Title : The Purple Line - Wolfram Fleischhauer - book Summary : We all know this scene: two women in a bathtub, one pinching the tip of the other's breast, the other holding a ring between her thumb and forefinger. The narrator of The Purple Line, a young, somewhat disillusioned academic, also saw it at the Louvre. But now a strange manuscript reveals its incredible mystery: the painting supposedly explains the death of his mistress Gabrielle d'Estrées, a few days before her marriage to King Henry IV. What explanation can be given for her death on the eve of her coronation? What is the connection with the work? Was Gabrielle poisoned by Grand Duke Ferdinand? Why did diplomatic dispatches between Paris and Florence stop a few days before? In this magnificent novel, Wolfram Fleischhauer takes his reader into a dark and brutal world, following in the footsteps of Vignac, a young painter whose ambition will lead to his downfall. In the France of Henry IV, still troubled by the Wars of Religion and the political maneuvering of the great European powers, an artist discovers that a few brushstrokes are enough to draw you into the most Machiavellian stratagems of high politics. EAN: 9782709626507 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Gardener's Constancy - John Le Carré - book Summary : Tessa Quayle, a young and beautiful English lawyer, was brutally murdered near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. Her traveling companion and supposed lover, an African doctor with a humanitarian organization, has disappeared without a trace. Tessa's husband, Justin, a career diplomat at the British High Commission in Nairobi and an amateur gardener, embarks on a solitary quest to find the killers and their motives. His quest takes him to London, then across Europe and Canada, back to Africa, to South Sudan, and ends at the very scene of the crime. An odyssey full of violence and fury, where the dark machinations of pharmaceutical multinationals are plotted and strange political alliances are formed. And as Justin's conscience awakens, as he rallies to Tessa's cause, even completing the mission she had set for herself, his greatest revelation will be the discovery of this woman he hardly had time to love. The Gardener's Constancy blends the moving story of a man raised by tragedy with the merciless exploration of the hidden side of globalization by one of the most incisive novelists of our time. John le Carré , born in 1931, studied at the universities of Bern and Oxford, taught at Eton, and worked briefly for British intelligence during the Cold War. For six decades, he devoted himself to writing. He died in 2020 at the age of 89. EAN: 9782020495752 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : LA Story - James Frey - book Summary : From one of America's most celebrated and controversial authors comes his debut novel, a bold chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles. Dozens of characters parade before the reader's eyes—some only making a one-off appearance—as James Frey unfolds the dramatic lives of a handful of L.A.'s lost souls: a brilliant, ambitious Latino woman whose hopes are shattered in a moment of crushing humiliation; an overly narcissistic action actor whose pursuit of an impossible passion threatens to destroy him; two nineteen-year-olds who flee the stifling atmosphere of their hometown and struggle to survive on the fringes of the big city; and an old alcoholic from Venice Beach whose life is turned upside down when a half-dead drug-addicted teenage girl shows up in front of the bathroom where he has taken up residence. This powerful novel resonates with millions of other lives that, taken together, describe a city, a culture, and an era. In a breathtaking tour de force, THE STORY unfolds the joys, horrors, and unexpected twists of life and death in the City of Angels. EAN: 9782081221314 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Point Nemo Island - Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès - book Summary : A total, whirlwind, conquering adventure novel, a true machinery of the imagination where all the codes of romance and popular literature intertwine and collide, between the historical past and projection into the future, our programmed obsessions and our dreams of irrepressible escapes. Martial Canterel, a wealthy opium addict, allows his reconstruction of the famous Battle of Gaugamela to be interrupted by his old friend Holmes (John Shylock...). A fabulous diamond, the Anankè, has been stolen from Lady MacRae, while three right feet wearing Anankè sneakers washed up on the Scottish coast, very close to her castle... So here are Holmes, his butler and the aristocratic dandy, soon flanked by Lady MacRae and her daughter Verity, swept away - to begin with - on the Trans-Siberian in pursuit of the elusive Noh Straddle. Through a jubilant mise en abyme, this bouncy plot is set in the vagaries of a cigar factory in the Périgord Noir where, as in the Caribbean, the tradition of reading aloud the adventures of Jean Valjean or Monte Cristo is perpetuated. Soon taken over by Monsieur Wang, a high-tech voyeur and founder of B@bil Books, an e-reader assembly plant... With abrasive irony, this tsunami-novel sweeps away all the usual realistic constructions and opens extraordinary horizons of fiction. This wild novelistic escapade is also the most piquant reflection on literary art, coupled with a radical critique of ideologies and anonymous, sprawling governance, which alienates us even in our intimacy. Born in 1954 in Sidi-Bel-Abbès, he is the author, published by Zulma, of the monumental Là où les tigres sont chez eux (Fnac Novel Prize, Giono Prize and Médicis Prize 2008), of La Montagne de minuit and of the collection of short stories La Mémoire de riz. EAN: 9782843046971 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Jade Disc, volume 1 - The Celestial Horses - José Frèches - book Summary : The Jade Disc is the dazzling and thrilling novel of the immense fusion that took place, in the 3rd century BC, between the "Warring Kingdoms" to give birth to the largest and most populated Empire in the world. In this fabulous universe where words resemble poems, where eroticism is sublimated and women are oh so inventive, where ambition is carnivorous but not devoid of seduction, power is the supreme master. Unless it is a mortal enemy... EAN: 9782845630956 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud - book Summary : Manhattan, early 2001. Three thirty-somethings, friends since college, find themselves torn between their dreams and the demands of reality: Marina, an apprentice journalist, crushed by her father Murray, who reigns supreme over the New York intelligentsia; Danielle, in search of a soul mate and professional recognition; Julius, a gay, penniless freelancer, yearning only to settle down but unable to bring himself to do so. Their relationship becomes dangerously complicated with the arrival of the seductive Ludovic and especially with that of Bootie, twenty years old, idealistic and provincial, whose education remains to be done. This double irruption triggers a series of power struggles and emotional crossfire, a game of seduction and pretense at the end of which the masks will fall. And Murray, "the emperor," will drag all these grown-up children down with him, in a comedy of lost innocence that will culminate on a certain September 11. Through her virtuoso play on points of view, her skill in connecting each individual trajectory to the fabric of History, Claire Messud offers us a portrait as ferocious as it is delightful of a narcissistic metropolis, and recreates an entire era, so close and yet already so distant. EAN: 9782070780648 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Indian River - Jeffrey Lent - book Summary : My real problem with The Indian River was to determine whether it was a masterpiece or simply an American classic." Jim Harrison At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the borders of the United States remained blurred. Indian Stream, the Indian River, was a region in northern New Hampshire, bordering Canada. Many outlaws, trappers, and other farmers eager to escape justice had founded a small village there. This is where Blood decided to settle and start all over again. Accompanied by Sally, a sixteen-year-old prostitute he won playing cards, he plans to open a tavern and sell the rum, gunpowder, and furs they have transported there. Sally, for her part, reserves the right to choose her customers. They both aspire to a peaceful life, but incidents multiply within the community, and Blood and Sally are soon singled out as the source of all the trouble. Tensions reach a peak when two young men arrive in the village and force Blood to confront his past. In prose that is at once dense, lucid, and seductive, and has been compared to that of Faulkner, Jeffrey Lent offers us a captivating tale: he draws us into the heart of the poverty and deprivation of a nascent society that, in the grip of self-destructive madness, loses its innocence. " The Indian River is an exceptional novel about borders, memory, imagination, the old dream of becoming better by going to live elsewhere. (...) It is at once a love story, a parable and an East Coast Western. Colum McCann EAN: 9782259197595 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : School Sorrow - Daniel Pennac - book Summary : Renaudot Prize 2007 School Sorrow, in the vein of Like a Novel, addresses the question of school from the perspective of the student, and in this case, the bad student. Daniel Pennac, a former dunce himself, studies this figure of popular folklore, giving it its letters of nobility, while also restoring its weight of anguish and pain. EAN: 9782070769179 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : French - Alexandre Jardin - book Summary : A cheeky girl who gives herself the right to be herself. A lover who consents to all her contradictions. A rebel wise enough to be reckless. A French woman. EAN: 9782226441898 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : A Sudden Stir of the Heart - Barbara Taylor Bradford - book Summary : In this new bestseller, the author of The Space of a Life paints a moving portrait of Claire and Laura, two childhood friends subject to the whims of fate. Both models of professional and personal success, they possess everything a woman could wish for. Yet, this happiness that seemed so certain to them hides terrible dramas. Tragedy strikes Claire; while Laura's family's painful past resurfaces. Will they find in friendship a weapon strong enough to face life's trials? EAN: 9782226108944 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Now or Never - Penny Jordan - book Summary : The baby you are carrying belongs to someone else... " Upon discovering these words that so violently attack what is most dear to her, Maggie is devastated. Who could be so angry with her as to send her an anonymous letter? Placing her hand on her belly, which is rounding out over the weeks in a spontaneous gesture of protection, Maggie is in shock. Who... if not Nicki? Of the four friends who meet for ritual dinners, was it not she, her best friend, who reacted the strangest, almost with hostility, when she announced this unexpected pregnancy? For this child is the fruit of a miracle: without the assistance of doctors and science, Maggie could not have carried this baby. He is also the fruit of the passion that unites scandalous lovers, because, sixteen years younger than Maggie, Oliver seems to some too handsome, too young, too arrogant... Their affair has shocked. And the birth of this child sends a new shock wave through those around them. Engrossed in her happiness, Maggie has no idea what the news of this happy event will resonate with her friends, and even less the secret and intimate drama that it will reveal in each of them... EAN: 9782280843096 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Romance of Saint Petersburg - Loves on the Banks of the Neva - Vladimir Fédorovski - book Summary : On the occasion of the tercentenary of Saint Petersburg, Vladimir Fédorovski stages the great moments of the romantic history of this unusual city created by the sole will of Peter the Great on the banks of the Neva. Peter I and his peasant empress, Catherine II and her vigorous companion Prince Potemkin, Alexander I and his occult muse, but also the great Russian and Western artists and men of letters (Pushkin, Dostoevsky, the poets of the Silver Age, the Chevalier d'Éon, the Marquis de Custine, Balzac) are the characters of this true novel which invites us on a romantic stroll in the Venice of the North. An astonishing journey through time and space, in the sparkling palaces of Saint Petersburg of yesterday and the winding streets of Leningrad, in the footsteps of the men and women who fell in love there. This book draws on archives from confidential funds recently made accessible in Russia and on previously unpublished testimonies. Pages marked by mystery, escape, adventure, and challenge. EAN: 9782268044392 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Lean on me - Serge Joncour - book Summary : 2016 Interallié Prize Aurore is a renowned stylist and Ludovic is a farmer turned debt collector. They have nothing in common except for a curious problem: crows have taken up residence in the courtyard of their Parisian building. She is terrified of them, while her fiery neighbor would know how to get rid of them. For this young woman, who both intimidates and repels him, he will kill them. This first step will lead them down a perilous path that, from complicity to romantic confusion, will gradually distance them from their reasonable daily lives. In this great novel of love and disorder, Serge Joncour casts his gaze far and wide: by bringing the contemporary world and the intimate universe into collision, he depicts our opposing aspirations, the city and the countryside, solidarity and selfishness, in a context of general societal disorder where, ultimately, love seems to be the last means of resistance. EAN: 9782081306639 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : A Traitor's Daughter - Anna Lorme - book Summary : In a tone of raw, precise sobriety, without concern for novelistic transposition and without ever complaining, Anna Lorme recounts her childhood in an aristocratic family in Leningrad in the aftermath of the Revolution. She was abandoned by her very young father, who became a translator for the Comintern. She was seven years old when her mother died. She was adopted by her grandmother and her second husband. Her guardian was an alcoholic and tortured her. In 1934, Kirov was assassinated and this marked the beginning of the Moscow Trials. On Stalin's orders, those suspected of treason were arrested, executed, and deported en masse. Anna saw many of her school friends disappear, becoming "children of traitors." Her father having been arrested and then sentenced to death, she in turn became a "daughter of a traitor." When the war broke out, she was just sixteen years old and found herself in Kursk, far from her guardians. She was deported to Austria, to a labor camp. Just as she's exhausted from despair, a miracle happens. Thanks to a Russian immigrant couple, she's able to join her aunt, a painter who married a Frenchman with a doctorate in philosophy, in the Paris region. Adopted by them, Anna will no longer be a traitor's daughter. EAN: 9782070712533 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Les Maia - Eça de Queiroz - book Summary : Jorge Luis Borges considered Eça de Queiroz "one of the greatest writers of all time": The Maias, published in 1888, is undoubtedly his masterpiece. It belongs to the genre of "cyclical" novels, which follow the fate of not only one person, but also of a family, thus preceding Thomas's Buddenbrooks. The crux of the action is a sulphurous love story in the romantic style, but the great interest of the story lies elsewhere: in the depiction of a decadent bourgeois society; in the evocation of the city of Lisbon that the hero, Carlos de Maia, explores, from the street of the "Janelas Verdes" to Chiado; finally in the character of Ega, a typical cultured, hyper-conscious, cosmopolitan Portuguese, inclined to denigrate his country to which he is deeply attached – like Eça himself. At once the story of a fatal passion, an objective portrayal of morals and a virulent satire, this book, whose rhythm recalls English novels in its style that is at once luminous, tender and ironic, has immortalized Lisbon in literature. EAN: 9782906462748 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Man Who Draws - Benoît Séverac - book Summary : A dizzying thriller that takes us back 30,000 years and challenges our vision of prehistory and our origins. The Man-Who-Draws has been tasked by his people with traveling the world to learn more about it. During his journey, he is taken prisoner by a tribe of Men-Who-Know, whose members are inexplicably murdered. The Man-Who-Draws has seven nights, until the next moon, to prove his innocence... EAN: 9782748514445 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : A Girls' Hunting and Fishing Manual - Melissa Bank - book Summary : Jane, a young New Yorker working in publishing, tells the story of her family, friends, and loves through a series of stories that trace a continuous line from her adolescence to middle age. Touching and funny, at once full of doubts and armed with a keen sense of derision and self-irony, she navigates life's crossroads with intelligence and lightness, in search of the famous user manual... EAN: 9782743604202 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Saturday - Ian McEwan - book Summary : For Henry Perowne—a renowned neurosurgeon, happy husband, and the blessed father of a blues musician and a poet—it was supposed to be just another Saturday. There was no question of marching against the war in Iraq. Instead, he was enjoying the pleasures of life. And yet... A banal skirmish, and violence erupts in his sheltered existence. Henry may try to resume his day, but his old demons and the chaos of the world will constantly catch up with him during these twenty-four hours, at the end of which nothing will ever be the same again. While diabolically building suspense, McEwan interweaves global and private events with such virtuosity that this strange Saturday becomes a metaphor for an entire life, for all our fragile lives as Westerners caught up in the turmoil of the beginning of this century. And this profound reflection on chance and destiny, the respective powers of science and art, the quest for a meaning that would resist death, shows us once again, after Expiation, a novelist who has reached the fullness of his talent. EAN: 9782070775361 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Check-point - Jean-Christophe Rufin - book Summary : Twenty-one-year-old Maud hides her beauty and her ideals behind ugly glasses. She joins an NGO and finds herself driving a fifteen-ton truck on the roads of war-torn Bosnia. The four men who accompany her in this convoy are very different from the usual image of humanitarian volunteers. In this machismo-filled daily life, Maud will nevertheless manage to place herself at the center of the game. One by one, her companions will reveal to her the secret wounds of their existence. And the true nature of their cargo. Through characters of exceptional strength, Jean-Christophe Rufin offers us a powerful psychological thriller. And Maud's adventure illuminates one of the most fundamental dilemmas of our time. At a time when violence is creeping into the heart of Europe, is there still room for the benevolent neutrality of humanitarian action? Faced with suffering, isn't it time, now, to take up arms? EAN: 9782070146413 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Plantation - Calixthe Beyala - book Summary : Zimbabwe was their land, their domain, their paradise... Until the day the "democratically elected President for life" decided to expropriate these white farmers who believed themselves to be the kings of the world, reducing them to struggle or exile. Blues is eighteen years old. Her golden hair and fierce character inflame all desires. Daughter of a large landowner, sure of her superiority and her education, she has lived on a cloud of privilege, loved, pampered, courted. But beneath her white skin beats the heart of a woman born of this African land that she loves so much, and for which she is ready to fight and die... For the first time, a great Black writer puts himself in the shoes of the Whites, the colonizers. With this tumultuous and passionate fresco, Calixthe Beyala has created a true African Gone with the Wind, populated by violent and chimerical beings, cunning and naive, Blacks and Whites struggling to invent a new life together. EAN: 9782226158352 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : The Silk Tunic - Michel Tauriac - book Summary : See photos EAN: 9782260000587 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Lives Behind Us - Maxime Alterio - book Summary : The Femme Actuelle novel of the summer, a powerful story about friendship, love and the legacies of the Great War. In July 1915, the hospital ship Mahona took 70 New Zealand nurses to the battlefield. Among them were Meg and Addie, who had nothing in common: Meg, whose father was an alcoholic and whose mother was depressed, had been taken in by her uncle and aunt. She was flirtatious and fun-loving. Addie, who came from a close-knit and loving family, was very reserved and loved nothing more than literature. However, a strong friendship developed between these two young women, which would withstand all trials. Stationed first in Egypt, they met, among others, Wallace, a surgeon, and Edward, an anesthesiologist. Meg and Wallace fell in love immediately. But Wallace was married and consumed by an anxiety he didn't share with anyone. In Egypt and then in France, the two nurses and their colleagues will discover the horrors endured by the combatants, limbs to be amputated, disfigured faces, and the diseases that accompany times of war, dysentery and especially the Spanish flu, which will not spare even the members of the nursing staff, nor their families even though they are so far away. At the end of the First World War, Addie and Edward are ready to return home together. Meg, whose uncle and aunt have died of the flu, alone since Wallace's death, decides to stay in France to continue helping the people. A delicate and touching novel with its dramatic intensity, a tribute to all those women who fought to save human lives. EAN: 9782810404001 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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Title : Sorrow and Grace - Wally Lamb - book Summary : A novel of total ambition, driven by virtuoso writing and construction, which interweaves present voices and past events to unfold, through the odyssey of a man in desperate search of identity and meaning, the flamboyant epic of a family spanning five generations. A dive into the heart of the great moments of the history of the United States, but also the portrait of a society confronted by chaos that is constantly rebuilding itself. When, in April 1999, his wife Maureen narrowly escaped the Columbine massacre, Caelum sought refuge with her on his childhood farm in Three Rivers, Connecticut. It is there that he discovers unexpected family archives: the letters of his grandmother, an abolitionist activist, devastated by the loss of her sons at the front; the diaries of his great-grandmother, founder of the county women's prison, haunted by her sister's descent into hell; press clippings on the local tragedies of the 1960s, when Caelum grew up alongside an alcoholic father who returned traumatized from the Korean War... As his research progresses, Caelum, stunned, sees two centuries of family history full of sound and fury recomposed, and the terrible secret of his origins resurface... To try to understand this infinite anger that has always inhabited him, Caelum will have to explore the darkest corners of his memory... EAN: 9782714445551 Used book Book in good condition The book matches the photo

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