Ian McEwan

Claire Messud

Atonement

الفتاة التي تحترق

Das brennende Mädchen

Une réception un peu snob à Sidney, où un romancier assez médiocre et son épouse ont convié des intellectuels branchés. Ce petit groupe se retrouve à New York, cette fois dans l'orbite d'un certain Murray, célèbre journaliste qui a été de tous les combats des années 1960-1970. Mais à force de se fréquenter, les uns et les autres découvrent les vraies personnalités de chacun.

Les enfants de l'empereur

When the world was steady

Two sisters, middle-aged and alienated from each other, find that their steady worlds are disintegrating. The sisters' self-scrutiny, their encounters with strangeness, and finally with each other are described in prose of unusual grace and power.

When the World was Steady

Irène Némirovsky

Readers everywhere were introduced to the work of Irène Némirovsky through the publication of her long-lost masterpiece, Suite Française. But Suite Française was only a coda to the brief yet remarkably prolific career of this nearly forgotten, yet hugely talented novelist, who fled Russia for Paris after the Revolution and died at Auschwitz at the age of 39. Here in one volume are four of Némirovsky's other novels - all of them newly translated by the award-winning Sandra Smith, and all, except David Golder, available in English for the first time. David Golder is the book that established Némirovsky's reputation in France in 1929 when she was twenty-six. It is a novel about greed and loneliness, the story of an ageing Russian Jewish businessman,an exile in France, learning to confront death and the knowledge that wealth has not brought him happiness. The Ball is both a sensitive exploration of adolescenceand a mercilessexposure of bourgeois social pretension. Snow in Autumn is an evocative tale of White Russian emigrés in Paris, while in The Courilof Affair a retired Russian revolutionary recalls an infamous assassinationcommitted in his youth. Introduced by novelist Claire Messud.

The Ball ; Snow in Autumn ; The Courilof Affair

David Golder

Emmy Simpson believes she makes her own luck. After an austere wartime childhood in London, she joyfully grasped at her first sign of good fortune and left for Australia. Her sister Virginia doesn’t believe in luck at all. She made no more than a brief foray to the other side of the city. The sisters made their choices, made steady worlds for themselves. But now, middle-aged, they find these worlds disintegrating. ‘In its rich detail and its humour, this is a wry, uplifting book’ Independent on Sunday ‘Messud writes beautiful cadenced prose, and proceeds, sentence by sentence, image by image, character by character, to create a fully realized, multi-layered world . . . [she] has the imagination, the craft and the understanding of human nature to write about anything she chooses’ Chicago Tribune ‘This is a fine first novel, and the “first” is deceptive, for its author has the daring and assurance to take on Iris Murdoch-like questions about goodness and truth’ New Yorker

Claire Messud

Books

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