Search results for ""author laurent gaudé""

Timely and essential, Hear Our Defeats is a novel about the battles that define us, the battles lost, won, and those still being fought. A French intelligence officer is tasked with tracking down a former member of the U.S. Special Forces suspected of drug trafficking during the war in Afghanistan. On his way to Beirut he shares a night with Mariam, an Iraqi archaeologist, who is in a race against time to save ancient artifacts across the Middle East from the destruction wreaked by ISIS. Woven into these two forceful, gripping storylines are stylish meditations on humankind's bellicose history: Hannibal's failed march on Rome and the burning of his fleet on the waters of the Mediterranean; Grant's pursuit of the Confederates into rural Virginia; Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House; and Emperor Haile Selassie's swift retreat from Ethiopia. Each one a turning point in world history, each revealing a different facet of how nations and in

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A timeless story between foundational tale and myth When Salina dies, it falls to her youngest son to tell her story, a story of violence and suffering, vengeance and passion. Exiled three times, the first time as a new–born abandoned outside a village by a mysterious horseman, Salina was taken in and raised by a clan that only ever saw her as a stranger and an enemy to be defeated. Three times a mother, her children born from strife, Salina never knew love, and revenge became her reason to live. For her to gain admittance to the cemetery, to a place of peace at last, Salina’s son must face up and tell the tale of Salina’s ordeals—her rape the most harrowing—in minute detail. He has no choice but to give voice to all the hardship that for years fed into Salina’s rage. With this short novel set in an ancestral world, Laurent Gaudé explores a narrative space where time flows to rhythmic rituals, where fate blurs to legend, and secrets become myth.

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When his son is killed by gangsters' crossfire on his way to school, Neapolitan taxi driver Matteo is consumed by despair. But just when he feels life has lost all meaning, he encounters a man who claims the living can find ways into the afterlife. And legend says that there's an entrance to the underworld beneath Naples. What if Matteo had a chance of bringing Pippo back from the dead?

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