Sandra Benítez
Bitter Grounds
Spanning the years between 1932 and 1977, this beautifully told epic is set in the heart of El Salvador, where coffee plantations are the center of life for rich and poor alike. Following three generations of the Prieto Clan and the wealthy family they work for, this is the story of mothers and daughters who live, love, and die for their passions.
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Angela’s ashes, a memoir of a childhood
En Anglais – « 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 Pulitzer Prize winning 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 ….
Reading in the Dark
En Anglais – Hugely acclaimed in Great Britain, where it was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and short-listed for the Booker, Seamus Deane’s first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend–the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls fly–reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house « as cunning and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it. » Seamus Deane has created a luminous tale about how childhood fear turns into fantasy and fantasy turns into fact. Breathtakingly sad but vibrant and unforgettable, Reading in the Dark is one of the finest books about growing up–in Ireland or anywhere–that has ever been written.
Flammes d’automne
Daniel Foxworth, héritier d'une immense fortune au Texas, s'est spécialisé dans l'extinction des incendies pétroliers. Mais un jour, quelqu'un essaie de le tuer en sabotant son hélicoptère. Il soupçonne Seth, le frère de Cozie, la jolie journaliste et désormais célèbre auteur d'un best-seller. Et il vient s'installer dans le Vermont sous un nom d'emprunt. Lorsque que Cozie découvre les vraies raisons de la présence de ce grand Texan au charme irrésistible, Daniel doit relever le plus grand défi de sa vie: gagner la confiance de Cozie sans renoncer aux soupçons qui l'ont amené jusque-là…
Deux femmes
Une jeune femme est retrouvée assassinée dans une chambre d’hôtel de Nice, sans papiers, sans passé, sans rien… Une autre femme, l’épouse d’un procureur adjoint de la République, s’amuse à mener l’enquête. Ne lui faut-il pas tromper son ennui, sinon tromper son mari ? Entre l’insolente jeunesse d’Olga et la distinction vernissée de Blandine, il y a Jean-Louis, scénariste, romancier, célibataire par indolence plus que par conviction, qui se laisse trop facilement séduire par l’une puis par l’autre. Les femmes ne mènent-elles pas toujours le bal, ou l’aventure ? Après Charles et Camille et La Comédie de Terracina. Frédéric Vitoux nous offre un roman policier sur fond de mafia russe et de faux tableaux, une comédie sentimentale où un homme peut en cacher un autre, une chronique de l’été 95 dans sa torpeur estivale. La Provence, l’île Saint-Louis, l’Italie sont autant de décors chers à l’auteur, qui invitent à un vrai suspense et à cette légère ébriété romanesque sans laquelle il n’est pas de bonheur littéraire.