Search results for ""Author Alex Capus""

Alex Capus follows every step of Robert Louis Stevenson's last years, studying every clue left behind by the Scottish writer and reaching his own conclusion about the most dramatic turn in Stevenson's life: his decision to settle in Samoa, where the climate was poison for his already diseased lungs. When he arrived there in 1889, neither Stevenson nor his family particularly liked the Pacific island and wanted to stay for only a few days. Yet soon afterwards he changed his mind and, intriguingly, spent what little remained of his savings on a plot of land and began living there on a meagre income. Before long Stevenson set about building an opulent villa and lived out the rest of his days in splendour. What had happened? Capus asserts that Stevenson not only wrote the world-famous novel "Treasure Island" here but searched for the treasure himself and furthermore found it towards the end of his life, on a little island he could see from the peak of the mountain in Samoa where he settled.

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Summer 1918. The First World War is drawing to a close when Leon Le Gall, a French teenager from Cherbourg who has dropped out of school and left home, falls in love with Louise Janvier. Both are severely wounded by German artillery fire, are separated, and believe each other to be dead. Briefly reunited two decades later, the two lovers are torn apart again by Louise's refusal to destroy Leon's marriage and by the German invasion of France. In occupied Paris during the Second World War, where Leon struggles against the abhorrent tasks imposed upon him by the SS, and the wilds of Africa, where Louise confronts the hardships of her primitive environment, they battle the vicissitudes of history and the passage of time for the survival of their love.

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