One of the greatest love stories ever told. For Jane Eyre, orphan and impoverished governess, the last person she should want is the only person she needs: her employer, Rochester. Not only is he socially inaccessible, he’s also a man of few words and many secrets – and one of his secrets is so terrible it could destroy everything he and Jane hold dear… (Takakansiteksti)

Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer. “Ancient Evenings should be for literature in the 1980’s what Gravity’s Rainbow was in the 1970’s, the epicenter of the major disturbance.” – Thomas Edwards. “Ancient Evenings is about reincarnation. Menenhetet, a courtier in the twentieth dynasty kingdom of Ramses and Nefititi, is reborn three times: Charioteer, general, High priest, general again. In seven books, Mailer explores the seven stages or components of the Egyptian soul – Name, Power, Angel, Heart, Double, Shadow and Remains – as they range across vast tracts of time and yet are contained within one person. The book is violent, sexual and scatological, demands concentration of attention, and is one of the most profound modern statements about the nature and destiny of mankind. With Ancient Evenings, Mailer has produced a fiction of unquestionable power and importance.” – Times Educational Supplement. There is a spiritual power in Mailer’s fantasy and there is a relevance to current reality in America that actually surpasses that of Mailer’s largest previous achievement, The Executioner’s Song… Ancient Evenenings is an extravagant invention, another warning that Mailer is at home on Emerson’s stairway of surprise.” – New York Review of Books. “Swiftly, Ancient Evenings pulls its reader inside a counsciousness different from any hitherto met in fiction. A soul or body entombed is struggling to burst free, desperate not alone for light and air but for prayer and story – promised comforters that have been treacherously withheld or stolen. Dwelling within this consciousness we relieve the ‘experience’ of an Egyptian body undergoing burial preparations, sense the soul’s overwhelming yearnings, within an unquiet grave, for healing that no physical treatment can provide. All is strange, dark, intense, mysteriously coherent.” – New York Times Book Review. (Takakansiteksti)

Kirjailija

Norman Mailer (1923, Long Branch, New Jersey – 2007, New York) oli yhdysvaltalainen kirjailija ja toimittaja. Häntä pidetään yhtenä merkittävimmistä toisen maailmansodan jälkeisistä jälkeistä yhdysvaltalaiskirjailijoista. Mailer osoitti lahjakkuutta jo teini-ikäisenä, sillä hän pääsi opiskelemaan Harvardin yliopistoon vain 16-vuotiaana. Hän valmistui ilmailuinsinööriksi ja hänet värvättiin armeijaan, jossa hän palveli Tyynellämerellä vuosina 1944-1946. Mailer kiinnostui kirjoittamisesta jo opiskeluaikanaan, ja hän julkaisi ensimmäisen kirjoituksensa 18-vuotiaana. Hänen tunnetuin teoksensa on esikoisromaani Alastomat ja kuolleet (1948), jota on pidetty yhtenä vaikuttavimmista toisen maailmansodan kuvauksista. Häntä pidetään ei-fiktiivisen romaanin kehittäjänä, mistä esimerkkejä ovat teokset Yön armeijat (1968), joka kuvaa Vietnamin sodan vastaisia mielenosoituksia, sekä Pyövelin laulu (1979), joka kertoo vuonna 1977 teloitetun murhaajan Gary Gilmoren elämäntarinan. Hän kirjoitti elämänkerran myös henkilöistä Pablo Picasso, Muhammad Ali, Lee Harvey Oswald, ja Marilyn Monroe. Hän kirjoitti myös CIA:n historiaa läpikäyvän romaanin. Mailer tunnettiin myös amerikkalaista yhteiskuntaa arvostelevana esseistinä, sekä niin sanotun uuden journalismin yhtenä kehittäjänä.

Norman Mailer, Wikipedia (fi)

Norman Mailer 1923-2007, Ylen muistokirjoitus

Elisabeth Costello is an Australian writer of international renown; she is fêted, studied and honoured. Famous principally for an early novel that established her reputation and from which, it seems, she will never escape, she has reached the stage, late in life, where her remaining function is to be venerated and applauded. One of a new breed of intellectual nomads, her life has become a series of engagements in sterile conference rooms throughout the world - a private consciousness obliged to reveal itself to a curious public: the presentation of a major award at an American college where she is required to deliver a lecture; a sojourn as the writer-in-residence on a cruise liner during which she encounters a fellow guest lecturer, an African poet also employed to divert the passengers; a visit to her sister a missionary in Africa, who is receiving an honorary degree, an occasion which both recognise as the final opportunity for effecting some form of reconciliation; and a disquieting appearance at a writers’ conference in Amsterdam where she finds the subject of her talk unexpectedly amongst the audience. She has made her life's work the study of other people, yet now it is she who is the object of scrutiny. But, for her, what matters is the continuing search for a means of articulating her vision and the verdict of future generations. J.M. Coetzee's work of fiction offers us a profound and delicate vision of literary celebrity, artistry and the private life of the mind. (Lieveteksti)

Author

J. M. Coetzee (born 1940, Cape Town) is a South African novelist, essayist, linguist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.  He relocated to Australia in 2002 and lives in Adelaine. He became an Australian citizen in 2006.

Coetzee, J. M., Wikipedia (en)

Coetzee John Maxwell, Ruotsin akatemian perustelut kirjallisuuden Nobel palkinnolle 2003

The reflections of the great scholar and Christian apologist on the death of his wife. In April 1956, C. S. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, married Joy Davidman, an American poet with two small children. After four brief, intensely happy years, Lewis found himself alone again, and inconsolable. To defend himself against the loss of God, Lewis wrote this journal, an eloquent statement of rediscovered faith. In it he freely confesses his doubts, his rage, and his awareness of human frailty. In it he finds again the way back to life.  “Its honest dissection is the negation of self-pity… drawing firmly back from each conventional posture of the mourner, he invites not sympathy but co-operation in his attempt to argue out a grief.” – The Times Literary Supplement (Takakansi- ja esittelyteksti)

McCourt Frank, Angela’s Ashes.“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling—does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors—yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness. Angela’s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic. (Lieveteksti)

Author

Frank McCourt (1930 Brooklyn, New York – 2009 Manhattan, New York) was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his book Angela’s Ashes, a memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood.

Frank McCourt, Wikipedia (en)

Rarely have the agonies of youth been so well captured as in Daphne du Maurier’s study of a young man’s restless search for identity – a search which takes him from the wastes of Scandinavia to the boulevards of Paris in the thirties. (Backcover text)

Author

Daphne du Maurier (1907 London – 1989 Cornwall) was an English author and playwright. Although she is classed as a romantic novelist, her stories seldom feature a conventional happy ending, and have been described as "moody and resonant" with overtones of the paranormal. These bestselling works were not at first taken seriously by critics, but have since earned an enduring reputation for storytelling craft. Many have been successfully adapted into films, including the novels Rebecca, My Cousin Rachel, and Jamaica Inn and the short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now/Not After Midnight. 

Daphne du Maurier, Wikipedia (en)

Zadie Smith’s brilliant tragi-comic NW follows four Londoners – Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan – after they’ve left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and complicated. Yet after a chance encounter they each find that the choices they’ve made, the people they once were and are now, can suddenly, rapidly unravel. A portrait of modern urban life, NW is funny, sad and urgent – as brimming with vitality as the city itself. (Backcover text) 

The second volume of Raymond E. Feist's classic heroic fantasy trilogy, The Riftwar and sequel to the timeless classic, Magician. For nearly a year peace reigned the enchanted kingdom of Rillanon. But new challenges awaited Arutha the Prince of Krondor when Jimmy The Hand – youngest thief in the Guild of Mockers – came upon a sinister Nighthawk poised to assassinate him. What evil power raises the dead and makes corpses do battle with the living at the behest of the Guild of Death? And what high magic can defeat it? The new King of Midkemia is threatened – and a life-or-death quest must be undertaken for an antidote to a poison that fells a beautiful Princess on her wedding day… “Epic scope and vivid imagination” -Washington Post. (Backcover text)

Author

Raymond E. Feist (born 1945, Los Angeles) is an American fantasy fiction author. He graduated from the University of California at San Diego with B.A. in Communication Arts. He is known especially of the fantasy series Riftwar, Kondor, and Empire. His books have been translated into multiple languages and have sold over 15 million copies. 

Raymond E. Feist, Wikipedia (en)

Raymond E. Feist, Wikipedia (fi)

Sookie Stackhouse enjoys her life, mostly. She’s a great cocktail waitress in a fun bar; she has a love life, albeit a bit complicated, and most people have come to terms with her telepathy. The problem is, Sookie wants a quiet life – but things just seem to happen to her and her friends. Now her brother Jason is about to turn into a werepanther for the first time. She can deal with that, but her normal sisterly concern turns to cold fear when a sniper sets his deadly sights on the local shifter population. She’s afraid not just because Jason is at risk, but because his new were-brethren suspect Jason himself may be the shooter. Sookie has until the next full moon to find out who’s behind the attacks – unless the killer decides to find her first. (Backcover text) 

Kirjailija

Charlaine Harris (s. 1951) yhdysvaltalainen rikoskirjailija. Harrisin teoksiin yhdistyy usein fantasia- ja kauhuelementtejä. Harris on julkaissut yli 30 kirjaa, jotka muodostavat mm. Aurora Teagarden-, Lily Bard- (Shakespeare), Sookie Stackhouse- (The Southern Vampire mysteries/ True Blood), Harper Connelly- ja Midnight Texas -sarjat. Gummerus on julkaissut Harrisin Sookie Stackhouse-sarjan suomennettuna. Harris on päässyt New York Timesin bestseller-listalle.

Charlaine Harris, Wikipedia 

Charlaine Harrisin kotisivut

Sookie Stackhouse likes living in Bon Temps, Louisiana, and she likes working as a cocktail waitress at Merlotte’s. But she is having a streak of bad luck. First her co-worker is killed, and no one seems to care. Then she comes face-to-face with a beastly creature which gives her a painful and poisonous lashing. Enter the vampires, who graciously suck the poison from her veins (like they didn’t enjoy it). The point is: the vampires saved her life. So when one of the bloodsuckers asks for a favour, she obliges – and soon Sookie’s in Dallas, using her telepathic skills to search for a missing vampire. She’s supposed to interview certain humans involved, but she makes one condition: the vampires must promise to behave, and let the humans go unharmed. But that’s easier said than done, and all it takes is one delicious blonde and one small mistake for things to turn deadly... (Backcover text)

Kirjailija

Charlaine Harris (s. 1951) yhdysvaltalainen rikoskirjailija. Harrisin teoksiin yhdistyy usein fantasia- ja kauhuelementtejä. Harris on julkaissut yli 30 kirjaa, jotka muodostavat mm. Aurora Teagarden-, Lily Bard- (Shakespeare), Sookie Stackhouse- (The Southern Vampire mysteries/ True Blood), Harper Connelly- ja Midnight Texas -sarjat. Gummerus on julkaissut Harrisin Sookie Stackhouse-sarjan suomennettuna. Harris on päässyt New York Timesin bestseller-listalle.

Charlaine Harris, Wikipedia 

Charlaine Harrisin kotisivut