The Pilgrimage


Paulo Coelho - 1987
    In many ways, these two volumes are companions—to truly comprehend one, you must read the other.Step inside this captivating account of Paulo Coehlo's pilgrimage along the road to Santiago. This fascinating parable explores the need to find one's own path. In the end, we discover that the extraordinary is always found in the ordinary and simple ways of everyday people. Part adventure story, part guide to self-discovery, this compelling tale delivers the perfect combination of enchantment and insight.

Señor Peregrino


Cecilia Samartin - 2005
    Men under klærne skjuler hun et grotesk fødselsmerke. Det er som om hun har sittet i djevelens hånd. Med håp om å bli som alle andre flykter Jamilet til USA. Hun får som jobb å ta seg av den gamle Señor Peregrino. Når han forteller om sin pilegrimsvandring til Santiago de Compostella, forandres alt. Señor Peregrino er en poetisk og overraskende fortelling om aldri å miste troen på kjærligheten. Om å våge å leve på den skjøre linjen mellom fantasi og virkelighet. Historien om Jamilet fortsetter i La Peregrina. Om forfatterenCecilia Samartin (født 1961) vokste opp på Cuba midt under revolusjonen, før hun flyktet til USA. Hun er utdannet familieterapeut, og har jobbet med et prosjekt som skal bedre levevilkårene for de aller fattigste i Los Angeles. Hun debuterte som forfatter i 2004 med romanen Drømmehjerte.e birthmark. It spills over her back and down her legs, twisting and writhing like a hideous cape of blood, causing her to be shunned by the villagers of her rural Mexican town. In search of medical salvation, this angel with the devil's mark is finally driven to escape north and cross the border illegally to Los Angeles.After acquiring false documents, Jamilet finds work at a mental hospital, where she is assigned to look after Señor Peregrino, an elderly man from Spain who is as disagreeable as he is mysterious. Jamilet is given strict orders to keep her distance, but when he cleverly snags possession of her papers, he bargains to return them upon the condition that she listen to his story. Jamilet begrudgingly agrees, and Señor Peregrino takes her back to the days of his youth, when he embarked upon a mystical and romantic journey along the legendary Road to Santiago in Spain. Jamilet and Señor Peregrino forge a spiritual bond that is more healing to them both than modern medicine could ever be. In an inspiring story of redemption, faith and the enduring power of love, Samartin offers an enlightening perspective on the true meaning of beauty.

Conquistadora


Esmeralda Santiago - 2011
    And in handsome twin brothers Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home.This is a sensual, riveting tale, set in a place where human passions and cruelties collide: thrilling history that has never before been brought so vividly and unforgettably to life.

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created


Charles C. Mann - 2011
    More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher Columbus set foot in the Americas, he ended that separation at a stroke. Driven by the economic goal of establishing trade with China, he accidentally set off an ecological convulsion as European vessels carried thousands of species to new homes across the oceans. The Columbian Exchange, as researchers call it, is the reason there are tomatoes in Italy, oranges in Florida, chocolates in Switzerland, and chili peppers in Thailand. More important, creatures the colonists knew nothing about hitched along for the ride. Earthworms, mosquitoes, and cockroaches; honeybees, dandelions, and African grasses; bacteria, fungi, and viruses; rats of every description—all of them rushed like eager tourists into lands that had never seen their like before, changing lives and landscapes across the planet. Eight decades after Columbus, a Spaniard named Legazpi succeeded where Columbus had failed. He sailed west to establish continual trade with China, then the richest, most powerful country in the world. In Manila, a city Legazpi founded, silver from the Americas, mined by African and Indian slaves, was sold to Asians in return for silk for Europeans. It was the first time that goods and people from every corner of the globe were connected in a single worldwide exchange. Much as Columbus created a new world biologically, Legazpi and the Spanish empire he served created a new world economically.As Charles C. Mann shows, the Columbian Exchange underlies much of subsequent human history. Presenting the latest research by ecologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians, Mann shows how the creation of this worldwide network of ecological and economic exchange fostered the rise of Europe, devastated imperial China, convulsed Africa, and for two centuries made Mexico City—where Asia, Europe, and the new frontier of the Americas dynamically interacted—the center of the world. In such encounters, he uncovers the germ of today’s fiercest political disputes, from immigration to trade policy to culture wars.In 1493, Charles Mann gives us an eye-opening scientific interpretation of our past, unequaled in its authority and fascination

Happiness in This Life: A Passionate Meditation on Earthly Existence


Pope Francis - 2017
    

Ferdinand and Isabella


Malveena McKendrick - 2015
    But the historic landfall of October 1492 was only a secondary event of the year. The preceding January, they had accepted the surrender of Muslim Granada, ending centuries of Islamic rule in their peninsula. And later that year, they had ordered the expulsion or forced baptism of Spain's Jewish minority, a cruel crusade undertaken in an excess of zeal for their Catholic faith. Europe, in the century of Ferdinand and Isabella, was also awakening to the glories of a new age, the Renaissance, and the Spain of the "Catholic Kings" - as Ferdinand and Isabella came to be known - was not untouched by this brilliant revival of learning. Here, from the noted historian Malveena McKendrick, is their remarkable story.

Scotch: Unraveled (Brimstone Lords MC Book 4)


Sarah Zolton Arthur - 2021
     I'm a brother of the Lords and now single dad in way over my head. She’s the only woman I ever loved—the only woman to ever break my heart. But I don’t want revenge, I want forever. Scotch I don’t love ’em and leave ’em, I bang ’em and forget ’em. It’s been that way since she broke my heart, only now it’s come back to bite me in the arse. One night of fun too many has left me in a position I never thought possible, a single dad of two wee lassies and the only one willing to help is the one woman I tried and failed to bang out of my system.Now, after our tentative truce shatters, war with the Horde threatens to take all three of ’em away from me. I’ll do anything to save ’em, but if I go down, I’m taking bloody Horde with me. Frankie Imagine my heartache when the man I once thought I’d have babies with walks into my daycare with two baby girls and no mother in sight. He’s different than the man I fell in love with, in some good ways and some sort of scary. But those girls snagged me in from the beginning and with the girls comes their father. They’re the family I always wanted and he’s the man I wanted them with. If only we can stay alive long enough to enjoy it. *Other Books By Sarah Zolton Arthur* Series Immortal Elements Series Flight: The Roc Warriors (Immortal Elements Bk. 1)Soar: The Warrior’s Fight (Immortal Elements Bk. 2) Run: The Viking Pack (Immortal Elements Bk. 3) coming soon… Standalones  Summer of the BoyThe Significance of Moving OnSkydiving, Skinny-Dipping & Other Ways to Enjoy Your Fake Boyfriend Audio Summer of the BoySkydiving, Skinny-Dipping & Other Ways to Enjoy Your Fake Boyfriend

Bolívar: American Liberator


Marie Arana - 2013
    He freed six countries from Spanish rule, traveled more than 75,000 miles on horseback to do so, and became the greatest figure in Latin American history. His life is epic, heroic, straight out of Hollywood--he fought battle after battle in punishing terrain, forged uncertain coalitions of competing forces and races, lost his beautiful wife soon after they married and never remarried (although he did have a succession of mistresses, including one who held up the revolution and another who saved his life), and he died relatively young, uncertain whether his achievements would endure.

Man of Honour


Iain Gale - 2007
    The British Army, illustrious and fresh from victory, stands proudly to attention, ready to fight for honour and glory. Their enemy is Louis XIV of France, the self-styled Sun King, a megalomaniac intent on possessing all of Europe."

A Short History of Slavery


James Walvin - 2007
    Setting these historical documents against Walvin's own incisive historical narrative, the two layers of this extraordinary, definitive account of the Atlantic slave trade enable us to understand the rise and fall of one of the most shameful chapters in British history, the repercussions of which the modern world is still living with.

The Mystery of Garabandal: Fantasy or Fraud? Ghost or God?


L.R. Walker - 2013
    Eyes fixed on a mysterious point in the air, they were mesmerized by something which was invisible to everyone else. What the girls said they saw--and heard--sent shock waves that are still reverberating today. The messages the four girls claimed to receive revealed a picture of a Catholic church in crisis and a world that faced an earth-shattering future that would unfold in their lifetime. The girls’ pronouncements about coming trouble in the church and world were met with fierce skepticism from the first. Some charged the girls with being possessed by demons (based on the girls’ strange physical poses and apparent levitation), and others claimed the girls were putting on an act (revealing their true colors when they chose ordinary married lives instead of the convent). There was also a third body of critics: those who believed that a group of girls on the cusp of adolescence in a remote and insular society conjured up a psychodrama which, fueled by the spotlight and mounting frenzy, gained a frightening life of its own. There was one other possibility--that the strange events in Garabandal, Spain actually did occur, and the girls received an apocalyptic warning for both the church and the modern world. The warning to the world included a prediction that a newly militant Russia would rise again. The prophecies of Garabandal also foretell a World-Wide Warning and a Global Miracle, whose purpose is to convince a world reeling from one catastrophe to the next that God exists. But the Warning and Miracle, dramatic as they sound, are not even the most unsettling of the messages. One night, the young girls dissolved into screams. During this so-called “Night of the Screams,” the girls say they were shown a tragic chastisement that would befall the entire world if the Warning and Miracle failed to trigger global change. As disquieting as those messages were, the most shocking message at Garabandal was for the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Why were the messages of Garabandal so effectively suppressed? Did it have to do with the fact that the messages presciently warned of coming scandal and turmoil in the Roman Catholic Church itself? Did a portal open between worlds on a Spanish mountaintop in that summer of 1961? And if so, who opened the door--an angel of God or an angel of darkness? Did a young girl's flight of fancy one summer night spin wildly out of control? Or was it a visitation from God? Now that the “girls” at the center of this drama are 60-year-old women, should their claims be discredited or re-examined? Are the apparitions bogus or fast-approaching their fulfillment? If the events are false, Garabandal is a fascinating and perhaps tragic human interest story with several explanations. If the events and warnings are true--then what do we do? By the end of this book, readers can judge whether the visions of four young seers on a mountaintop in Spain were historical fact, a devilish fraud, or the creative confusion of four girls who would spend the rest of their lives trying to escape a human tragicomedy that they themselves had produced.

A Luminous Republic


Andrés Barba - 2017
    But then the children arrived.No one knew where they came from: thirty-two kids, seemingly born of the jungle, speaking an unknown language. At first they scavenged, stealing food and money and absconding to the trees. But their transgressions escalated to violence, and then the city’s own children began defecting to join them. Facing complete collapse, municipal forces embark on a hunt to find the kids before the city falls into irreparable chaos.Narrated by the social worker who led the hunt, A Luminous Republic is a suspenseful, anguished fable that “could be read as Lord of the Flies seen from the other side, but that would rob Barba of the profound originality of his world” (Juan Gabriel Vásquez).

The Frying Pan of Spain: Sevilla v Real Betis: Spain's Hottest Football Rivalry


Colin Millar - 2019
    Enchanted with effortlessly stylish bars and colourful buildings, this is a charismatic metropolis doused in the endless sun of southern Spain. The city is also home to two historic institutions of Spanish football - Real Betis and Sevilla - and when they go head-to-head to contest El Gran Derbi, the rest of Spain can only watch in awe. This is a pulsating and arresting experience which encapsulates the beautiful game in all its raw, spellbinding brilliance. Spanish football is more than Barcelona and Real Madrid. Much more. The city contrasts uptown Sevilla with downtown Betis. Los Rojiblancos pitted against Los Verdiblancos. Sevillistas and Beticos. Nothing can compare to this beautiful city and the crazy passion for football that it produces, either in Spain or Europe. Colin Millar - who made the city his home - charts the illustrious histories of football in the city and explores how both clubs represent a way of life for Sevillanos.

The Cartel


Stephen Breen - 2017
    However, Christy Kinahan will never be fêted in the financial press. For his business - drugs, guns, money-laundering, murder - also makes him Ireland's leading criminal.While Kinahan kept a low profile as he grew his empire, by the time his crime cartel shot to public attention in 2010 it was known to European police forces for over a decade. In that year police raided members' homes and premises in Spain, Ireland the UK. By then Kinahan and his sons Daniel and Christopher Jr were already among the richest men in Europe, with an estimated joint worth of €750m.However, events in February 2016 made Kinahan a household name. A daring and deadly gun attack in a suburban Dublin hotel - an attack targeting Daniel Kinahan (who escaped) - stunned the public and exposed the depth of enmity between the Kinahans and the family and associates of the veteran Dublin criminal, Gerry Hutch. Despite an intense garda crack-down on the gangsters' activities, the body count continues to rise.The Cartel gives behind-the-scenes story of that initial Spanish-led raid on the Kinahans. The authors have had exclusive access to the wiretaps that tracked the cartel for two years and talked to key officers who investigated them. They expose the criminal clan's aims and actions - in members' own words - and reveal the surprising truths behind how they built their empire.And The Cartel brings the story bang up-to-date to explain the origins of and fall-out from the feud with the Hutches, one of the most violent and vicious Ireland has ever known - and one that could be the undoing of the Kinahans.The authors' combined depth of knowledge - Stephen Breen has been a crime correspondent for over 15 years and in addition to writing about crime for over a decade, Owen Conlon is a fluent Spanish speaker - has culminated in a detailed and gripping account of double-crossing, vengeance and murder.

Messi


Guillem Balagué - 2013
    Born in Rosario in Argentina in 1987, he began playing football at a very young age, and it wasn't long before his skill and potential was noticed in Europe by Barcelona. He debuted in the 2004-5 season, breaking FC Barcelona's team record for youngest footballer to score a league goal, and being part of the outstanding team that won La Liga that year. His breakthrough season was 2006-7, when he became a first team regular, and in 2008-9 he scored 38 goals to play an integral part in the team's triple-winning success. He surpassed this achievement in 2009-10 with 47 goals in all competitions, and again in 2010-11 with 53 goals.Since Pep Guardiola took over as manager of Barcelona in 2008, Messi has become Barcelona's all-time top scorer in all official club competitions - at the age of 25. He scored an astonishing 91 goals in the calendar year 2012 alone. He won the FIFA World Player of the Year Award in 2009, and won the inaugural FIFA BALLON D'OR in 2010 and again in 2011 and 2012. He has also excelled on the international stage, playing for his national team. The diminutive Argentinian plays with a smile on his face at the most successful club in European football. He has even been praised by Maradona as his 'successor'. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest players of all time, possibly even the greatest. Guillem Balague's perceptive and compelling book goes to the heart of the mystery - and genius - that is Messi.