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Anna Karénina

Анна Каренина
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Shandon Classics
1878
eBook
904
Russian
Constance Garnett
April 1, 2023 May 25, 2023
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Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.

Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.


About the book

Leo Tolstoy’s novel “Anna Karénina” follows the story of two families and focuses on the love affairs of the characters. The book explores the “double standard” of society at the time and the strict morals women were forced to follow.

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Guarda o muori (Look and Die)

Ich sehe was, und das ist tot
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, Book # 3
Giunti
September 20, 2017
ebook
416
German
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May 14, 2023 May 17, 2023
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Monday 28 September, 00.17. The Düsseldorf police receive a strange call: someone has noticed suspicious movements in an abandoned factory in the port area. But when the agents arrive on site, they immediately realise that it is not trivial trafficking: this is a case for Homicide; this is a case for Georg Stadler. Awakened with a start and led to the scene, the commissioner is faced with a disconcerting sight: a pool of blood on the floor, a razor, a shattered mirror, but… no corpse. Just an obscure code drawn on the wall. An indecipherable mystery, except that a few days later, in a hotel room, the body of a woman is found wearing only a pair of briefs, her right hand resting on her chest in an unnatural pose. Her blood everywhere: on the white sheets, on the carpet, on the victim's neck and long hair. Two seemingly unrelated cases, yet Stadler can't free himself from a suspect: both crime scenes seem set up like a macabre film set. The Commissioner just has to resort again to the help of Liz Montario, the brilliant profiler to whom he is bound by a subtle attraction. But this time even Liz will have a hard time, because every progress in the investigation, every new discovery seems to converge on a single suspect: Commissioner Stadler himself.


This book doesn’t have an English version.

About the book

A killer who plays out the most famous Horror films, a new flame for Commissioner Stadler and a colleague resentful of a case involving a policewoman he was in love with. In this new chapter of the Stadler and Montario saga, the commissioner and the psychologist will have to capture a bleak assassin.

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One Way or Another

Todo modo

Carcanet Press
1974
Paperback
103
Italian
S. Rabonvich
April 26, 2023 April 29, 2023
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The novel, set in the seventies, has as its protagonist a famous painter, whose name is never mentioned, who needs a period of peace in solitude. Seeing a sign indicating a hermitage, the Hermitage of Zafer (not better defined geographically), the painter thinks of going there. He then discovers that the hermitage has been transformed into a hotel founded by the ambiguous Don Gaetano and that at certain times of the year it hosts people of high social class (ministers, politicians, bank directors...) for spiritual retreats.


About the book

What’s the argument of this book? I have no idea… really. I know we are in an unmentioned village (certainly in Sicily since Sciascia, if I remember correctly, wrote about Sicily), the protagonist, a painter, driving around sees a building that could be a hotel or a hermitage and that this is managed by priests. There are some strange meetings between the most powerful of the region or of the state, I didn’t understand it, and that there is a live rosary. Well, I managed to write something…so maybe I got the argument…

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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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Penguin
1886
Paperback
88
English
April 24, 2023 April 25, 2023
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Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is the original title of a novella written by the famous Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson that was first published in 1886. The work is commonly known today as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. It is about a London lawyer named John Gabriel Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.


About the book

Can evil be eradicated from a person? That’s what Dr. Jekyll wanted to do with his experiments. Did he succeed? Maybe, but everything has its consequences.

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Dark Water

Dark Water
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, Book # 3
Grand Central Publishing
October 20, 2016
Paperback
373
English
April 3, 2023 April 13, 2023
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When Detective Erika Foster receives a tip off that key evidence for a major narcotics case was stashed in a disused quarry on the outskirts of London, she orders for it to be searched. From the thick sludge the drugs are recovered, but so is the skeleton of a young child.

The remains are quickly identified as seven-year-old Jessica Collins. The missing girl who made headline news when she vanished twenty-six years ago.

As Erika tries to piece together new evidence with the old, she discovers a family harbouring secrets, a detective plagued by her failure to find Jessica, and the mysterious death of a man living by the quarry.


About the book

The plot follows Inspector Erika Foster who investigates the death of a little girl who went missing 26 years ago. In the course of the investigation, family secrets and conspiracies emerge, and Erika’s life is put in danger.

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