Arjaan van Nimwegen Libri

Figlio di una madre devota e di un padre inaffidabile, Theo Decker sopravvive, appena tredicenne, all’attentato terroristico che in un istante manda in pezzi la sua vita. Solo a New York, senza parenti né un posto dove stare, viene accolto dalla ricca famiglia di un suo compagno di scuola. A disagio nella sua nuova casa di Park Avenue, isolato dagli amici e tormentato dall’acuta nostalgia nei confronti della madre, Theo si aggrappa alla cosa che più di ogni altra ha il potere di fargliela sentire vicina: un piccolo quadro dal fascino singolare che, a distanza di anni, lo porterà ad addentrarsi negli ambienti pericolosi della criminalità internazionale. Nel frattempo, Theo cresce, diventa un uomo, si innamora e impara a scivolare con disinvoltura dai salotti più chic della città al polveroso labirinto del negozio di antichità in cui lavora. Finché, preda di una pulsione autodistruttiva impossibile da controllare, si troverà coinvolto in una rischiosa partita dove la posta in gioco è il suo talismano, il piccolo quadro raffigurante un cardellino che forse rappresenta l’innocenza perduta e la bellezza che, sola, può salvare il mondo.

This Medea is intelligent and cynical, slighted by a husband and her gender. She is a woman who craves revenge for the fate of being born a woman and thus rendered powerless in a world ruled by men. Vann strips away the softer parts of Medea's character as ruthlessly as Medea slits throats ... The centrepiece of Bright Air Black is the butchering of Pelias, a long and magnificently gruesome scene, described in stomach-churning detail ... Vann leaves us with the troubling paradox that murderous Medea is also a devoted mother ... Vann evokes this visceral, sensual, brutal world of warring city states, capricious gods and fragile human agency in a fractured prose style, reminiscent of ancient Greek drama and poetry. Short poetic phrases pile up, fall away, stop short. Powerful internal rhythms build and subside, like the waves the Argonauts sail over ... The time and the place may be very different from his previous novels, but Bright Air Black shares the same central structure of a searing family drama set against a backdrop of untamed nature ... At the heart of this ambitious, dazzling, disturbing and memorable novel lies the uneasy juxtaposing of the wild and the civilised, and the complex, shifting relationship between the two. Rebecca Abrams Financial Times

'Startlingly brilliant' Spectator 'A triumph' Daily Mail Aged nine, Caitlin spends almost every afternoon at the local aquarium while her mother works overtime at her construction job. Caitlin's whole world is her school, her mother, occasionally her mother's boyfriends, and the fish at the aquarium. She has no friends at school, apart from Shalini, who is making a paper mache Hindu reindeer with her, and no other family. But Caitlin has made a friend at the aquarium; an old man who seems to know something about Caitlin, something she doesn't even know about herself.

When the construction of their dream cabin on an isolated Alaskan island is interrupted by an early Arctic winter, Gary and Irene find their marriage unraveling as they become stranded with their daughter, Rhoda, who watches helplessly as her parents drift further apart.

Roy is still young when his father, a failed dentist and hapless fisherman, commits suicide on the deck of his boat. Throughout his life, Roy returns to that moment, gripped by its memory and the shadow it casts over his small-town boyhood. Finally, Roy lays his father's ghost to rest. But not before he exacts a gruelling, exhilarating revenge.

Beautifully rendered . . . genuinely affecting and handsomely constructed. It moves for all the right reasons. Independent