"Delicate handling of deep themes—loss, missed connections, meaninglessness—gives the novel an emotional charge greater than its low-key particulars and pacing."
A French journalist and a Portuguese photographer find they have some uncomfortable things in common in this latest from Le Tellier (Enough About Love, 2011, etc.).
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"Stripped of its period shading, this is a sad and timeless tale of women on pedestals and the pain of loving not wisely, but too well."
In a new translation of the 20th-century French classic, wealthy Philippe Marcenat makes two attempts to find the perfect partner and fails both times.
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"Intended to celebrate the art of storytelling, this tedious work merely illustrates the perils of authorial self-indulgence."
A scroll containing a Buddhist sutra written in an unknown language causes no end of trouble in Sijie's meandering novel (Mr. Muo's Travelling Couch, 2005, etc.).
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"The power of the author's previous historical fiction came largely from a meticulous sense of historical detail missing in this artifice, which never comes to mythological or fictional life."
Beijing-born novelist and painter Shan Sa (Empress, 2006, etc.) imagines the life of Alexander the Great in terms of his impassioned love affair with an Amazon warrior queen.
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"The overall effect is one of a haunting relationship that will help teens understand both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Fiction. YA)"
When a bomb explodes at a nearby café on the evening of the tenth anniversary of a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, Tal, a 17-year-old Israeli girl, decides to reach out to a Palestinian neighbor.
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"Eccentric, elusive and at times explosively funny. A lucid allegorical gem."
If Eugène Ionesco had written Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," he might have produced something very like this terse, teasing novel
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"A grim, sharp-edged look at the emotional emptiness of marital intimacy."
Winner of the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, this unsentimental account of a sexually unhappy young wife is half Madame Bovary, half The Story of O.
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"A compelling read and surprisingly easy to follow, given its exotic complexity."
In sharp contrast to her tightly focused previous novel (The Girl Who Played Go, 2003), Shan Sa, the China-born French novelist and painter, has written a sweeping panoramic historical novel about the seventh century's Tang dynasty and China's only woman emperor.
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"Intense, operatic personal tragedy magnified by Sa's sense of history and Eastern culture."
The China-born Sa, who arrived in France in 1990 as a late adolescent and writes in French, presents the first of her three novels to be translated into English.
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"Moore's descriptions of the pilgrimage's hardships are gripping, but the prose in her English-language debut is turgid Ivanhoe with a Gallic accent."
Easter 1146: After thousands of pilgrims gather for the Paschal Mass in Le Puy, France, many of them will walk, some barefoot, in deadly winter weather over the Pyrenees to the Saint Jacques de Compostela in the northwest corner of Spain.
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Newcomer Sanders begins a series of expatriate novels set in France's Dordogne region with the funeral of Gaston Caminade, who was crushed by an oak he was trying to fell.
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The graceful, thoughtful, oddly charming, and profoundly pornographic account of a French intellectual's life of extreme sexuality.
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A young Western woman's experience of culture shock and psychological panic take frantic comic form in this highly entertaining, if rather slight, prizewinning eighth novel (first published in 1999 in France) from the popular author of The Stranger Next Door (1998).
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"Jurgensen's is a powerful voice for the unbearable sadness caused by death and the courage and love it takes to live with both the pain of loss and the cherished memories."
A French mother's lyrical and haunting memoir of the deaths of her two young daughters and how she has coped with this terrible loss.
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