Winzerer Recommendations: English Books

Anne Michaels: Fugitive Pieces

Athos and I stood together on deck and looked across the water at the bright city. From this distance no one would guess the turmoil that had torn apart Greece . The sea began to darken, and Athens, glowing in the distance, seemed to float on the horizon like a bright ship.Jakob Beer is seven years old when he is rescued from the ruins of a buried village in Nazi-occupied Poland. He is the only one of his family to have survived the invasion. Adopted by his saviour, the Greek geologist Athos, Jakob must steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history. A novel of astounding beauty and wisdom, Fugitive Pieces is a profound meditation on the resilience of the human spirit and love's ability to restore even the most damaged of hearts.

ISBN 978-0-7475-9925-8 | 13,80 €


Callan Wink: August

After his parents' divorce August struggles to start over again in a new town. And when a shocking act of violence pushes him off course, he is once more on the move: this time to rural Montana, where he takes a job on a ranch. Here, he learns that even the smallest communities have secrets and even the most broken of families still have a bond. Unfolding against an epic American landscape August is a magnificent moving story about the joys and traumas that irrevocably shape us all.

ISBN 978-1-84708-813-0 | 12,30 €


J. L. Carr: A month in the country

A damaged survivor of the First World War, Tom Birkin finds refuge in the quiet village church of Oxgodby where he is to spend the summer uncovering a huge medieval wall-painting. Immersed in the peace and beauty of the countryside and the unchanging rhythms of village life he experiences a sense of renewal and belief in the future. Now an old man, Birkin looks back on the idyllic summer of 1920, remembering a vanished place of blissful calm, untouched by change, a precious moment he has carried with him through the disappointments of the years. Adapted into a film starring Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson and Kenneth Branagh, A Month in the Country traces the slow revival of the primeval rhythms of life so cruelly disorientated by the Great War.

ISBN 978-0-14-118230-8 | 11,25 €


Jonathan Coe: Mr Wilder & Me

In the summer of 1977, naïve Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing.

While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.

At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . .

ISBN 978-0-241-98971-5 | 12,50 €


Abdulrazak Gurnah: Paradise

Born in East Africa, Yusuf has few qualms about the journey he is to make. It never occurs to him to ask why he is accompanying Uncle Aziz or why the trip has been organised so suddenly, and he does not think to ask when he will be returning. But the truth is that his 'uncle' is a rich and powerful merchant and Yusuf has been pawned to him to pay his father's debts. Paradise is a rich tapestry of myth, dreams and Biblical and Koranic tradition, the story of a young boy's coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.

ISBN 978-0-7475-7399-9 | 13,80 €


Claire Thomas: The Performance

The false cold of the theatre makes it hard to imagine the heavy wind outside in the real world, the ash air pressing onto the city from the nearby hills where bushfires are taking hold.
The house lights lower.
The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.

As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone.
As the performance unfolds, so does each woman's story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.

ISBN 978-1-4746-1700-0 | 13,80


Bonnie Garmus: Lessons in Chemistry

Your ability to change everything - including yourself - starts here

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.

But it's the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans, the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with - of all things - her mind. True chemistry results.

Like science, life is unpredictable. Which is why a few years later, Elizabeth Zott finds herself not only a single mother, but the reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show, Supper at Six. Elizabeth's unusual approach to cooking ('combine one tablespoon acetic acid with a pinch of sodium chloride') proves revolutionary. But as her following grows, not everyone is happy. Because as it turns out, Elizabeth Zott isn't just teaching women to cook. She's daring them to change the status quo.

ISBN 978-0-85752-813-1 | 17,70 €


Ian McEwan: Lessons

While the world is still counting the cost of the Second World War and the Iron Curtain has descended, young Roland Baines's life is turned upside down. Stranded at boarding school, his vulnerability attracts his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell, leaving scars as well as a memory of love that will never fade.

Twenty-five years later, as the radiation from the Chernobyl disaster spreads across Europe, Roland's wife mysteriously vanishes and he is forced to confront the reality of his rootless existence and look for answers in his family history.

From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the Covid pandemic and climate change, Roland sometimes rides with the tide of history but more often struggles against it. Haunted by lost opportunities, he seeks solace through every possible means - literature, travel, friendship, drugs, politics, sex and love.

His journey raises important questions. Can we take full charge of the course of our lives without damage to others? How do global events beyond our control shape us and our memories? What role do chance and contingency play in our existence? And what can we learn from the traumas of the past?

ISBN 978-1-78733-398-7 | 20,20 €


Amor Towles: The Lincoln Highway

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett returns home to his younger brother Billy after serving fifteen months in a juvenile facility for involuntary manslaughter. They are getting ready to leave their old life behind and head out to sunny California.

But they're not alone. Two runaways from the youth work farm, Duchess and Wolly, have followed Emmett all the way to Nebraska with a plan of their own, one that will take the four of them on an unexpected and fateful journey in the opposite direction - to New York City.

ISBN 978-1-5291-5764-2 | 13,80 €


William Melvin Kelley: A Drop of Patience

At the age of five, a blind African-American boy is handed over to a brutal state home. Here Ludlow Washington will suffer for eleven years, until his prodigious musical talent provides him unlikely ticket back into the world.

The property of a band, playing for down-and-outsin a southern dive, Ludlow's pioneering flair will take him to New York and the very top of the jazz scene - where his personal demons will threaten to drag him back down to the bottom.

A Drop of Patience is the story of a gifted and damaged man entirely set apart - by blindness, by race, by talent - who must wrestle with adversity and ambition to generate the acceptance and self-worth that have always eluded him.

ISBN 978-1-78747-807-7 | 13,00 €


Mick Kitson: Sal

This is a story of something like survival.

Sal planned it for almost a year before they ran. And now Sal knows a lot of stuff. Like how to build a shelter and start a fire. How to estimate distances, snare rabbits and shoot an airgun. And how to protect her sister, Peppa. Because Peppa is ten, which is how old Sal was when Robert started on her.

Told in Sal's distinctive voice, and filled with the silent, dizzying beauty of rural Scotland, Sal is a disturbing, uplifting story of survival, of the kindness of strangers, and the irrepressible power of sisterly love; a love that can lead us to do extraordinary and unimaginable things.

 

ISBN 9781786891914 | 9,95 €


Sally Rooney: Conversations with Friends

Frances is twenty-one years old, cool-headed and observant. A student in Dublin and an aspiring writer, at night she performs spoken word with her best friend Bobbi, who used to be her girlfriend. When they are interviewed and then befriended by Melissa, a well-known journalist who is married to Nick, an actor, they enter a world of beautiful houses, raucous dinner parties and holidays in Provence, beginning a complex ménage-à-quatre. But when Frances and Nick get unexpectedly closer, the sharply witty and emotion-averse Frances is forced to honestly confront her own vulnerabilities for the first time.

ISBN 9780571333134 | 12,00 €


Ocean Vuong: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born - a history whose epicentre is rooted in Vietnam - and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to the American moment, immersed as it is in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

ISBN 9781787331501 | 15,95 €


Virginia Woolf: A Room of One's Own

The book is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled 'Women and Fiction', and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

ISBN 9783458194682 | € 15,00


Valeria Luiselli: Lost Children Archive

A mother and father set out with their two children, a boy and a girl, driving from New York to Arizona in the heat of summer. Their destination: Apacheria, the place the Apaches once called home.

Why Apaches? asks the ten-year-old son. Because they were the last of something, answers his father.

In their car, they play games and sing along to music. But on the radio, there is news about an "immigration crisis": thousands of kids trying to cross the southwestern border into the United States, but getting detained--or lost in the desert along the way.

As the family drives--through Virginia to Tennessee, across Oklahoma and Texas--we sense they are on the brink of a crisis of their own. A fissure is growing between the parents, one the children can almost feel beneath their feet. They are led, inexorably, to a grand, harrowing adventure--both in the desert landscape and within the chambers of their own imaginations.

Told through several compelling voices, blending texts, sounds, and images, Lost Children Archive is an astonishing feat of literary virtuosity. It is a richly engaging story of how we document our experiences, and how we remember the things that matter to us the most. With urgency and empathy, it takes us deep into the lives of one remarkable family as it probes the nature of justice and equality today.

ISBN 9780008290047 | 18,00 €


Jane Gardam: Last Friends

Old Filth and The Man in the Wooden Hat told with bristling tenderness and black humour the stories of that Titan of the Hong Kong law courts, Old Filth QC, and his clever, misunderstood wife Betty. Last friends, the final volume of this trilogy, picks up with Terence Veneering, Filth's great rival in work and - though it was never spoken of - in love.

Veneering, filth and their friends tell a tale of love, friendship, grace, the bittersweet experiences of a now-forgotten Empire and the disappointments and consolations of age.

ISBN 978-0-349-00016-9|€ 13,99


Louise Erdrich: the plague of doves

Pluto, North Dakota, is a town on the verge of exstinction. Here, everybody is connected - by love or friendship, by blood, and, most importantly, by the burden of a shared history.

Growing up on the nearby reservation is Evelina Harp, witty and abitious, and prone to falling hopelessly in love. Listening to her grandfather's tales, she learns a horrific crime that has marked both Obijwe and whites. Noboy understands the weight of that crime better thand Judge Antone Bazil Coutts, who keeps watch over Pluto's inhabitants and recounts their lives with compassion and rare insight.

In distinct and winning voices, Erdrich's characters unravel the stories of different generatiobs and families in this powerful and moving portrait of the complex allegiances, passions and drama of a haunting land and its all-too-human people.

ISBN 078-0-00-727076-7|€ 12,50


John Williams: Augustus - a novel

After the brutal murder of his great uncle Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power struggles, bloody wars and family strife, to transform his realm and become the greatest ruler the western world had ever seen: Augustus Caesar, the first Roman Emperor.

ISBN 978-0-09-944508-1|€ 13,90


J.L. Carr: A Month In The Country

'That night, for the first time during many months, I slept like the dead and, next morning, awoke very early.'

One summer, just after the Great War, Tom Birkin, a demobbed soldier, arrives in the village of Oxgodby. He has been invited to uncover and restore a medieval wall painting in the local church. At the same time, Charles Moon - a fellow, damaged survivor of the war - has been asked to locate the grave of a village ancestor. As these two ousiders go about their work of recovery, they form a bond, but they also stir up long dormant passions within the village. What Berkin discovers here will stay with him for the rest of his life...

ISBN 978-0241-97203-8|€ 9,70


Lydia Davis: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

With her deep sensibility, sly wit and syntactic precision, Lydia Davis is capable of hitting the nail on the head in each and every one of the stories published in this volume. Davis is celebrated for having invented an entirely new genre, combining the emotional compactness of poetry with the formal liberty of the short story. Definitely the most unique writing in contemporary American fiction. And, everything you ever wanted to know about marriage, children, friendship and death.

ISBN 978-0-241-96913-7 | 18,99 €


Teju Cole: Open City

The bestselling debut from a writer heralded as the twenty-first century W.G. Sebald.

A haunting novel about national identity, race, liberty, loss and surrender, Open City follows a young Nigerian doctor as he wanders aimlessly along the streets of Manhattan. For Julius the walks are a release from the tight regulations of work, from the emotional fallout of a failed relationship, from lives past and present on either side of the Atlantic.

Isolated amid crowds of bustling strangers, Julius criss-crosses not just physical landscapes but social boundaries too, encountering people whose otherness sheds light on his own remarkable journey from Nigeria to New York - as well as into the most unrecognisable facets of his own soul.

ISBN: 978-0-571-27943-2 | 9,70€

 

 


Meg Wolitzer: Belzhar

Devastated by the death of her first love, sixteen-year-old Jam Gallahue is having difficulty moving on with her life. After nearly a year of her being mired with grief, her parents send her to a boarding school in rural Vermont for troubled teens. At first, nothing helps and her downward spiral continues. But when a journal-writing assignment in a class on the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath unlocks the seemingly idyllic world of Belzhar, Jam starts down a path of discovery even as her connection to reality begins to slip away. It isn´t long before Belzar reveals that her classmates are hiding secrets from the past. Does Jam have a secret of her own?

 ISBN: 978-0-14-242629-6 | 11,99€


Siri Hustvedt: The Blazing World

The artist Harriet Burden, furious at the lack of attention paid her by the New York art world, conducts an experiment: she hides her identity behind three male fronts in a series of exhibitions. Their success seems to prove her point, but there's a sting in the tail - when she unmasks herself, not everyone believes her. Then her last collaborator meets a bizarre end.

In this mesmerising tour de force, Burden's story emerges after her death through a variety of sources, including her (not entirely reliable) journals and the testimonies of her children, lover and a dear friend. Each account is different, however, and the mysteries multiply.

ISBN: 978-1-4736-1156-6 |11,99€


John Williams: Butcher's Crossing

Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.

In a small town called Butcher's Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, the harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.

ISBN: 978-0-09-958967-9 | 14,99€


John Green: The Fault In Our Stars

The Fault In Our Stars is award-winning author John Green`s most ambitious heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling and tragic business of being alive and in love.

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, his final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel`s story is about to be completely rewritten.

ISBN: 978-0-14-134565-9 | 8.55€


Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Americanah

As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and achievs triumphs, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into undocumented life in Britain.

Years later, is wealthy in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu achieved succes as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. When Ifemelu decides to return home, she and Obinze will face the hardest decision of their lives.

`An Adichie`s able prose, social comedy mingles with cultural polemic under the umbrella of an exuberantly romantic love story` Financial Times


ISBN: 978-0-00735634-8 | 10,05€


Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch

Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and an absent father, miraculously survives a catastrophe that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by a family of a wealthy friend. Theo is tormented by longing for his mother and down the years he clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, captivaiting painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld.


ISBN: 978-0-349-13963-0 | 11.30€


Alice Munro: Dear Life

Alice Munro captures the essence of life in her brilliant new collection of stories. Moments of change, change encounters, the twist of fate that leads a person to a new way of thinking or being: the stories of "Dear Life" build to form a radiant, indelible portrait of just how dangerous and strange ordinary life can be.


ISBN 978-0-09-957863-5 | 12,99 €


John Williams: Stoner

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture. Later, he becomes a teacher. He marrries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely.

Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. "Stoner" tells of the conflicts, defeats und victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

ISBN 978-0-09-956154-5 | 12,99 €


Yann Martel: Beatrice and Vergil

This is the story of an extraordinary journey undertaken by a man named Henry. It begins with a mysterious parcel. It ends in a place that will make you think again about one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. It also involves a howler monkey, a donkey, an enigmatic taxidermist and a dog named Erasmus. Once you have finished reading it, it is impossible to forget.

ISBN 978-1-84767-932-1 | 9,95 €


Jack Kerouac: On the Road

Fifty years after its original publication, Kerouacs road epic - typed on one continuous scroll in only three weeks - is published for the first time as the author intended, complete with real names, places, and scandalous details. In this influential odyssey of jazz and drugs, of filling stations and marriage licences, of sex, and poolsharks, and hiballs, Kerouac tells the real story of his travels with car thief and Beat icon Neal Cassady, and the famous friends they met, drank with, and ignored. 

ISBN 978-0-141-118921-5 | 10,40 €


Otfried Preußler: The little Ghost

The little ghost lived in an old oak chest in a cobwebbed corner of an attic in an old castle. He was one of those harmless little ghosts who haunt places by night, and never hurt anyone unless they are provoked. He enjoyed haunting, but did so wish he could see the town by day instead of by night. Then one day it happend. But a town by daylight is no place for a little white ghost...

ISBN 978-3-522-17440-4 | 7,90 €


Grimm's Most Beautiful Fairy Tales

In the year 1857 the Grimm brothers published their classic collection of folk songs and folktales, which should become one of the world's most popular fairy tale collection ever since. For this new editon the storyteller Arnica Esterl has chosen the most beautiful and most loved fairy tales from the original collection. Even nowadays Grimm's fairy tales have lost nothing of their wit and charm and are still able to fascinate young and grown-up readers alike.

The Russian artist Anastassija Archipowa has lavishly illustrated the book in her unique way: detailed watercoulours sensitively convey the fairy tales' individual mood!

ISBN 978-3-480-21638-3 | 19,80 €


Babette Cole: A Dose of Dr. Dog

Feeling poorly? You need a dose of Dr. Dog! Dr. Dog is taking a well-deserved break when his pesky family, the Gumboyles, turned up, and proceed to cathch all sorts of nasty holiday ailments.

Luckily Dr. Dog and his new side-kick are on call with some ingenious natural remedies. But even this dynamic duo can't protect the Gumboyles fron a hungry and highly dangerous plant...

ISBN 978-0-099-48768-5 | 9,90 €


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