1. On the shore
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Litera, 2024
Translation: Andreea Năstase
On a late November afternoon, Saleh Omar lands at Gatwick Airport from Zanzibar, a remote island in the Indian Ocean. He has a bag with him that contains his most prized possession – a mahogany box containing incense. He used to own a furniture store, he had a house and he was a husband and father. Now he is an asylum seeker arrived from paradise. Silence is his only defense. During this time, Latif Mahmud, an important figure in Saleh’s past, leads a lonely life in his London flat. When the two meet in a small English seaside town, a complex story emerges, a story about love and betrayal, about seduction and possession, about people trying their best to find a certain stability in the tumult of their era.
Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 and was a professor of English at the University of Kent. He is the author of the novels: Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Paradis (Paradise, 1994, finalist for the Booker Prize and Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence (1996), By the Sea (By the Sea, 2001, Booker Prize nominee and Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist), Abandon (Desertion, 2005, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize finalist), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017), Afterlives (2020, Orwell Prize for Fiction finalist and Walter Scott Prize nominee) and Theft (2025). Lives in Canterbury.
Nobel Prize for Literature (2021).
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Ștefan Mandachi apologizes after supporting and voting for Călin Georgescu: “I was wrong”. He had enjoyed his victory on Sunday
2. Paradis
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Litera, 2022
Translation: Andreea Năstase
Yusuf lives a quiet life with his family in a small town in East Africa, and when he is informed that he is going to go far from home, he receives the news calmly. It does not occur to him to ask why he must accompany Uncle Aziz, and why the expedition was organized so quickly; he doesn’t even ask when he’ll be back. The truth is that the “uncle” is a rich and powerful merchant, and Yusuf was entrusted to him as collateral for his father’s debts.
Paradise is a complex tapestry in which myths, dreams and biblical and Koranic traditions are interwoven, the story of a boy’s coming of age in an Africa crushed by colonialism and violence.
3. Lives adrift
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publisher: Litera, 2022
Translation: Andreea Năstase
When he was just a little boy, Ilyas was kidnapped from his parents by German colonial troops. After many years of fighting in a war against his own people, he returns to his village only to find that his parents are gone and his sister, Afiya, has been taken into the care of strangers.
Another young man returns at the same time. Hamza was not kidnapped but sold; also joined the colonial troops, he became the right hand of an officer whose protection marked his life. Convalescing and penniless, all he wants is a job and a life safe from danger – as well as the love of the beautiful Afiya. As fate intertwines the lives of these people, who get on with their lives by working and falling in love, the shadow of a new war on another continent grows longer and darker, threatening to seize them and take them with it…
4. The librarian
Author: Mikhail Elizarov
Publisher: Trei, 2024
Translation: Magda Achim
No one remembers Gromov, once a writer of propagandistic novels, not much enjoyed by the public. But as time goes by, his books surface again, and each one gives its reader a special attribute: The fury of savagely confronting one’s enemies; Memory, which brings to the mind of the reader the images of a happy childhood; The power to ignore the fear of death. Over time, Libraries begin to appear in the country, reading phalansteries supported by readers who fight for the last copies of these rare books. In the whirlwind of the fight between the outcasts, Aleksei appears, the hero without any particular quality, who changes everyone’s destinies the moment he receives the Book of Memory, becoming a Librarian against his will. Combining the environment of a corrupt universe with black humor, reality with myth, Mikhail Elizarov takes an ironic look at Soviet Russia in his novel, in a story about inexhaustible human desire, about the search for meaning in life lived in a chaotic, illusory world.
Booker Prize for Russian Literature 2008.
5. History of the future
Author: Georges Minois
Publisher: Nemira, 2024
Translation: Doru Mareș
Georges Minois proved that history is not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. Knowing the future has been a constant concern of all civilizations. Although universal, prediction has taken different forms throughout human history: divination, prophecy, astrology, utopianism or futurology. It is not neutral or passive, but corresponds to intentions, desires or fears. And the emphasis is not so much on accuracy as on its role as social or individual therapy and its reflection in the present. In this sense, it reveals the mentality and culture of a society.
6. Dismantled houses
Autor: Colin Barett
Publisher: Polirom, 2024
Translation: Bogdan Perdivara
The long-awaited novel by Colin Barrett, winner of several prestigious awards for his volumes of short prose, is an exploration of the underworld of County Mayo, Ireland, and the conflicts in the area, but also a true analytical-literary immersion in the darkness of the human condition . As the town of Ballina prepares for the biggest weekend of the year, the simmering conflict between small-time drug dealer Cillian English and underworld brothers Gabe and Sketch Ferdia erupts in violence. When Dev hears the doorbell on Friday night and goes to open it, he finds Doll, Cillian’s teenage brother covered in bruises, in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Spurred on by his infamous cousins, Dev finds himself involved, against his will, in the two Ferdia’s dreams of revenge. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can’t shake the feeling that something bad has happened to her boyfriend, Doll. Hungover, still trying to recover from a restless night and haunted by her own ghosts, she sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, questioning her future in Ballina. Broken Houses is a beautifully written, suspenseful story about two outcasts struggling to find themselves as their world descends into chaos and violence.
Novel nominated for Booker Prize 2024.
7. Blood and ruins
Autor: Richard Overy
Publisher: Litera, 2024
Translation: Diana Morărașu
Blood and Ruin is a masterpiece, a new and comprehensive look at the final battle for the future of the global order, which will make us see war in new and unfamiliar ways. Provocative, original and thought-provoking, Blood and Ruin aims to bring us a new understanding of war.
Duke of Wellington Medal winning volume for military history.
8. The story of the legendary Orient Express
Autor: Guillaume Picot
Publisher: Corinth, 2024
Translation: Dorina Tataran
The Orient Express, the first train connecting Europe and the gateway to the Orient, the embodiment of all the desires and fantasies associated with it, was an immediate success. Soon known as “the king of trains, the train of kings”, it became a legend in its own lifetime. 30 years after its last journey, the Orient Express opens unique archives and the doors of the restoration workshops, where the historic carriages, witnesses of this mythical story, are brought back to life…
“In October 1883, the Orient Express arrived in Bucharest via Sinaia and the Prahova valley, and on this occasion Peleș Castle was inaugurated. The travelers visited the palace on October 7, 1883, arriving in Bucharest the same day, at 9 p.m. (the train had left Paris three days earlier). Then they were invited by the Romanian officials to Hotel Hugues (located on the site of today’s Grand Hotel Continental), for an evening of banquet and a night of hospitality on Calea Victoriei.” – Adrian Majuru
9. Russia and the Romanian Countries
Author: Victor Taki
Publisher: Corinth, 2024
Translation: Sorin Cristescu
One of the goals of Russia’s foreign policy since the beginning of the 19th century was to transform Moldavia and Wallachia from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and launching pad for future military operations against Constantinople. Russia and the Wallachia describes the divergent interests and complicated cooperation between Russian officials and the elites of the two Principalities between 1812 and 1834, a pivotal period for the Wallachia.
Through a meticulous research of the plans and memoranda drawn up by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite, Victor Taki shows how the ruling class of the two Principalities used the Russo-Ottoman rivalry to preserve and expand their traditional autonomy . Stemming from the interaction with the Tsar’s representatives, comprehensive institutional reforms consolidated territorial statehood in the Lower Danube area, providing the framework for the realization of the future Romanian national state.
Although Russian policy was based on self-interest and a good part of Romanian society manifested an obvious Russophobia, this troubled period nevertheless contributed in a significant way to the emergence of modern Romania, a few decades later.
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Source: jurnalul.ro
