Bookbot

Niek Miedema

    The Blind Man's Garden
    El Señor de las moscas
    The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
    Het Courage Ensemble: Honderdnegenennegentig treden
    The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
    The Underground Railroad
    • Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life. Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry—though not the life—of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

      Young Man with a Horn2021
      4,0
    • When Frances Shore moves to Saudi Arabia, she settles in a nondescript sublet, sure that common sense and an open mind will serve her well with her Muslim neighbors. But in the dim, airless flat, Frances spends lonely days writing in her diary, hearing the sounds of sobs through the pipes from the floor above, and seeing the flitting shadows of men on the stairwell. It's all in her imagination, she's told by her neighbors; the upstairs flat is empty, no one uses the roof. But Frances knows otherwise, and day by day, her sense of foreboding grows even as her sense of herself begins to disintegrate.

      Eight Months on Ghazzah Street2017
      3,6
    • The Underground Railroad

      • 336 páginas
      • 12 horas de lectura

      #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

      The Underground Railroad2017
      4,2
    • El Señor de las moscas

      • 198 páginas
      • 7 horas de lectura

      Una treintena de muchachos son los únicos supervivientes de un naufragio en el que perecen todos los adultos. Enseguida se plantea cómo sobrevivir en tales condiciones, y no tardan en crearse dos grupos con sus respectivos líderes. Ralph se convierte en el cabecilla de quienes están dispuestos a construir refugios y a recolectar, mientras que Jack se convierte en el jefe de los cazadores, animados por un espíritu más aventurero. Las tensiones entre ambos bandos desembocan en un enfrentamiento que se resuelve en un baño de sangre. Partiendo de este esquema, el Premio Nobel William Golding crea una fábula moral sobre el lado más oscuro de la naturaleza humana. Una novela deslumbrante en la que se ha visto desde una requisitoria moral contra la educación represiva hasta una parábola acerca de los instintos básicos del ser humano. El señor de las moscas es un nombre para el mal en la cultura judía, y este es uno de los temas principales de la novela, junto con la contraposición entre civilización y barbarie y la validez de la disciplina, entre otros muchos.

      El Señor de las moscas2016
      4,0
    • The Bone Clocks

      • 595 páginas
      • 21 horas de lectura

      Metaphysical thriller, meditation on mortality and chronicle of our self-devouring times, this is the kaleidoscopic new novel from the author of Cloud Atlas. SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS UK AUTHOR OF THE YEAR 2014 LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 LONGLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2015 One drowsy summer's day in 1984, teenage runaway Holly Sykes encounters a strange woman who offers a small kindness in exchange for 'asylum'. Decades will pass before Holly understands exactly what sort of asylum the woman was seeking . . . The Bone Clocks follows the twists and turns of Holly's life from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland's Atlantic coast as Europe's oil supply dries up - a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes - daughter, sister, mother, guardian - is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.

      The Bone Clocks2014
      3,8
    • The Blind Man's Garden

      • 480 páginas
      • 17 horas de lectura

      Jeo and Mikal, foster-brothers from a small Pakistani city, secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban, but to help and care for wounded civilians. But it soon becomes apparent that good intentions can't keep them out of harm's way...

      The Blind Man's Garden2013
      3,9
    • Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel.

      Ghost Light2011
      3,5
    • One of "TIME" magazine's most influential novelists in the world presents a bold and epic novel about a rarely visited point in history--18th-century Japan--in a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable.

      The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet2010
      4,0
    • The Uncommon Reader

      • 128 páginas
      • 5 horas de lectura

      The Queen of England comes across a travelling library and ends up taking out a novel. One read leads to another and a passion awakes, resulting in a decline of her public duties.

      The Uncommon Reader2008
      3,8
    • The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories

      • 228 páginas
      • 8 horas de lectura

      An acclaimed collection of stories from the internationally bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White

      The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories2005
      4,1
    • The Crimson Petal and the White

      • 901 páginas
      • 32 horas de lectura

      Yearning to escape her life of prostitution in 1870s London, Sugar finds her fate entangled in the complicated family life of patron William, an egotistical perfume magnate.

      The Crimson Petal and the White2003
      3,9
    • De villa van Clodia

      • 252 páginas
      • 9 horas de lectura

      De verhouding van de Latijnse dichter Catullus met Clodia lijkt zich te herleven in die van een archeoloog die Clodia's villa opgraaft en zijn assistente.

      De villa van Clodia2000
      2,3