Best of
European-Literature

2003

Candles in the Storm


Rita Bradshaw - 2003
    It's during another storm fifteen years later that her father and brothers are lost and Daisy rescues William, heir of a wealthy Southwick family, with whom she falls in love. Soon, as her reward for saving him, Daisy is working for William's irascible aunt, while local lad Alf continues to court her. Warned off by Daisy's grandmother, William denies his own feelings and so it will be many years later, after much hardship and turmoil, that Daisy finds the happiness she deserves, amidst the drama of the Great War.

The Young Wan


Brendan O'Carroll - 2003
    Before she was a Mammy, before she had Chisellers, and before they made her a Granny, Agnes Browne was Agnes Reddin, a young girl-or a Young Wan- growing up in the Jarro in Dublin. Brendan O'Carroll takes readers back to the heart of working-class Dublin, this time in the 1940s.  Together with her soon to be lifelong best friend Marion Delany, young Agnes manages to survive the indignities and demands of Catholic school, the unwanted births of siblings, days spent in the factories and markets, and nights in the dance hall as rock-and-roll invades Dublin.But on the eve of her wedding night, the Jarro is alive with gossip—will Agnes be turned away at the altar?  For the whole parish knows Agnes's not-so-well-kept secret.  And with a mother falling further into dementia, and a younger sister turning to a life of crime, it's up to Agnes alone to keep her splintering family together, while trying to create one of her own. Filled with O'Carroll's trademark wicked wit and loving, larger-than-life characters, The Young Wan shows the hardscrabble beginnings of the ultimate Irish mother and family.

Equator


Miguel Sousa Tavares - 2003
    But his life is turned upside down when King Dom Carlos invites him to become governor of Portugal’s smallest colony, the island of São Tomé e Principe. Luis Bernardo is ill-prepared for the challenges of plantation life – used to a softer urban existence, he is shocked by the conditions under which the workers labour.But with the English closing in on São Tomé’s cocoa plantations, the island’s main means of survival, Luis Bernardo must endeavour to protect the island and its community.

Diary of an Ordinary Woman


Margaret Forster - 2003
    On the eve of the Great War, Millicent King begins to keep her journal and vividly records the dramas of everyday life in a family touched by war, tragedy, and money troubles. From bohemian London to Rome in the 1920s her story moves on to social work and the build-up to another war, in which she drives ambulances through the bombed streets of London.Here is twentieth-century woman in close-up coping with the tragedies and upheavals of women's lives from WWI to Greenham Common and beyond. A triumph of resolution and evocation, this is a beautifully observed story of an ordinary woman's life - a narrative where every word rings true.

Ten Poems to Open Your Heart


Roger Housden - 2003
    This new volume from Roger Housden features a few of the same poets as his extraordinarily moving Ten Poems to Change Your Life, such as Mary Oliver and Pablo Neruda, along with contributions from Sharon Olds, Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, Denise Levertov, and others. Any one of the ten poems and, indeed, any one of Housden’s reflections on them, can open, gladden, or pierce your heart. Through the voices of these ten inspiring poets, and through illustrations from his own life, Housden expresses the tenderness, beauty, joys, and sorrows of love, the presence of which, more than anything else, gives human existence its meaning.As Housden says in his eloquent introduction, “Great poetry happens when the mind is looking the other way and words fall from the sky to shape a moment that would normally be untranslatable. . . . When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.â€

La loca de la casa


Rosa Montero - 2003
    She undertakes a trip to her inner self in a narrative game full of surprises. It is a magician's hat from which she reveals amazing and unexpected events. In this book, she mixes literature and life in an aphrodisiacal cocktail of other people's biographies and a semi-fictional autobiography. This is, above all, a torrid story of love and salvation between her and her imagination.

The Best of Pippi Longstocking (Pippi Longstocking, #1-3)


Astrid Lindgren - 2003
    This work is illustrated throughout by best-selling artist, Tony Ross, who has illustrated the cover. Astrid Lindgren has won numerous awards including the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the International Book Award.

Icarus Fallen: Search For Meaning In An Uncertain World


Chantal Delsol - 2003
    With style and lucidity, Delsol likens contemporary Western man to the mythical figure Icarus, fallen back to earth after trying to reach the sun, alive but badly shaken and confused. During the twentieth, century, Delsol argues, man flew too closely to the sun of utopian ideology. Having been burned, he is now groping for a way to orient himself. But the ideas he once held so dear--inevitable progress, the possibility of limitless social and self-transformation--are no longer believable, and he has, for the most part, long since rejected the religious tradition that might have provided an anchor. Delsol's portrait is engrossing. She explains how we have come simultaneously to embrace the good but reject the true; how we have sacralized rights and democracy; and how we have lost our sense of the tragic and embraced the idea of zero risk. Already a well-known political thinker in her native France, this is Delsol's first book to appear in English. Icarus Fallen should establish her as one of the most insightful social and cultural writers working on either side of the Atlantic.

A War In Words


Svetlana Palmer - 2003
    This was a young person's war and these people record their experiences with all the immediacy and passion of youth. They talk to us directly from within the war itself and from all sides of the conflict -- from the testimony of a Serbian teenager, one of Franz Ferdinand's assassins, to the final entry from a French soldier as he revisits a battlefield in 1919, realising he and the rest of the world have changed irrevocably. Most of these letters and diaries have never been published in English before. They were uncovered during extensive research across twenty-eight countries for the major ten-part series THE FIRST WORLD WAR, broadcast on Channel 4 in autumn 2003. The series will introduce many of the characters who appear in this book and will, like the book, recount the complex history of the war though the lives of the individuals caught up in it.

At God's Mercy


L.L. Fine - 2003
     A desperate young Jewish woman sacrifices her life to save her baby twins from the terrible death that awaits them. Decades later, in New York, Rabbi Jeremiah Neumann discovers the existence of his long lost twin. He rushes headlong to meet him – but is shocked to discover that his identical twin is a priest. The two brothers travel to Poland to find out who they truly are. Page by page they uncover the terrible secret of their bloodcurdling heritage. A long-dormant evil is resurrected, and once again threatens to take the twins’ lives. Will they survive the new storm? At God’s Mercy is a captivating book that is hard to put down. It will take you deep behind the frontiers of human atrocity, where cruelty meets courage, and faith meets fate. Its chilling storyline bites hard at religious establishment and raises hard questions regarding Judaism, Christianity, human nature, faith and existence.

Amy Johnson: Queen of the Air


Midge Gillies - 2003
    An adventuress both in her private and public life, Amy Johnson has iconic status as an outstanding female adventurer whose death remains a mystery to this day.

The Phoenix Land


Miklós Bánffy - 2003
    Phoenix-like the Hungarian people survived the horrors of war, the disappointment of the first socialist republic, the disillusion of the brief but terrifying communist rule of Bela Kun, and the bitterness of seeing their beloved country dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon.