New Arrivals: The Man Who Smiled

16 03 2010

Título: The Man Who Smiled

Autor: Henning Mankell

Obra adaptada: NO

In The Man Who Smiled, Mankell’s fourth novel starring Kurt Wallander, investigations lead into the heart of an international crime syndicate.

For over a year, Kurt Wallander has been on leave from the police-force. After killing a man, he is riven with self-doubt and is on the verge of quitting the police-force when an intriguing new case arouses his curiosity and lifts his depression. A friendly but concerned lawyer comes to Kurt for help: Sten Torstensson’s father has died in a car accident, but he believes that it is anything but. He claims his father would never have gone driving in the fog, and certainly not at night.

However, two weeks later Sten is also found dead. He’s been shot. Kurt returns to take over the case, which will soon throw up leads that cast the entire investigation into a new light.

http://www.inspector-wallander.org/mysteries/man-who-smiled/



New Arrivals: Amsterdam

16 03 2010

Título: Amsterdam

Autor: Ian McEwan

Obra adaptada: NO

When good-time, fortysomething Molly Lane dies of an unspecified degenerative illness, her many friends and numerous lovers are led to think about their own mortality. Vernon Halliday, editor of the upmarket newspaper the Judge, persuades his old friend Clive Linley, a self-indulgent composer of some reputation, to enter into a euthanasia pact with him. Should either of them be stricken with such an illness, the other will bring about his death. From this point onward we are in little doubt as to Amsterdam’s outcome -it’s only a matter of who will kill whom. In the meantime, compromising photographs of Molly’s most distinguished lover, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, have found their way into the hands of the press, and as rumors circulate he teeters on the edge of disgrace. However, this is McEwan, so it is no surprise to find that the rather unsavory Garmony comes out on top.

http://www.amazon.com



New Arrivals: The Great Gatsby

4 03 2010

Título: The Great Gatsby

Autor: F. Scott Fitzgerald

Obra adaptada: NO

Editorial: Penguin Books

 Review: The Great Gatsby” (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, stands among the greatest of all American fiction. Jay Gatsby’s lavish lifestyle in a mansion on Long Island’s gold coast encapsulates the spirit, excitement, and violence of the era Fitzgerald named ‘the Jazz Age’. Impelled by his love for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby seeks nothing less than to recapture the moment five years earlier when his best and brightest dreams - his ‘unutterable visions’ - seemed to be incarnated in her kiss. A moving portrayal of the power of romantic imagination, as well as the pathos and courage entailed in the pusuit of an unattainable dream, The Great Gatsby is a classic fiction of hope and disillusion. 

books.google.es

Book and film now available at the School Library!



New Arrivals: Breakfast at Tiffany´s

3 03 2010

Título: Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Autor: Truman Capote

Obra adaptada: NO

Editorial: Penguin Books

 The heroine of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly, became one of Capote’s best known creations, and the book’s prose style prompted Norman Mailer to call Capote “the most perfect writer of my generation.”

For Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s was a turning point, as he explained to Roy Newquist (Counterpoint, 1964):

“I think I’ve had two careers. One was the career of precocity, the young person who published a series of books that were really quite remarkable. I can even read them now and evaluate them favorably, as though they were the work of a stranger… My second career began, I guess it really began with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It involves a different point of view, a different prose style to some degree. Actually, the prose style is an evolvement from one to the other—a pruning and thinning-out to a more subdued, clearer prose. I don’t find it as evocative, in many respects, as the other, or even as original, but it is more difficult to do. But I’m nowhere near reaching what I want to do, where I want to go. Presumably this new book is as close as I’m going to get, at least strategically.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Capote

Book and film now available at the School Library!



New Arrivals: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

29 01 2010

Título: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

Autor: Stieg Larsson

Obra adaptada: NO

This is the third book in the Millennium-trilogy, all them available at our School Library.

Salander is plotting her revenge - against the man who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that very nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release. With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his researchers at Millennium magazine, Salander must not only prove her innocence, but identify and denounce the corrupt politicians that have allowed the vulnerable to become victims of abuse and violence. Once a victim herself, Salander is now ready to fight back.

http://www.waterstones.com/

                     



New Arrivals: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

28 01 2010

Título: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Autor: Muriel Barbery

Obra adaptada: NO

Renée is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building on the Left Bank. To the residents she is honest, reliable and uncultivated an ideal concierge. But Renée has a secret. Beneath this conventional façade she is passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, Renée is resigned to living a lie, with only visits from her one friend Manuela to break the monotony. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the predictably bourgeois future laid out for her, and plans to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. But before this happens, the death of one of their privileged neighbours will bring dramatic change to number 7, Rue de Grenelle, altering the course of both their lives forever. With sales of over a million copies in French, this funny, moving and wise novel is now an international publishing sensation.

Nobody ever imagined that his tender, funny book with a philosophical vein would have enjoyed such incredible success. For some, it is part Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, part Monsieur Malaussene by Daniel Pennac. While for others it resembles a written version of the film Amélie. Either way, readers are responding in vast numbers. –Le Monde

http://www.amazon.co.uk



New Arrivals: The Museum of Innocence

27 01 2010

Título: The Museum of Innocence

Autor: Orhan Pamuk

Obra adaptada: NO

The Museum of Innocence is the latest novel written by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, published in August 2008, Orhan Pamuk’s first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Pamuk has been working on the novel for many years and it has been hinted by himself in many interviews during this period. “The story, which takes place in Istanbul between 1975 and today, is about obsessive passion and the great question: What is love, really?” says the writer, in a Spiegel interview back in 2007.

Orhan Pamuk is also trying to establish an actual museum based on the novel, in Cukurcuma - Istanbul, to exhibit several objects mentioned in The Museum of Innocence.

http://themuseumofinnocence.com/