'An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief.' From one of America's iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes the riveting story of rebuilding a life after the end of a marriage—an exploration of motherhood, art, and new love.   Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books— Splinters enters a new realm.   In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once—a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover—Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.   How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we’ve caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to “stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon” (NPR).

De hilarische en pijnlijk herkenbare Spaanse bestseller over een vrouw die haar werk zat is. Een heerlijke roman voor de fans van de serie Fleabag. Marisa is begin dertig en haat haar baan bij een reclamebureau in Madrid. Ze kan een werkdag alleen overleven met een zorgvuldig samengestelde cocktail van Instagram, YouTube-filmpjes en Lorazepam. De hoge huur van haar appartement en een continue stroom aan impulsaankopen maken dat ze niet zonder haar salaris als head of creative strategy kan.Marisa haat niet alleen haar baan, maar ook al haar collega’s, en de gedachte aan een aanstaand bedrijfsuitje is bijna ondraaglijk. Toch komt ze niet onder het teambuildingweekend uit, en de stress die dit veroorzaakt zorgt ervoor dat er barsten verschijnen in het masker dat ze al die tijd heeft gedragen. Lukt het Marisa om haar werkende leven op de rails te houden, of zal ze eindelijk haar ware gezicht laten zien?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition – its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires. At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse. As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life – sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty.

A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales from the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature winner and three-time Booker finalist, Samanta Schweblin.Once a decade a story collection rips a hole in the sky and we remember how it feels to have a spell cast upon us. From Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son to the earthquake stories of Haruki Murakami, these books are often short, but unforgettable. Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil is such a book. Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these six stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life—ourselves.In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring, to go home to her family, only to wish she could go back. In another, a sorrowful father finds himself unable to communicate with his son after a life-changing misfortune occurs under his supervision. In yet another, a dying woman calls a friend she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years—not since an accident which forever changed them both.Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection—but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive.Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin’s worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river’s current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream.

'You knew I'd write a book about you someday' Our narrator understands good love stories - their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined - with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth. Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.

‘Muziek mag niet, daten is verboden, het hebben van vrienden van het andere geslacht is onwettig, je leuk kleden en opmaken is ongepast, ’s avonds buiten zijn is niet geoorloofd, “vieze, immorele” films en series kijken is onaanvaardbaar (en dan bedoel ik geen porno, gewoon een film waarin wordt gezoend), het vieren van verjaardagen of andere heidense feestdagen mag niet, werken met mannen kan niet en ook uitgaan en feesten op festivals is verboden.’ Opgroeien in een streng islamitisch gezin betekent voor Büsra dingen stiekem doen. Stiekem make-up en sieraden dragen, laat thuiskomen, met jongens afspreken en alcohol serveren in een restaurant. Maar het betekent vooral: voortdurend vragen stellen. ‘Moet ik leven als een kamerplant? Moet ik in een huwelijk treden waar alle seks uit is geramd nog voordat het begonnen is, omdat mijn verwekkers een volstrekt humorloze, bloedeloze en Koranvaste lul voor mij hebben uitgekozen? En dan veranderen in een broedkip zoals alle vrouwen om me heen? En de rest van mijn bestaan op die manier slijten? Is dat waarvoor ik leef? Is God dan blij met mijn tragedie?’ In een ongekend eerlijk relaas onderzoekt Büsra met veel humor de grenzen van haar geloof en de gemeenschap waar ze in opgroeit. Als er iemand geen blad voor de mond neemt, is het Büsra wel.

In De helleveeg keert A.F.Th. van der Heijden terug naar het decor en de personages van zijn vermaarde cyclus De tandeloze tijd. We maken kennis met Albert Egberts’ tante Tiny, die behalve met smetvrees ook behept is met een dwangmatig scherpe tong. Voor Albert is tante Tiny, schertsend Tientje Poets genoemd, even afschrikwekkend als intrigerend. Eenmaal zelf vader geworden stuurt Albert aan op een grote confrontatie, waarbij eindelijk alle familiegeheimen aan het licht komen. Met zijn majestueuze beheersing van de stof voert Van der Heijden ons zijn vertrouwde, levendige universum binnen. De helleveeg is een even geestige als schrijnende roman. Van der Heijden levert opnieuw het bewijs van de vitaliteit en kracht van zijn schrijverschap.