Alba Arikha Book order

“Someone rang my husband. Your wife is not well, the person said. Your wife is not well.”When Clara’s parents transplant her from Paris to New York at the age of sixteen, a fleeting encounter with a young man seems, for a brief period, to open up new possibilities. As she strives to fulfil her vocation as a writer, and as she struggles in later years with the cumulative constraints of an unhappy marriage, Clara’s imagination is strangely haunted by a life that might have been.Tracing Clara’s story from her adolescence to her experience of motherhood, and then through to a pivotal bid for freedom, Two Hours is an exceptional novel. Witty, perceptive, and profoundly humane, this is the work of a writer at the height of her powers.

In the summer of 1939, nineteen-year-old Flore Baum is having the time of her life in Paris. But when war breaks out, Flore's fragile happiness is shattered, and she embarks upon a journey that will eventually take her to Palestine, to the realisation of the nature of true love, and to the brink of despair... Hannah Karalis, a teenager living with her family in 1980s Notting Hill, becomes fascinated by her neighbour, Flora Dobbs, an enigmatic elderly woman - but the improbable friendship that the two strike up is abruptly cut short by Flora's sudden departure from the neighbourhood. Eighteen years later, Hannah is astonished to receive a bequest from Flora, a black notebook, which sets her on a search for the truth, leading her to confront the ghosts that lurk in both their pasts.

A vivid and haunting coming of age memoir set in Paris in the 1980s. Originally published to widespread critical acclaim, this luminously honest book chronicles the pain of growing up in an illustrious yet dysfunctional family.

An hour outside Paris, a train comes to an unscheduled stop. As the other passengers bicker, confide, flirt, the narrator remembers lovers, disappointments, marriage. She talks with Chopin and models for Modigliani. The boundaries of self are dissolved by imagination and memory, until the journey resumes and another life ends. [br][br] [i]Soon[/i] has the freshness of an eye-witness report and yet travels in many directions in time and space, by train and by memory, by image and by imagination. A beautiful achievement. [br] Adam Zagajewski[br][br] One hopes, one hunts, for a book that resembles nothing one has read before. Alba Arikha s Soon is not only a true original, it s beautiful, moving, and, yes, profound. Which makes it a rare creature indeed. [br] Michael Cunningham[br][br] Multum in so musical; such darting observation and tender understanding; such rich seams of memory and imagination. Above all, such awareness of our need to connect, such sheer openness to the joy and pain of being fully alive. [br] Kevin Crossley-Holland[br][br] Lucid, tender and hypnotic ... This is a beautiful book, all the more rich for being spare, a book to pick up again and again, as one might pick up a smooth, polished stone, for its satisfactions and its mysteries. [br] Rupert Thomson