In Kafka’s...

An early dystopian short novel from a writer I had never read before, The Scarlet Plague is hardly a mind-blowing masterpiece of the genre. However, unlike in most dystopian novels I’ve read the world is not only ruined, it’s irreversibly doomed to remain ruined for a long time. And that's good...

She must have terrified readers when it first came out. I can only imagine how the prim, sexually-pressed Victorian society received a novel about an immortal woman who commands a lost tribe, possesses mystical powers, can submit any man to her will by unveiling her face, and has the knowledge...

I'm trying to build a list of novels about real-life writers. So far I've come up with: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago (Fernando Pessoa) Immortality, Milan Kundera (Goethe) The Master of St. Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee (Dostoevsky) Lotte in Weimar, Thomas Mann (Goethe)...

Horace Walpole. A brilliant politician and witty observer of his time, his achievements include: writing enough letters to fill over 40 volumes of enormous value to historians; causing a personal rift between Rousseau and Hume which involved almost every intellectual of the time (Rousseau’s...

A Plan for Escape narrates the journey of lieutenant Henrique Navers, in exile from France for mysterious reasons, to an unnamed prison archipelago in the French Guiana, where he’ll take charge of the penitentiary. Before departing from the mainland he hears ominous concerns that the prison...