They can seduce you with amazing stories, conjure up vividly imagined worlds, but also manipulate you into thinking exactly what they want you to.When Luca Campelli dies a sudden and violent death, his son Jon inherits his second-hand bookshop, Libri di Luca, in Copenhagen. Jon has not seen his father for twenty years since the mysterious death of his mother.When Luca's death is followed by an arson attempt on the shop, Jon is forced to explore his family's past. Unbeknown to Jon, the bookshop has for years been hiding a remarkable secret. It is the meeting place of a society of booklovers and readers, who have maintained a tradition of immense power passed down from the days of the great library of ancient Alexandria. Now someone is trying to destroy them, and Jon finds himself in a fight for his life and those of his new friends.

    A bitter secret divides each mother-and-daughter pair, though Gili--abandoned by Nina when she was just three--has always been close to her grandmother. With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey--filtered through the lens of Gili's camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life--lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman's longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok (the Adriatic Alcatraz). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman's fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel will thrill his many readers and bring new ones into the fold.

    A man who does not struggle does not live, he survives." (quote from the book)The book is a pseudo-biography about Alexandros Panagoulis written in the form of a novel. Fallaci had an intense romantic relationship with Panagoulis. She uses the novel to put forth her view that Panagoulis was assassinated by a vast conspiracy, a view widely shared by many Greeks.

    One night driving home after an unexpected encounter with a client, Paddy hits a pedestrian crossing the street. He pulls over and gets out of his car, intending to do the right thing. As he bends over to help the man, he recognizes him. It’s Donal Cullen, brother of one of the most notorious mobsters in Dublin. And he’s dead.Shocked and scared, Paddy jumps back in his car and drives away before anyone notices what’s happened.The next morning, the Cullen family calls Gallagher’s to oversee the funeral arrangements. Paddy, to his dismay, is given the task of meeting with the grieving Vincent Cullen, Dublin’s crime boss, and Cullen’s entourage. When events go awry, Paddy is plunged into an unexpected eddy of intrigue, deceit, and treachery.By turns a thriller, a love story, and a black comedy of ill manners, The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley is a surprising, compulsively readable debut novel.

    Thankfully she's blossomed since then. But when she meets Kerr McKinnon one starry summer's night and discovers, days later, who he actually is... well, that's when the problems really start. Because everyone in Ashcombe knows what happened eleven years ago, and as far as her mother's concerned, Marcella would rather tear that family to pieces with her bare hands than see Maddy associate with a McKinnon.It's Romeo and Juliet all over again. Quick, hide those sharp knives and that little bottle of poison...

    It is here that she meets two streetwise girls, Kasia and Eva, who--each in her own way--begin to teach her the secrets of life. Marysia's drab life suddenly gains color, as she discovers not only the ostensible ways of the world, but also the subtler experiences of love, sex, desire, passion, and--finally, in the novel's breathtaking conclusion--betrayal. Combining elements of straightforward contemporary fiction, the metaphysical, fairytales, and the epic, richly layered styles of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Mann (to whom many international critics have compared him), Tomek Tryzna has made an astonishing literary debut.

    Set in 90s Manhattan, Victor Ward, a model with perfect abs and all the right friends, is seen and photographed everywhere, even in places he hasn't been and with people he doesn't know. He's living with one beautiful model and having an affair with another onthe eve of opening the trendiest nightclub in New York City history.And now it's time to move to the next stage. But the future he gets is not the one he had in mind. With the same deft satire and savage wit he has brought to his other fiction, Bret Ellis gets beyond the facade and introduces us, unsparingly, to what we always feared was behind it. Glamorama shows us a shadowy looking-glass reality, the juncture where fame and fashion and terror and mayhem meet and then begin to resemble the familiar surface of our lives."

    Toxic, eyeless crabs poison Long Island's water supply. The North Sea shelf collapses, killing thousands in Europe. Around the world, countries are beginning to feel the effects of the ocean's revenge as the seas and their inhabi-tants begin a violent revolution against mankind. In this riveting novel, full of twists, turns, and cliffhangers, a team of scientists discovers a strange, intelligent life force called the Yrr that takes form in marine animals, using them to wreak havoc on humanity for our ecological abuses. Soon a struggle between good and evil is in full swing, with both human and suboceanic forces battling for control of the waters. At stake is the survival of the Earth's fragile ecology -- and ultimately, the survival of the human race itself.The apocalyptic catastrophes of The Day After Tomorrow meet the watery menace of The Abyss in this gripping, scientifically realistic, and utterly imaginative thriller. With 1.5 million copies sold in Germany -- where it has been on the bestseller list without fail since its debut -- and the author's skillfully executed blend of compelling story, vivid characters, and eerie locales, Frank Schatzing's The Swarm will keep you in tense anticipation until the last suspenseful page is turned.(front flap)

    This audacious novel is a brilliant (and literal) head trip of a book that brings us into the wildly active, albeit coma-beset, mind of Roy Strang, whose hallucinatory quest to eradicate the evil predator/scavenger marabou stork keeps being interrupted by grisly memories of the social and family dysfunction that brought him to this state. It is the sort of lethally funny cocktail of pathos, violence, and outrageous hilarity that only Irvine Welsh can pull off.

    Silas House called this story of five eccentric misfits who come together to make rock music and question convention in a small Kentucky town, "a hilarious, irreverant, and wildly orginal roller coaster of a novel."

    Juan knows little of the interior life of his father Ranz; but when Juan marries, he begins to consider the past anew, and begins to ponder what he doesn't really want to know. Secrecy—its possible convenience, its price, and even its civility—hovers throughout the novel. A Heart So White becomes a sort of anti-detective story of human nature. Intrigue; the sins of the father; the fraudulent and the genuine; marriage and strange repetitions of violence: Marías elegantly sends shafts of inquisitory light into the shadows and on to the costs of ambivalence. ("My hands are of your colour; but I shame/To wear a heart so white"—Shakespeare's Macbeth.)

    When long-hidden secrets about the atrocities he committed in Vietnam come to light, a candidate for the U.S. Senate retreats with his wife to a lakeside cabin in northern Minnesota. Within days of their arrival, his wife mysteriously vanishes into the watery wilderness.

    A famous bestselling author who appears a modest everyman. A loving, devoted husband even though he could have any woman he desires. A generous friend and coworker. But Henry Hayden is a construction, a mask. His past is a secret, his methods more so. No one besides him and his wife know that she is the actual writer of the novels that made him famous.For most of Henry’s life, it hasn’t been a problem. But when his hidden-in-plain-sight mistress becomes pregnant and his carefully constructed facade is about to crumble, he tries to find a permanent solution, only to make a terrible mistake.Now not only are the police after Henry, but his past—which he has painstakingly kept hidden—threatens to catch up with him as well. Henry is an ingenious man and he works out an ingenious plan. He weaves lies, truths, and half-truths into a story that might help him survive. But bit by bit the noose still tightens.Smart, sardonic, and compulsively readable, here is the story of a man whose cunning allows him to evade the consequences of his every action, even when he’s standing on the edge of the abyss.

    The literary critic Roland Barthes dies—struck by a laundry van—after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered?

    He was very happy there, petted and made much of, until one day a treacherous rival, an alderman of the village, lay in wait for him early in the morning when he was coming out of the tavern, and would have beaten him with a wooden club. But Ulenspiegel, thinking to cool his rival's anger, threw him into a duck-pond that was full of water, and the alderman scrambled out as best he could, green as a toad and dripping like a sponge. -from Chapter XXXVII Based upon scatterings of European folktales and mythologies, this is a romantic drama of human vice and virtue spun around the wanderings of Tyl Ulenspiegel, artist, prankster, and fool. First published in 1867-this 1918 English translation is by British writer GEOFFREY WHITWORTH (1883-1951)-it is a saga of witches and martyrs, torture and heroism that sings of the national character of heartiness and generosity of the Flemish people, with Ulenspiegel the embodiment of Flemish spirit. From its fascinating depiction of Flemish life in the 16th century to its stalwart pluck in the face of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition that then was raging, this is the first classic of Belgian literature, the personification of the tiny country's honor and courage. ALSO AVAILABLE AT COSIMO: deCoster's Flemish Legends OF INTEREST TO: readers of classic European literature, students of myth and folklore