Echoes Of The City

A jewel of modern Norwegian literature now hailed as Lars Saabye Christensen's crowning achievement - an intricate and utterly compelling narrative. "With its tonal nuance and quietly amusing melancholy, Echoes of the City confirms him as one of Norway's finest writers" Guardian "[A] profoundly resonant novel" T.L.S. Christensen is one of Scandinavia's finest and most celebrated storytellers, who has devoted the best part of his career to writing about the city of his birth. As Oslo slowly emerges from a period of crippling austerity, Echoes of the City shows how small, almost imperceptible acts of kindness and compassion, and tiny shifts in fortune, can change the lives of many. At the centre of the novel are Maj and Ewald Kristoffersen and their son Jesper, their lives closely entwined and overlapping with their neighbours' on Kirkeveien. When the butcher's son Jostein is knocked down in a traffic accident and loses his hearing, Jesper promises to be his ears in the world. The arrival of a long-awaited telephone is a major event for Maj and Ewald, and meanwhile their neighbour, recently widowed Fru Vik, tentatively takes up with the owner of the bookshop near the cemetery. The bar at Hotel Bristol becomes a meeting place for all of them - for Ewald and his advertising colleagues, for Fru Vik and her suitor, to the piano playing of hapless Enzo Zanetti, an immigrant down on his luck, who enables Jesper to discover his true passion. The minutes of the local Red Cross meetings give an architecture to the narrative of so many lives and tell a story in themselves, bearing witness to the steady recovery of the community. Echoes of the City is a remarkably tender observation of the rhythms and passions of a city, and a particular salute to the resilience of its women. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Set in post-war Oslo and following on from Echoes of a City, by an author who understands the city like no other. "One of Norway's finest writers" GUARDIAN "Profoundly resonant" TLS In Kirkeveien, Oslo, in the year 1956, forty-year-old Maj is worn down by being a homemaker and widowed mother. To the indignation of the Red Cross ladies, she cautiously frees herself from the role she has otherwise fulfilled to the letter. She finds a job that she turns out to be more than good at, and some kind of love, too. Her friend Margrethe is sick of her marriage to the antiquarian bookseller, Olaf Hall, but cannot think of divorce. Jesper gets a girlfriend who opens the door to a new, more liberated environment of vegetarianism and politics. And his best friend Jostein realises that his talent for making money will allow him access to a world that is larger and richer than that of the Oslo slaughterhouse. Friendship is a beautifully orchestrated story about people and their dreams, about social conventions, personal constraints and what it takes to have the courage to realise oneself. In this book brimming with human insight, as in Echoes of the City, in each of these characters we recognise something of ourselves.

A shipwrecked sailor disturbs the life of a journalist in a late nineteenth-century English seaside town in this reimagining of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. After a ferocious storm shipwrecks young Norwegian sailor Hans Lyngstrand in the English Channel near Dengate, aspiring journalist Martin Bridges takes a job at the local newspaper. When Hans moves into Martin’s boardinghouse to convalesce and Martin interviews the young sailor for the paper, it upends Martin’s otherwise uneventful world. Hans tells him of the shipwreck—and of his encounter with a vicious sailor vowing to seek revenge, who Hans believes may still be alive. So begins a complex friendship between the two young men that will cause Martin to reexamine his relationships with everyone around him. In The Stranger from the Sea, the backstories Paul Binding creates for the characters of Ibsen’s classic The Lady from the Sea unfold in tandem with the secret romances, rivalries, and heartaches of a seemingly unremarkable town. The result is a lyrical and quietly captivating novel that will mesmerize readers from its opening pages. “A sensitive depiction of youthful sexuality, the anguish of failed relationships, and the rights of women in a male-dominated world,” —TLS

SUMMER, 2019 PHOENIX attends a protest rally with her older brother, and it ignites a fire in her she didn’t know she had. The island city she loves is disappearing and she’s determined to capture the moment on camera. That night she accidentally swaps phones with the enigmatic Kai. KAI never wanted to be a policeman, but his estranged father enrolled him in the Academy anyway. A chance encounter with a group of student protestors offers him a way to earn his father’s approval once and for all: by going undercover and infiltrating their network. Sparks fly between Phoenix and Kai, drawing them together even as they stand on different sides of the struggle. But when love is built on a lie, what chance does it have to survive?

On Detective Matt Jones's first night working Homicide in LA, he's called to investigate a particularly violent murder case: a man has been gunned down in a parking lot off Hollywood Boulevard, his bullet-riddled body immediately pegged as the work of a serial robber who has been haunting the Strip for months. Driven by the grisliness of the killing, Jones and his hot-tempered partner, Denny Cabrera, jump headfirst into the investigation. But as Jones uncovers evidence that links the crime to a brutal, ritualized murder that occurred eighteen months prior, he begins to suspect that there's more going on beneath the surface. When Jones discovers shocking, deep-seated corruption; a high-level cover-up; and his own personal ties to the rising body count, he's no longer sure he can trust anyone, even himself.

What happens to a teenage girl who starts hearing voices? The answer is vastly different for two girls living in two different eras.When a “spirit” contacts Lucy Phillips at a séance in nineteenth-century Manhattan, Lucy quickly gains fame as a talented medium who can impart knowledge about the future to wealthy socialites. Lucy is grateful to this “spirit,” who communicates with her from beyond, for giving her a life of luxury she’s never known before. By contrast, Lindsay Miller is hospitalized in modern-day New York City for schizophrenia when she starts to hear a girl’s voice in her head.But when the two girls realize they are really hearing each other’s voices every time they occupy the same physical location, they begin to see possibilities that will change both of their lives forever. . . .

In an empire built on lies, truth may be the greatest weapon. Now in paperback, the first book of a new fantasy duology filled with forbidden magic, plenty of snark, and even more action, from Morgan Rhodes, the New York Times bestselling author of the Falling Kingdom series. Josslyn Drake knows only three things about magic: it’s rare, illegal, and always deadly. So when she’s caught up in a robbery gone wrong at the Queen’s Gala and infected by a dangerous piece of magic—one that allows her to step into the memories of an infamously evil warlock—she finds herself living her worst nightmare. Joss needs the magic removed before it corrupts her soul and kills her. But in Ironport, the cost of doing magic is death, and seeking help might mean scheduling her own execution. There’s nobody she can trust. Nobody, that is, except wanted criminal Jericho Nox, who offers her a deal: his help extracting the magic in exchange for the magic itself. And though she’s not thrilled to be working with a thief, especially one as infuriating (and infuriatingly handsome) as Jericho, Joss is desperate enough to accept. But Jericho is nothing like Joss expects. The closer she grows to Jericho and the more she sees of the world outside her pampered life in the city, the more Joss begins to question the beliefs she’s always taken for granted—beliefs about right and wrong, about power and magic, and even about herself.