„And never at the top“ (by Paolo Cognetti)-is a book for all people who love mountains, climbing and self-examination while diving into their own soul. Cognetti is one of the most widely read and contemporary Italian writers. He spends part of the year in his hut in the Italian Alps at an altitude of 2000 meters. He is the author of the ultimate Italian bestseller “Eight Mountains” – a book that won the Italian literary award Strega and the French award Medicis. In the new book, the author tells the story of wandering through small Tibet in the remote Dolpo region of Nepal. There was a 2017 trail of the cult book “Snowy leopard” by Peter Matthiessen. The narrator travels the region with his childhood friend Remigi (who never left the Alps) and the painter Nicole, and accompanied by several silent Nepalese sherpa guides. He tries to discover a new way of walking and observing. The author tries to experience the last original mountain before this mountain disappears forever.
http://paolocognetti.blogspot.com/
“Frankenstein in Baghdad” (by Ahmed Saadawi) – is a novel by one of the most important contemporary Iraqi authors, Ahmed Saadawi.
From the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad, Hadi—a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café—collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive—first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path. A prizewinning novel by “Baghdad’s new literary star” (The New York Times), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.
*Man Booker International Prize finalist*
“Brave and ingenious.” —The New York Times
“Gripping, darkly humorous . . . profound.” —Phil Klay, bestselling author and National Book Award winner for Redeployment
“Extraordinary . . . A devastating but essential read.” —Kevin Powers, bestselling author and National Book Award finalist for The Yellow Birds
“Curtain” is an intimate novel about the life of writer Kader Abdolah. His life is literally divided into two parts.This is his latest novel.
In the first half of his life, the writer lived in Iran, where he was born. The second half began when the writer fled his homeland. He has set out on a journey and is coming to the Netherlands. The writer founds a family and creates a literary opus. This writer’s books have been translated into many languages. He has traveled the world meeting readers in various countries. Iran is the writer’s homeland and the only country he can never return to: Iran – even when his mother is at the end of his life. That’s why Kader Abdolah travels to the safe city of Dubai to see his mother – perhaps for the last time.
When Abdolah arrives in Dubai, he will be confronted with the mysterious world of old age into which his mother introduces him more and more deeply. She gradually disappears into the world of dementia: sometimes she knows she’s in an apartment in Dubai, sometimes she thinks she’s in his apartment in Amsterdam. At the same time, he believes he is finally on a hajj to the holy city of Mecca. Increasingly and figuratively, it remains behind the curtain that separates reality and imagination. So once upon a time, sitting behind the curtain that separated the living room from the pantry behind which she could only retreat into the world of her imagination – she told stories to her son. Abdolah revives old memories and stories in the novel. But only in the world of imagination, in the world behind the curtain, does he ask questions that he does not dare to ask his mother and his estranged sister – he can only entrust them to paper and he must write about it. The result is an intimate and sometimes funny and painful story about the possibility and impossibility of establishing contact with others and about the boundaries between reality and imagination; the story of a demented mother and her children scattered by traumatic events from the past.
magicandbeauty 