Rob van der Veer Orden de los libros (cronológico)

When Laurence Waters arrives at his rural hospital posting in a former homeland of the new South Africa, Frank, a fellow doctor there, is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not - young, optimistic, and full of new schemes. The two become uneasy friends, while the rest of the meagre staff in the deserted hospital view Laurence with a mixture of awe and mistrust. The tired, ghostly town beyond the hospital is also coping with new arrivals, and the return of old faces. The Brigadier, a self-fashioned dictator from apartheid days, is rumoured to be still alive. And down at Mama's Place, the town's only watering hole, a group of soldiers have moved in with their malign commandant, a man Frank has met before and is keen to avoid for his own dark reasons. Laurence wants to help - but in a world where the past is demanding restitution from the present, his ill-starred idealism cannot last. "From the Hardcover edition."

"Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother -- her only family -- is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world -- including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong."--Jacket

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as it goes on being written every day. An autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful and powerful as his novels.

A magical novel from a world class writer about a remarkable historical figure. In his early years, growing up on a Dutch farm in the deep interior of the southern African Cape, Cupido Cockroach became the greatest drinker, liar, fornicator and fighter of his region. Coming under the spell of the soap-boiler Anna, and under the influence of the great Dr Johannes Theodorus van der Kemp of the London Missionary Society, Cupido is made the first Khoi or ‘Hottentot’ missionary ordained at the Cape of Good Hope. Received into the fold of the Church, Cupido passionately turns against all his early beliefs. After being drawn into the fierce struggle between the missionaries and the Dutch colonists, he rises to some prominence and is appointed as missionary in a remote and arid region in the North-western Cape. But this also marks the beginning of his decline, as the Society abandons him to his fate. One by one, the members of his congregation disappear into the desert, so that in the end, abandoned even by his wife and children, he is left to preach to the stones and thorn trees and tortoises, returning to the dream-world of his people. In a heady mixture of comedy and tragedy, the real and the magical, and immersed in the ancient, earthy, African world of magic and dreams, Praying Mantis explores through the historical figure of Cupido Cockroach the origins of racial tension in the shadowlands between myth and history.

La publicación de la segunda novela de Nicole Krauss confirmó su extraordinario talento, recibiendo elogios de críticos y escritores, incluido el Premio Nobel J. M. Coetzee. Con una mezcla de humor y ternura, la autora aborda el insondable tema del amor, la pérdida y la memoria, rindiendo homenaje a la literatura y su capacidad para transformar vidas. Leo Gursky, un cerrajero polaco jubilado en Nueva York, teme morir sin que nadie lo haya visto. Su vida da un giro cuando recibe un manuscrito perdido, acompañado de una carta enigmática, que lo lleva a revivir recuerdos de su juventud. Mientras tanto, Alma Singer, una quinceañera que enfrenta los dilemas de su edad, decide que es hora de que su madre supere la tristeza tras la muerte de su padre. Su búsqueda de un nuevo marido para su madre se entrelaza con la novela "La historia del amor", escrita en yidis y adquirida por su padre en Buenos Aires. Surgen interrogantes sobre el pasado de su padre, el autor del libro y un misterioso hombre que ha encargado su traducción al inglés. La narrativa se intensifica a medida que los caminos de Leo y Alma se cruzan, revelando una trama ingeniosa que culmina en un final inolvidable. Con un tono intimista, Krauss logra contar una profunda historia de amor, llena de pasión y melancolía, que resonará con todo tipo de lectores.

Dr Hope Clearwater lives on an African beach reflecting on the complicated, violent and tragic events that brought her there her stormy marriage to John, a brilliant mathematician, her painstaking research work among the wild chimpanzees in the national park, her encounters with the chaos of the civil war. She examines her past and tries to find tranquility.