Search results for ""Author Charlotte Coombe""

A taut, appealing, and often quite funny exploration of existential angst."—Kirkus ReviewsIn a nameless suburb in an equally nameless country, every house has a room reserved for the president. No one knows when or why this came to be. It’s simply how things are, and no one seems to question it except for one young boy.The room is kept clean and tidy, nobody talks about it and nobody is allowed to use it. It is for the president and no one else. But what if he doesn’t come? And what if he does? As events unfold, the reader is kept in the dark about what’s really going on. So much so, in fact, that we begin to wonder if even the narrator can be trusted...Ricardo Romero has been compared to Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino, and we see why in this eerie, meditative novel narrated by a shy young boy who seems to be very good at lying about the truth. Following in the footsteps of Julio Cortázar and a certain literary tradition of sinister rooms (such as Dr Jekyll’s laboratory), The President’s Room is a mysterious tale based on the suspicion that a house is never just one single home.

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"One of the most original and talented novelists writing in Spanish today." —Alberto ManguelWith sensuous imagery and musical cadence, renowned Oulipian Eduardo Berti conjures an exquisite, star-crossed love story in pre-revolutionary China. The desires of a young girl, visited in her dreams by her grandmother's ghost, clash with the strict expectations of her parents, exploring the delicate balance between modernity and tradition, mysticism and memory.Eduardo Berti (b. 1964) was admitted to the Oulipo in 2014, becoming the group's first Argentinian writer. In 2011 he won the Emecé Prize and the Las Américas Prize for his book The Imagined Land.

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Lucía and Pablo are Colombian immigrants who’ve built their lives together in the US yet maintain conflicting attitudes towards their homeland and the extent to which it defines their identity. After undergoing fertility treatment, Pablo finds himself excluded from raising their twins, and the new family situation seems to question the very nature of their relationship and of who they believed they were. In search of respite and time to reflect, Lucía takes the kids to her parents’ apartment in Miami. Meanwhile, Pablo learns he is suffering from a syndrome known as ‘Holiday Heart’. But is this just a break, or is it really the final days of their marriage?

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From her home in Paris, Lina recalls the story of three women whose lives unfold in the conservative city of Barranquilla in Colombia. Amongst parties at the Country Club and strolls along the promenade in Puerto Colombia, unfurls a story of sensuality supressed by violence; a narrative of oppression in which Dora, Catalina and Beatriz are victims of a patriarchal system living in and among the fragile threads of the fabric of society. In Lina’s obsessive recounting of the past, this masterful novel transforms anecdotes of a life into an absolute view of the world, a profound panorama of Colombian society towards the end of the 50s. Written from personal memories and historical research, this is a novel that is both precise and poetic, a novel that immortalises—from the distant perspective of its narrator—the events that took place in a small seaside town. Distancing herself from her contemporaries of the Latin-American literary boom with a boldly feminist narrative, Marvel Moreno has created a world that both mirrors the close-up, private lives of the people of Barranquilla and the human condition itself. *WHAT NETGALLEY READERS ARE SAYING* "Just delightful." "Full of a fierce fightback against generations of misogyny and toxic masculinity. This book is powerful." "A wonderfully written and sensually feminist novel." "I'd read Moreno again like a shot." "There's something deliciously unexpected, even subversive about Moreno's prose."

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