Entre mentiras, recuerdos e imaginación se teje la vida de la señora Winter, una famosa novelista ya muy entrada en años que pide ayuda a Margaret, una mujer joven y amante de los libros, para contar por fin la historia de su misterioso pasado. «Cuénteme la verdad», pide Margaret, pero la verdad duele, y solo el día en que Vida Winter muera sabremos qué secretos encerraba "El cuento número trece", una historia que nadie se había atrevido a escribir.
A wonderful new collection of short stories, most of which are published here for the first time.Wallis Simpson, the twice-divorced American woman for whom Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, ended her life (as the Duchess of Windsor) as the prisoner of her lawyer who would not allow anyone — friend, foe or journalist — to visit her in her Paris flat. Rose Tremain takes this true story and transforms it into an imaginative and ironic fiction. Her thesis is that Wallis, gaga and bed-ridden, had forgotten the king who gave up an empire for love of her.This superb story plays with the selectiveness of why does Wallis recall the seemingly unimportant, while forgetting the glory days of her notoriety? She can remember her first two husbands — one a bit of a brute, the other very boring — but not the world-famous third one.The other stories in this magnificent collection range over a variety of themes, equally original and an East German border guard, redundant after the Berlin Wall comes down in 1989, imagines that he might still have a purpose in life. He tries to reach Russia by bicycling across the hostile wastes of Poland. A jilted man gets his revenge. A baby grows wings. A character in an Impressionist painting escapes from his “frame” — or does he? And there’s a Christmas story set in a seedy hotel.From the Hardcover edition.
On a spring day in Vermont, seventy-nine-year-old painter Hope Chafetz tells the story of her life to Kathryn, a young interviewer from New York. Questions send Hope back to her youth, to the heady postwar days of American art and her relationships with the artists who defined their times. As the day wears on, Kathryn and Hope - interviewer and interviewee - try to understand one another across the gulf of age, experience and time that lies between them. And subtly, as each comes to know the other, their relationship changes!
In 'Aiding and Abetting', the doyenne of literary satire has written a wickedly amusing and subversive novel around the true-crime case of one of England’s most notorious uppercrust scoundrels and the “aiders and abetters” who kept him on the loose. When Lord Lucan walks into psychiatrist Hildegard Wolf’s Paris office, there is one problem: she already has a patient who says he’s Lucan, the fugitive murderer who bludgeoned his children’s nanny in a botched attempt to kill his wife. As Dr. Wolf sets about deciding which of her patients, if either, is the real Lucan, she finds herself in a fierce battle of wills and an exciting chase across Europe. For someone is deceiving someone, and it may be the good doctor, who, despite her unorthodox therapeutic method (she talks mainly about her own life), has a sinister past, too. Exhibiting Muriel Spark’s boundless imagination and biting wit, 'Aiding and Abetting' is a brisk, clever, and deliciously entertaining tale by one of Britain’s greatest living novelists.
In the author's words, this novel is an attempt at a comic family epic of little England into which an explosion of ethnic colour is injected. It tells the story of three families, one Indian, one white, one mixed, in North London and Oxford from World War II to the present day.
Novela ganadora del prestigioso premio PEN/FAULKNER, el DISCOVERY AWARD y el PACIFIC NORTHWEST BOOKSELLERS AWARD. «Tanto en el mundo real como en la ficción, nunca he leído una crónica más absorbente de un litigio.» JOHN GRISHAM. «Cautivador...estremecedor. Elegante e impecablemente escrito.» THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. En casos excepcionales, una primera novela sorprende y agrada a críticos exigentes, convirtiéndose en un bestseller. Un joven pescador es hallado muerto, atrapado entre las redes de su barco, en una tranquila isla del Pacífico Norte. La sospecha de asesinato altera la calma de los isleños, cuyas heridas de Pearl Harbor y la confrontación entre norteamericanos y japoneses aún no han sanado. Kazuo Miyamoto, amigo de la infancia del fallecido, es el principal sospechoso. Ishmael Chambers, director del periódico local, cubre el caso y observa cómo el juicio revela acontecimientos ocultos. En este contexto, Ishmael se reencuentra con Hatsue, su amor de adolescencia y esposa del acusado. El juicio desata viejos fantasmas y rencores soterrados, mientras la nieve cae sobre los cedros. La historia explora ambigüedades, arreglos de cuentas con el pasado y sentimientos como el racismo, la culpa, la moral individual y el amor. Una novela hermosa que sigue atrayendo lectores año tras año.
