Douglas Kennedy Libri

Sally Goochild, trentasette anni, affermata giornalista, è una donna tenace e sicura di ciò che vuole, almeno fino a quando la sua strada non si incrocia con quella del cronista Tony Hobbs inviato come lei in Somalia per un reportage. Nel giro di alcune settimane i piani a lungo termine di Sally vengono stravolti: abbandona il lavoro di corrispondente, si sposa, si trasferisce a Londra e scopre di aspettare un bambino. La vita, però, non è tutta rose e fiori.

On the face of it, Ben Bradford is a standard Wall Street hotshot - six-figure income, wife and two young kids straight out of a Gap catalogue. But with the WASP lifestyle comes the sting: Ben hates it. Whe he realizes that the state of his marriage has less to do with baby-induced sleeplessness and more to do with a wife who's playing outside the ground, a moment of madness provides Ben with the opportunity to redesign his life. But as the roller-coaster trajectory of his new existence takes hold, he begins to question the price of fulfilment. Because finding yourself means nothing when you're pretending to be someone else.

'Accomplished...a strangely mesmerising effect...absolutely excellent'New StatesmanNew York, 1980sAlice Burns - a young book editor - is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life.

Manhattan, Thanksgiving Eve, 1945. The war was over, and Eric Smythe's party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara -- an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked a gatecrasher, Jack Malone -- a U. S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, and a man whose world-view did not tally with that of Eric and his friends. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of postwar New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch-hunts,The Pursuit of Happinessis a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.

Before Isabelle I knew nothing of sex. Before Isabelle I knew nothing of freedom. Before Isabelle I knew nothing of life. Paris in the early Seventies. Sam, an American student, meets a woman in a bookshop. Isabelle is enigmatic, beautiful, older and, unlike Sam, experienced in love's many contradictions. Sam is instantly smitten but wary of the wedding ring on her finger. What begins as a regular arrangement in Isabelle's tiny Parisian apartment transforms into a true affair of the heart, and one which lasts for decades to come. Isabelle in the Afternoon is a novel that questions what we seek, what we find, what we settle for and shows how love, when not lived day in, day out, can become the passion of a lifetime.

Travel writer Thomas Nesbitt, age 50, retreats into his house in Maine to wallow in memories of living in Germany 25 years earlier after the success of his first book. In West Berlin as a worker for Radio Liberty, Thomas meets his soul mate, Petra Dussmann, a translator with an iron curtain around her heart. Petra's mysterious melancholy proves irresistible, and as Thomas is drawn into a passionate affair, he also becomes entangled in spy games played by the Stasi and the CIA.

America in the Sixties was an era of radical upheaval - of civil rights protests and anti-war marches; of sexual liberation and hallucinogenic drugs. More tellingly, it was a time when you weren't supposed to trust anyone over the age of thirty; when, if you were young, you rebelled against your parents and their conservative values. But not Hannah Buchan. Hannah is a great disappointment to her famous radical father and painter mother. Instead of mounting the barricades and embracing this age of profound social change, she wants nothing more than to marry her doctor boyfriend and raise a family in a small town. Hannah gets her wish. But once installed as the doctor's wife in a nowhere corner of Maine, boredom sets in ... until an unforeseen moment of personal rebellion changes everything. Especially as Hannah is forced into breaking the law. For decades, this one transgression in an otherwise faultless life remains buried. But then, in the charged atmosphere of America after 9/11, her secret comes out and her life goes into freefall.

In the heady strangeness of Morocco, Paul is everything Robin wants him to be - passionate, talented, knowledgeable. Robin is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant. But when Paul disappears, and Robin finds herself under suspicion, everything changes. Suddenly she is on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question : What would you be capable of doing if your life depended on it ?

Douglas Kennedy's outstanding new novel, THE JOB, is a thrilling page-turner involving downsizing, blackmail and murder in the Manhattan business world. Ned Allen is young, smart, and upwardly mobile. Several years into his career as an ad salesman for a successful computer magazine, Ned's finally left his small-town roots behind, and is certain that the sophisticated Manhattan world he covets is his forever. His wife Lizzie is also a rising star of a prestigious PR firm. It seems that Ned's made it. But then what appeared to be a career break shows its true colours. Ned's forced to make some tough calls, among them a question of ethics and the small matter of whether to lie to his wife - and when the tough calls just keep getting tougher he finds himself on the brink of losing everything ... Cautionary tale, compelling thriller, portrait of a man on the edge, Douglas Kennedy's THE JOB is a ruthlessly entertaining exploration of the fragility of modern life and the depths we'll go to in our quest to preserve it.