Pier Francesco Paolini Books

'If you care about something you have to protect it. If you're lucky enough to find a way of life you love, you have to find the courage to live it.' Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is both extraordinary and terrifying.

Mr Noon is a sardonic tale about the amorous adventures of Gilbert Noon, a young schoolmaster in Lawrence's home county of Nottinghamshire who gets entangled with a girl, loses his job, and decides to leave the country to escape the narrow provincial middle-class morality. It was first known as a long story posthumously published in A Modern Lover (1934) and collected in the volume called Phoenix II (1968). Lawrence in fact wrote a long continuation of the novel, but the manuscript disappeared for many years. The Cambridge edition brought the two parts together for the first time. It is like a sequel to Sons and Lovers, but much more straightforwardly autobiographical. The publication of the complete work added a new work of major importance to the canon of a great writer, and was widely hailed as a major literary event.

A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for over forty years, Richard Adams' spellbinding classic Watership Down is one of the best-loved animal stories of all time. Set in the beautiful English countryside of the Berkshire Downs, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a small band of rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a developer. Led by a stout-hearted pair of brothers, Fiver and Hazel, they leave the safety of Sandleford Warren in search of refuge, skirting danger at every turn.

Transformed by Don Juan from a bent, gray-haired old woman into a sensual sorceress whose mission is to test Castaneda, Dona Soledad turns her mysterious and awesome powers against Castaneda in a struggle that nearly consumes him.

When a ten-year-old boy finds an old book of magic in a bookshop in Ireland, the forces of good and evil gather to do battle over it.

ALL'INIZIO... ... era F.lli Arnold (1905), il Grande Magazzino. Era la casa dei niomi, come si chiamano loro stessi, che avevano abbandonato la vita di campagna e si erano stabiliti sotto i pavimenti dell'umanità. Non che avessero niente a che fare con gli umani. Gli umani sono grossi, lenti e stupidi. I niomi vivono rapidamente. Per loro dieci anni sono come un secolo. Dato che vivevano nel Grande Magazzino da più di ottant'anni, si erano dimenticati che c'erano cose come il Sole, la Pioggia o il Vento. C'era solo l'Emporio, fondato dal leggendario F.lli Arnold (dal 1905) perché i niomi vi abitassero. Le loro piccole, rapide vite erano regolate dall'orario di chiusura e apertura. Le stagioni dell'anno erano i Saldi Invernali, le Collezioni Primavera, le Occasioni Estive e il Natale. E nell'Emporio arrivarono un giorno gli ultimi niomi che vivevano fuori. Loro sapevano che cos'erano il vento e la pioggia. Lo sapevano bene. Per questo cercavano di non averci più niente a che fare... Narratore appassionante, grande umorista, lucido osservatore delle contraddizioni del consumismo e della vita moderna, Terry Pratchett sarà una rivelazione per i lettori di tutte le età.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, "marks an advance over This Side of Paradise," Edmund Wilson wrote. "The style is more nearly mature and the subject more nearly unified, and there are scenes that are more convincing than any in his previous fiction." Published in 1922, it chronicles the relationship of Anthony Patch, Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete, and his beautiful wife, Gloria, as they await to inherit his grandfather's fortune. A devastating satire of the nouveaux rich and New York's nightlife, of reckless ambition and squandered talent.

Because he spends so much time perfecting his flying form instead of concentrating on getting food, a seagull is ostracized by the rest of the flock

"Una straordinaria meditazione sulla morte e un'amara riflessione sulla perdita di tradizioni e valori antichissimi, nel racconto di un grande rappresentante della letteratura contemporanea." [dalla pagina web di Bompiani]

The classic novel of triumph, revenge, and friendship-now in a premium edition From the critically-acclaimed author of How Stella Got Her Groove Back comes this wise, down-to-earth story of a friendship between four African American women who lean on each other while "waiting to exhale"-waiting for that man who will take their breath away.

John le Carré 's classic novels deftly navigate readers through the intricate shadow worlds of international espionage with unsurpassed skill and knowledge, and have earned him unprecedented worldwide acclaim. At a small British trade fair in Moscow, a message of global importance is made up of three very fragile human links: a Soviet physicist (code name Bluebird) burdened with a secret knowledge; a beautiful young Russian woman to whom the papers are entrusted; and Barley Blair, a bewildered English publisher pressed into service by British Intelligence to ferret out the source of the document. A magnificent story of love, betrayal, and courage, "The Russia House" catches history in the act.

Gill Gamesh, John Baal, Rupert Mundys: If you've never heard of them, it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. This novel turns baseball's status as national passtime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picturesque heroism and perfidy, and ebullient wordplay.

Dean Corde is a man of position and authority at a Chicago university. He accompanies his wife to Bucharest where her mother lies dying in a state hospital. As he tries to help her grapple with an unfeeling bureaucracy, Corde is troubled: at home the centre is not holding firm, in Eastern Europe authority is cruel and dehumanising.

In 1941, Henry Miller, the author of Tropic of Cancer, was commissioned by a Los Angeles bookseller to write an erotic novel for a dollar a page. Under the Roofs of Paris (originally published as Opus Pistorum) is that book. Here one finds Miller’s characteristic candor, wit, self-mockery, and celebration of the good life. From Marcelle to Tania, to Alexandra, to Anna, and from the Left Bank to Pigalle, Miller sweeps us up in his odyssey in search of the perfect job, the perfect woman, and the perfect experience.

A darkly comic and ambitious sequel to the American classic Catch-22 . In Closing Time, Joseph Heller returns to the characters of Catch-22, now coming to the end of their lives and the century, as is the entire generation that fought in World War II: Yossarian and Milo Minderbinder, the chaplain, and such newcomers as little Sammy Singer and giant Lew, all linked, in an uneasy peace and old age, fighting not the Germans this time, but The End. Closing Time deftly satirizes the realities and the myths of America in the half century since WWII: the absurdity of our politics, the decline of our society and our great cities, the greed and hypocrisy of our business and culture -- with the same ferocious humor as Catch-22. Closing Time is outrageously funny and totally serious, and as brilliant and successful as Catch-22 itself, a fun-house mirror that captures, at once grotesquely and accurately, the truth about ourselves.