Voices In Time

In the 1980s the Bureaucracy eliminated all knowledge of the past in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. In 2030 André Gervais discovers two metal boxes containing manuscripts, diaries, and other personal papers that have somehow survived and asks an old man, John Wellfleet, to use these documents to discover the past. In doing so, Wellfleet learns the truth about two relatives: his older cousin Timothy Wellfleet, a Montreal TV journalist at the time of the 1970 War Measures Act, and his stepfather, Conrad Dehmel, a German scholar struggling to keep his Jewish fiancée and himself safe from Hitler's Gestapo. Hugh MacLennan skillfully juxtaposes the insanity of life in Nazi Germany, the political climate of Montreal in the 1960s, and the perspective of an old man looking back on the conditions that led to world destruction as the background to an unforgettable love story.

A striking mosaic of memories, observations, and legends that together reveal the author's own story and a grand, compassionate vision of life itself In this kaleidoscope of reflections, renowned South American author Eduardo Galeano ranges widely, from childhood to love, music, plants, fear, indignity, and indignation. In the signal style of his bestselling and much-admired Memory of Fire trilogy—brief fragments that build steadily into an organic whole—Galeano offers a rich, wry history of his life and times that is both calmly philosophical and fiercely political. Beginning with blue algae, the earliest of life forms, these 333 vignettes alight on the Galeano family's immigration to Uruguay in the early twentieth century, the fate of love letters intercepted by a military dictatorship, abuses by the rich and powerful, the latest military outrages, and the author's own encounters with all manner of living matter, including generals, bums, dissidents, soccer stars, ducks, and trees. Out of these meditations emerges neither anger nor bitterness, but a celebration of a blessed life in a harsh world. Poetic and passionate, scathing and lyrical, delivered with Galeano's inimitable mix of gentle comedy and fierce moral judgment, Voices of Time is a deeply personal statement from a great and beloved writer.

Young Memer takes on a pivotal role in freeing her war-torn homeland from its oppressive captors.

From one of Italy’s greatest writers, a stunning novel “filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation” (Colm Tóibín) After WWII, a small Italian town struggles to emerge from under the thumb of Fascism. With wit, tenderness, and irony, Elsa, the novel’s narrator, weaves a rich tapestry of provincial Italian life: two generations of neighbors and relatives, their gossip and shattered dreams, their heartbreaks and struggles to find happiness. Elsa wants to imagine a future for herself, free from the expectations and burdens of her town’s history, but the weight of the past will always prove unbearable, insistently posing the question: “Why has everything been ruined?”

From the Pulitzer and Story Prize winner: sixteen new stories—provocative, funny, disturbing, enchanting—that delve into the secret lives and desires of ordinary people, alongside retellings of myths and legends that highlight the aspirations of the human spirit. Beloved for the lens of the strange he places on small town life, Steven Millhauser further reveals in Voices in the Night the darkest parts of our inner selves to brilliant and dazzling effect. Here are stories of wondrously imaginative hyperrealism, stories that pose unforgettably unsettling what-ifs, or that find barely perceivable evils within the safe boundaries of our towns, homes, and even within our bodies. Here, too, are stories culled from religion and fables: Samuel, who hears the voice of God calling him in the night; a young, pre-enlightenment Buddha, who searches for his purpose in life; Rapunzel and her Prince, who struggle to fit the real world to their dream. Heightened by magic, the divine, and the uncanny, shot through with sly and winning humor, Voices in the Night seamlessly combines the whimsy and surprise of the familiar with intoxicating fantasies that take us beyond our daily lives, all done with the hallmark sleight of hand and astonishing virtuosity of one of our greatest contemporary storytellers.

We live immersed in thought. But do we actually know what a thought is? To answer this question, psychology professor Charles Fernyhough draws on everything from neuroscience to literary history to grasp the true nature of this most inscrutable of acts: thinking. Whether a medieval saint who hears voices or a writer absorbed in an imagined world, a daydreamer riding the subway or a captivated reader, we experience thought as a creative inner dialogue featuring multiple voices. Fernyhough uses this conception to demystify mental illness, showing that imagining voices is intimately linked to the feeling of artistic production. Drawing on literature, film, and psychology, as well as cognitive science, The Voices Within is a poetic venture into the depths of our mind. It will revolutionize the way we hear and understand the voices in our heads.