Bøger udgivet af Harper Perennial

The acclaimed author of Vinegar Hill returns with a story of two unlikely romances—one historical, the other modern-day—separated by thousands of miles and well over a century. Battling feelings of loss and apathy in the wake of a painful divorce, novelist Jeanette struggles to complete a book about the long-term relationship between Clara Schumann, a celebrated pianist and the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, and her husband's protégé, the handsome young composer Johannes Brahms. Although this legendary love triangle has been studied exhaustively, Jeanette—herself a gifted pianist—wonders about the enduring nature of Clara and Johannes's lifelong attachment. Were they just "best friends," as both steadfastly claimed? Or was the relationship complicated by desires that may or may not have been consummated? Through a chance encounter, Jeanette meets Hart, a mysterious, worldly entrepreneur who is a native of Clara's birthplace, Leipzig, Germany. Hart's casual help with translations quickly blossoms into something more. There are things about men and women, he insists, that do not change. The two embark on a whirlwind emotional journey that leads Jeanette across Germany and Switzerland to a crossroads similar to that faced by Clara Schumann—also a mother, also an artist—more than a century earlier. Accompanied by photographs, sketches, and notes from past and present, A. Manette Ansay's original blend of fiction and history captures the timeless nature of love and friendship between women and men.

"Fascinating....Bessel does an excellent job of evoking the blasted landscape of a conquered Germany."--The New Yorker"A sober yet powerful account."--New York Times Book ReviewAuthoritative and dramatic, Germany 1945 by distinguished British historian Richard Bessel is groundbreaking history that brilliantly explores the devastation and remarkable rebirth of Germany at the end of World War II. Called "a masterly account by a first rate historian," by Ian Kershaw (Hitler), Germany 1945 is sure to become the definitive work on the subject.

Ben Greenman is a writer of virtuosic range and uncanny emotional insight. As Darin Strauss has noted, "Like Bruno Schulz, George Saunders, Donald Barthelme, and no one else I can think of, Greenman has the power to be whimsical without resorting to whimsy." The stories in this new collection, What He's Poised to Do, showcase his wide range, yet are united by a shared sense of yearning, a concern with connections missed and lost, and a poignant attention to how we try to preserve and maintain those connections through the written word. From a portrait of an unfaithful man contemplating his own free will to the saga of a young Cuban man's quixotic devotion to a woman he may never have met; and from a nineteenth-century weapons inventor's letter to his young daughter to an aging man's wistful memory of a summer love affair in a law office—each of these stories demonstrates Greenman's maturity as a chronicler of romantic angst both contemporary and timeless, and as an explorer of the ways our yearning for connection informs our selves and our souls.

"A brilliant, complicated man is the centre of Jill Dawson's The Great Lover, and while she draws extensively on historical records of Brooke and his contemporaries, it is her decisions as a novelist that make this account of his life fascinating as well as faithful. . . . . The story that emerges is strong, satisfying, and memorable." -- The Times (London)An imaginative, fascinating novel about one of the most enduringly popular and romantic figures of the First World War--the radical, handsome young poet Rupert Brooke.

Billy Brent and Alice Stephens are star-crossed like all great lovers. Their need for each other drives them from Istanbul to Miami, Venice to Mexico. After years of encounters and escapes, they lose themselves deep in a desert wilderness, searching for a way forward, only to learn that sometimes the trail simply forks.From Charlie Smith, author of three New York Times Notable Books, comes his long-awaited new novel, his first in more than a decade. An exploration of the true particulars of obsession, Three Delays is a book of the spirit, of how broken people love and persist from darkness to darkness.

Delilah Blue Lovett has always been a bit of an outsider, ever since her father moved her from Toronto to L.A. when she was eight, claiming Delilah's mother no longer wanted to be part of their family. Twenty now and broke, but determined to be an artist like her errant mom, Delilah attends art class for free—by modeling nude at the front of the room, a decision that lifts the veil from her once insular world. While she struggles to find her talent, her father, her only real companion, is beginning to exhibit telltale signs of early-onset Alzheimer's. And her mother, who Delilah always assumed had selfishly abandoned them, is about to reappear with a young daughter in tow . . . and a secret that will change everything. Delilah no longer knows which parent to trust—the only one she can really rely on is the most broken person of all: herself.In a new novel as witty, sparkling, and poignant as her acclaimed Inside Out Girl, author Tish Cohen uncovers the humor and heart within the most dysfunctional of families.

Kevin Michael Connolly is a twenty-four-year-old man who has seen the world in a way most of us never will. Whether swarmed by Japanese tourists at Epcot Center as a child or holding court at the X Games on his mono-ski, Kevin Connolly has been an object of curiosity since the day he was born without legs. Growing up in rural Montana, he was raised like any other kid (except, that is, for his father's MacGyver-like contraptions such as the "butt boot"). As a college student, Kevin traveled to seventeen countries on his skateboard, including Bosnia, China, Ukraine, and Japan. In an attempt to capture the stares of others, he took more than 30,000 photographs of people staring at him. In this dazzling memoir, Kevin Connolly casts the lens inward to explore how we view ourselves and what it is to truly see another person. From the home of his family in Helena, Montana, to the streets of Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, Kevin's remarkable journey will change the way you look at others, and the way you see yourself.

In January 2003, Kenya was hailed as a model of democracy after the peaceful election of its new president, Mwai Kibaki. By appointing respected longtime reformer John Githongo as anticorruption czar, the new Kikuyu government signaled its determination to end the corrupt practices that had tainted the previous regime. Yet only two years later, Githongo himself was on the run, having secretly compiled evidence of official malfeasance throughout the new administration. Unable to remain silent, Githongo, at great personal risk, made the painful choice to go public. The result was a Kenyan Watergate. Michela Wrong's account of how a pillar of the establishment turned whistle-blower—becoming simultaneously one of the most hated and admired men in Kenya—grips like a political thriller while probing the very roots of the continent's predicament.

"Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving's inventive sleight of hand. . . . As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "Wondrous, wise and beautiful." -- David Kamp, New York Times Book Review The bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Werewolves in Their Youth, Wonderboys, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon "takes [his] brutally observant, unfailingly honest, marvelously human gaze and turns it on his own life" (Time) in the New York Times bestselling memoir Manhood for Amateurs.

One of the most famous, if controversial, lawyers in America, defense attorney Clarence Darrow was sixty-seven years old in 1924. His reputation was in tatters after a scandalous trial in Los Angeles and his life and career appeared almost over. Then, in rapid succession, he found himself at the forefront of three remarkable courtroom dramas. Each was dubbed "the Trial of the Century" by the press: the trial of teenage Chicago "thrill killers" Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb; Tennessee's infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, later immortalized in the play Inherit the Wind; and the incendiary case of Ossian Sweet, an African American man accused of murder while defending his Detroit home against a white mob.In The Great Trials of Clarence Darrow, award-winning author Donald McRae re-creates these momentous courtroom battles with breathtaking vividness—and offers a compelling, intimate, and unforgettable portrait of a true American icon.

In the early years of the 1940s, as the nation's young men ship off to combat, a city springs up, seemingly overnight in the fields of Oklahoma: the Van Damme airplane factory, a gargantuan complex dedicated to the construction of the necessary machinery of warfare. Laborers—mostly women—flock to this place, enticed by the opportunity to be something more than wife and homemaker. For Vi, fleeing a dying ranch; for Connie, following an unfaithful husband; for Diane, leaving behind the hot music and soldier boys to pursue something different, adult, and real; their journeys will be liberating in ways they couldn't previously imagine, and it will lead each of them to Prosper Olander—disabled artist, forger, friend, lover, and the true heart and soul of the temporary city—who will change their lives in profound and unexpected ways.

In the twenty-first century, political correctness, cynicism, prag-matism, and the commodification of sex have reduced romantic love to a discredited myth or a recreational sport—"a cause for embarrassment," says Cristina Nehring. In A Vindication of Love, Nehring wrests romantic love from the clutches of retrograde feminists and cutting-edge capitalists, thrill-seeking convenience shoppers and safe-sex moralists. With help from lovers ranging from Heloise and Abelard to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Nehring celebrates the wild, irreverent, and uncompromising models of love we have inherited—as she rediscovers romantic love's fearless and heroic provenance, and challenges readers to demand partnerships that fully engage body, heart, and mind.

The Boston police officers who brutally beat Michael Cox at a deserted fence one icy night in 1995 knew soon after that they had made a terrible mistake. The badge and handgun under Cox's bloodied parka proved he was not a black gang member but a plainclothes cop chasing the same murder suspect his assailants were. Officer Kenny Conley, who pursued and apprehended the suspect while Cox was being beaten, was then wrongfully convicted by federal prosecutors of lying when he denied witnessing the attack on his brother officer. Both Cox and Conley were native Bostonians, each dedicating his life to service with the Boston Police Department. But when they needed its support, they were heartlessly and ruthlessly abandoned.A remarkable work of investigative journalism, The Fence tells the shocking true story of the attack and its aftermath—and exposes the lies and injustice hidden behind a "blue wall of silence."

"[An] original and powerful writer.... His clear and honest writing blasts right through the clichés and the politically correct surface to touch the chaotic and ambiguous core of the Israeli identity." --Etgar Keret "In a dazzling display of empathy, Gavron creates two equally compelling narrators, the bomber and his victim. This is a virtuoso work; a pitch-perfect rendering of real Israeli life in all its chaos, energy, humor and terror. I couldn't put it down." -- Geraldine Brooks Politically incorrect, provocative, and steeped in wit and irony, Almost Dead is a fast-paced tragicomic novel about the perfectly ordinary madness in today's Middle East.

New York Times Bestseller"On the subject of his love of Red Auerbach and his Celtic teammates, Russell is loud and clear. He might object to my use of the word 'love, ' but deny it though you will, Mr. Russell, that's what sits at the heart of this beautiful book." -- Bill Bradley, New York Times Book ReviewIn Red and Me, Boston Celtics basketball legend Bill Russell pays homage to his mentor and coach, the inimitable Red Auerbach. A poignant remembrance of a life-altering relationship in the tradition of Big Russ and Me and Tuesdays With Morrie, Red and Me tells an unforgettable story of one unlikely and enduring friendship set against the backdrop of the greatest basketball dynasty in NBA history.Red Auerbach was one of the greatest basketball coaches in sports history. Bill Russell was the star center and five-time MVP for Auerbach's Celtics, and together they won eleven championships in thirteen years. But Auerbach and Russell were far more than just coach and player. A short, brash Jew from Brooklyn and a tall, intense African-American from Louisiana and Oakland, the men formed a friendship that evolved into a rare, telling example of deep male camaraderie even as their feelings remained largely unspoken.Red and Me is an extraordinary book: an homage to a peerless coach, which shows how he produced results unlike any other, and an inspiring story of mutual success, in which each man gave his all and gained back even more. Above all, it may be the most honest and heartfelt depiction of male friendship ever captured in print.

A Washington Post Best Book of the year A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceEula, Idaho, has never seen a battle, an earthquake, or a Democrat in City Hall. Yet life here is anything but simple.Lina's angry son Jesús has recently returned to the trailer park after living with wealthy white foster parents. Her younger son Enrique and his best friend, Gene—who lives in a neighboring trailer with his very Christian mother, Connie—are misfits who cling to their studies in the face of schoolyard cruelties. Determined to win the statewide science fair, Enrique and Gene devise an experiment involving "lake overturn," a phenomenon in which deadly gases erupt from a lake's depths. In their endeavor to discover if Eula could suffer from such an event, the boys come into contact with an odd assortment of locals—including a frail-hearted school principal with grand ambitions, a lonely lawyer who finds new love as his wife is dying, and a woman who decides to escape a life of exploitation and addiction by becoming a surrogate mother.With sweeping perspective and a Victorian wealth of character, Lake Overturn exposes small-town America in all its beauty and treachery, sunshine and secrets.

"You can read Michael Perry's Coop as an outrageously funny comedy about a semi-hapless neophyte navigating the pitfalls (and pratfalls) of the farming life. Please do, in fact. But scratch a little deeper, past Perry's lusciously entertaining and epigrammatic prose, his ultra-charming combo of Midwestern earnestness and serrated wit, and you'll find a reflective, sincere, and surprisingly touching-at times, even heart-cracking-story about a man struggling to put down roots." -- Jonathan Miles, author of Want NotIn over his head with two pigs, a dozen chickens, and a baby due any minute, the acclaimed author of Population: 485 gives us a humorous, heartfelt memoir of a new life in the country.Living in a ramshackle Wisconsin farmhouse--faced with thirty-seven acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home--Michael Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.Whether he's remembering his younger days--when his city-bred parents took in sixty or so foster children while running a sheep and dairy farm--or describing what it's like to be bitten in the butt while wrestling a pig, Perry flourishes in his trademark humor. But he also writes from the quieter corners of his heart, chronicling experiences as joyful as the birth of his child and as devastating as the death of a dear friend.

"Masterly. . . . Roberts's portrait of the relationship between the four men who made Allied strategy through the war years is a triumph of vivid description, telling anecdotes, and informed analysis." --Max Hastings, The New York Review of BooksAn epic joint biography, Masters and Commanders explores the degree to which the course of the Second World War turned on the relationships and temperaments of four of the strongest personalities of the twentieth century: political masters Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt and the commanders of their armed forces, General Sir Alan Brooke and General George C. Marshall.Each was exceptionally tough-willed and strong-minded, and each was certain that only he knew best how to win the war. Andrew Roberts, "Britain's finest contemporary military historian" (The Economist), traces the mutual suspicion and admiration, the rebuffs and the charm, the often-explosive disagreements and wary reconciliations, and he helps us to appreciate the motives and imperatives of these key leaders as they worked tirelessly in the monumental struggle to destroy Nazism.

"Crazy Heart just might be the finest country-western novel ever written, bar none." -- Houston Post"A masterpiece. . . . Cobb has created an unforgettable character who engages not only your interest but your emotion . . . and who proceeds to take you on a roller-coaster ride through his tawdrily tumultuous life." -- Chicago TribuneThomas Cobb's riveting novel tells the unforgettable story of a former country music star hoping to take one last shot at a better life.At the age of fifty-seven--living a life riddled with ex-wives, one night stands, and daily diet of Jack Daniels--Bad Blake is on his last legs. His ticker, his liver, even his pick-up truck are all giving him trouble. A renowned songwriter and "picker" who hasn't recorded in five years, Bad now travels the countryside on gigs that take him mostly to motels and bowling alleys. Enter Jean Craddock, a young journalist sent to interview him after a beautiful concert, and a tentative romance blooms. Can Bad stop living the life of a country-western song and tie a rope around his crazy heart?

On May 14, 1948, under the stewardship of President Harry S. Truman, the United States became the first nation to recognize the State of Israel -- just moments after sovereignty had been declared in Jerusalem. But it was hardly a foregone conclusion that America would welcome the creation of this new country. While acknowledging this as one of his proudest moments, Truman also admitted that no issue was "more controversial or more complex than the problem of Israel."Impeccably researched and brilliantly told, based on never-before-used archival material, A Safe Haven is a suspenseful, moment-by-moment re-creation of this crossroads in U.S.-Israeli relations and Middle Eastern politics.

Meet Ariel. Her glass is half empty . . . and leaking.If someone tells her everything will be okay, she asks: How do you know? If there's a wrong thing to say, she'll say it. If there's a downside to see, she'll see it. She lives in a permanent fear of what's to come. But at least she's prepared.In these witty and entertaining tales from the front lines of woe, Ariel highlights the humor in our everyday anxieties and delivers insight that will ring hilariously true if you are inclined to view the world through gray-tinted glasses.So whether you've been dumped by the love of your life, lost your job to the guy in the cubicle next to you, said the wrong thing at the party, or weren't invited to the party at all, Ariel is here to remind you that it could be worse, you could be her.

"A brilliant book. Karim Issar is one of the freshest, funniest heroes I've come across in a long time." -- Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara"An innovative and incisive meditation on the wages of corporate greed, the fundamental darkness of its vision lit by the author's great comic intelligence and wit." -- Kathryn Davis, author of The Thin Place, Hell: A Novel, and VersaillesWith a fresh and singular voice, Teddy Wayne marks his literary debut with the story of one 26 year old Middle Eastern man's attempt to live the American Dream in New York City. Like the award-winning Netherland and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Kapitoil provides an absorbing look into American culture and New York finance from an outsider's perspective."Sometimes you do not truly observe something until you study it in reverse," writes Karim Issar upon arrival to New York City from Qatar in 1999. Fluent in numbers, logic, and business jargon yet often baffled by human connection, the young financial wizard soon creates a computer program named Kapitoil that predicts oil futures and reaps record profits for his company.At first an introspective loner adrift in New York's social scenes, he anchors himself to his legendary boss Derek Schrub and Rebecca, a sensitive, disillusioned colleague who may understand him better than he does himself. Her influence, and his father's disapproval of Karim's Americanization, cause him to question the moral implications of Kapitoil, moving him toward a decision that will determine his future, his firm's, and to whom--and where--his loyalties lie.

For power. For passion. For glory. The epic story of the Knights Templar. Born in 1150 to a noble Swedish family and coming of age at a monastery under the tutelage of a Cistercian monk and a former Knight Templar, young Arn Magnusson is sent to fulfill his destiny beyond the cloister walls. But the world awaiting him is a place at odds with his monastic ways. And when the murder of a king engulfs Western Götaland into a whirlwind of intrigue and ruthless power plays, headstrong and naive Arn is forced to leave the woman he loves behind and take up arms to battle infidels in the Holy Land.The first book in the international bestselling Crusades Trilogy, this thrilling epic of betrayal, faith, blood, and love sets "a Shakespearian quest for power" (Corriere della Sera, Italy) against the backdrop of the Holy Wars, witnessed through a vibrant, unorthodox lens.

Fifteen-year-old Charley Thompson wants a home, food on the table, and a high school he can attend for more than part of a year. But as the son of a single father working in warehouses across the Pacific Northwest, Charley's been pretty much on his own. When tragic events leave him homeless weeks after their move to Portland, Oregon, Charley seeks refuge in the tack room of a run-down horse track. Charley's only comforts are his friendship with a failing racehorse named Lean on Pete and a photograph of his only known relative. In an increasingly desperate circumstance, Charley will head east, hoping to find his aunt who had once lived a thousand miles away in Wyoming—but the journey to find her will be a perilous one.In Vlautin's third novel, Lean on Pete, he reveals the lives and choices of American youth like Charley Thompson who were failed by those meant to protect them and who were never allowed the chance to just be a kid.

In April 1865, the steamboat Sultana slowly moved up the Mississippi River, its overtaxed engines straining under the weight of twenty-four hundred passengers--mostly Union soldiers, recently paroled from Confederate prison camps. At 2 a.m., three of Sultana's four boilers exploded. Within twenty minutes, the boat went down in flames, and an estimated seventeen hundred lives were lost.The worst maritime disaster in American history, the sinking of the Sultana is a forgotten tragedy lost in the turmoil of the times--the war's end, the assassination of President Lincoln, the pursuit of John Wilkes Booth. Alan Huffman presents this harrowing story in gripping and vivid detail and paints a moving portrait of four individual soldiers who survived the Civil War's final hell to make it back home.

Married in 1764, Abigail and John Adams worked side by side for a decade, raising a family while John became one of the most prosperous, respected lawyers in Massachusetts. When his duties as a statesman and diplomat during the Revolutionary War expanded, Abigail and John endured lengthy separations. But their loyalty and love remained strong, as their passionate, forthright letters attest. It's in this correspondence that Abigail comes into her own as an independent woman. It's also in these exchanges that we learn about the familial tragedies that tested them: the early deaths of their son Charles from alcoholism and their daughter Nabby from breast cancer.As much a romance as it is a lively chapter in early American history, Abigail and John is an inspirational portrait of a couple who endured the turmoil and trials of a revolution, and in so doing paved the way for the birth of a nation.

"Charming and luminous . . . . A perfect summer indulgence that'll have you peeking out your window on a muggy night in search of the Moon Lady, who'll wrap her nurturing arms around you from afar." -- Austin American-StatesmanA tale of family and friendship, tragedy and triumph, loss and love, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder features the warmth, humor, soul, and wonder that have made Rebecca Wells one of today's most cherished writers, and gives us an unforgettable new heroine to treasure.In the small river town of La Luna, Calla Lily bursts into being, a force of nature as luminous as the flower she is named for. Under the loving light of the Moon Lady, the feminine force that will guide and protect her throughout her life, Calla Lily enjoys a blissful childhood--until it is cut short by forces beyond her control. On the banks of the La Luna River, her mother, M'Dear, a woman of rapture and love, teaches Calla compassion, and passes on to her the art of healing through the humble womanly art of "fixing hair." At her mother's side, Calla further learns that this same touch of hands on the human body can quiet her own soul. It is also on the banks of the La Luna River that Calla encounters sweet, innocent first love, with a boy named Tuck.But when Tuck leaves Calla with a broken heart, she transforms hurt into inspiration and heads for the wild and colorful city of New Orleans to study cosmetology at L'Académie de Beauté de Crescent. In that big river city, Calla finds her destiny--and comes to understand fully the power of her "healing hands" to change lives and soothe pain, including her own. Years later, when Tuck reappears, he presents her with an offer that is colored by the memories of lost love. But who knows how Calla Lily, a "daughter of the Moon Lady," will respond?For longtime Ya-Ya fans, as well as the lucky ones discovering Wells for the first time, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder will capture your heart.