It’s the 1960s, and the air is electric. On the cusp of adulthood, two biracial siblings search for their place in a newly independent Morocco brimming with both possibility and peril. Aicha aspires to become a doctor and spends most of her time studying. Her younger brother, Selim, falls in with the American and European hippies to do drugs and practice free love. Now dreaming of a radiant future and experiencing the ecstatic first flush of desire against the backdrop of a country intoxicated by its own sense of freedom, Aicha and Selim soon find the ideals of their youth colliding with the realities of racism and corruption, as Moroccans once united against their colonizer make a grab for wealth and influence, and the national spirit of communal celebration gives way to elites telling everyone else to “watch us dance.”
Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored --- and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making.
When Myriam, a French-Moroccan lawyer, decides to return to work after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their two young children. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic apartment in Paris’s upscale 10th arrondissement, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau.
In THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva --- as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of ROLAND BARTHES FOR DUMMIES). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.”
As a bilingual bestselling novelist with a mixed Franco-British bloodline and a host of eminent forebears, Tatiana de Rosnay is the perfect candidate to write a biography of Daphne du Maurier. As an 11-year-old de Rosnay read and reread REBECCA, becoming a lifelong devotee of du Maurier’s fiction. Now de Rosnay pays homage to the writer who influenced her so deeply, following du Maurier from a shy seven-year-old to a rebellious 16-year-old, a twenty-something newlywed, and finally a cantankerous old lady.
Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. While driving home exhausted, they are involved in a fatal car accident on a deserted road. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one goes through the windshield. The doctors declare him brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital, but his heart is still beating. THE HEART takes place over the 24 hours surrounding the resulting heart transplant, as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death.
