Smita, Giulia, Sarah: three lives, three continents, three women with nothing in common, but nevertheless bound by a rare expression of courage . . . like three strands in a braid. Through the story of one woman's hair, three women's destinies are drawn together. India. Smita is an untouchable, married to a 'rat hunter', her job to clean with her bare hands the village latrines, just like her mother before her. Her dream is to see her daughter escape this same fate, and learn to read. When this hope is shattered, she decides to run away with the child, despite her husband's warnings, sacrificing what is most precious to her: her hair. Sicily. Giulia is a worker in her father's wig workshop, the last of its kind in Palermo. She classifies, washes, bleaches, and dyes the hair provided by the city's hairdressers. When her father is the victim of a serious accident, she quickly discovers the family company is bankrupt. Canada. Sarah is a reputed lawyer. As a twice-divorced mother of three children, she ploughs through cases at breakneck speed. Just as she is about to be promoted, she learns she has breast cancer. Her seemingly perfect existence begins to show its cracks . . . But this is only if one ignores the incredible lust for life that keeps her going. Laetitia Colombani's The Braid is the powerfully moving story of three women's courage in the face of adversity.
José Antonio Soriano Marco Book order (chronological)





Good & Evil
- 384 pages
- 14 hours of reading
The second instalment in the million-copy bestselling Nazi spy series for fans of Dan Brown, Steve Berry and Wilbur Smith
The Great Swindle
- 464 pages
- 17 hours of reading
The year is 1918, the war on the Western Front all but over. An ambitious officer, Lieutenant Henry D'Aulnay-Pradelle, sends two soldiers over the top and then surreptitiously shoots them in the back to incite his men to attack the German lines. When another of D'Aulnay-Pradelle's soldiers, Albert Maillard, reaches the bodies and discovers how they died, the lieutenant shoves him into a shell hole to silence him. Albert is rescued by fellow soldier, the artist Edouard Péricourt, who takes a bullet in the face. The war ends and both men recover, but Edouard is permanently disfigured, and fakes his death to prevent his family from seeing him as a cripple. In gratitude for Edouard's rescue, Albert becomes the injured man's companion and caregiver. Finding that the postwar gratitude for the soldiers' service is nothing more than lip-service to an empty idea, the two men scramble to survive, ultimately devising a scam to take money for never-to-be-built war memorials from small towns. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Pradelle has married Edouard's sister Madeline and is running a scam of his own that involves the exhumation of war victims. In this sorrowful, heart-searching novel, the interwoven lives of these three men create a tapestry of the human condition as seen through the lens of war, revealing brutality and compassion, heroism and cowardice, in equal measure
All Our Worldly Goods
- 288 pages
- 11 hours of reading
Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, All Our Worldly Goods points up with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close were those two wars, how history repeated itself, tragically, shockingly...
- J'ai vecu la vie de mon ami le chat-tigre. La jungle qui tue ne m'a pas eu, elle me fera grace parce que je l'aime d'un amour fervent, parce que je lui dois tout, parce qu'elle m'a appris a etre libre. La jungle est l'ennemi loyal et sur, qui frappe en face, qui prend a bras-le-corps. L'adversaire hideux et bete, qui torture et qui fuit, le plus redoutable ennemi dans la jungle c'est l'homme... -"