There is something strange about Coraline's new home. It's not the mist, or the cat that always seems to be watching her, nor the signs of danger that Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, her new neighbours, read in the tea leaves. It's the other house - the one behind the old door in the drawing room. Another mother and father with black-button eyes and papery skin are waiting for Coraline to join them there. And they want her to stay with them. For ever. She knows that if she ventures through that door, she may never come back.
Maurizio Bartocci Book order






- 2022
- 2016
The Last Policeman
- 336 pages
- 12 hours of reading
Hank Palace is working the case of Peter Zell, an insurance man who has comitted suicide. To his fellow police officers, it's just one more death-by- hanging in a city that sees a dozen of suicides every week. But Palace senses something wrong. There's something odd about the crime scene. Something off. Palace becomes convinced that it's murder.
- 2014
The unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry
- 384 pages
- 14 hours of reading
Harold Fry is convinced that he must deliver a letter to an old love in order to save her, meeting various characters along the way and reminiscing about the events of his past and people he has known, as he tries to find peace and acceptance.
- 2004
Junior J Gaia: La grande festa dei murales
- 160 pages
- 6 hours of reading
Yeoville, quartiere di Johannesburg, Sudafrica: una zona turbolenta dove famiglie di diverso colore cercano di stabilire nuove regole di vita dopo la fine dell'apartheid. La speranza di assistere all'inizio di una nuova era si scontra con le difficoltà economiche, i residui della mentalità razzista e il dilagare di violenze, droga, rapine. Protagoniste quattro amiche, che trovano l'energia per ribellarsi alla situazione. E con loro l'intero quartiere sembra vivere un momento di rinascita che culmina in una grande festa di strada in cui tutti collaborano a dipingere un enorme murale. Un romanzo vero, duro, traboccante di un'irresistibile energia vitale, un romanzo corale sul Sudafrica di Mandela
- 2004
Before We Were Free
- 208 pages
- 8 hours of reading
PURE BELPRÉ AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE’S 100 BEST YA BOOKS OF ALL TIME • AN ALA-YALSA BEST BOOK FOR YOUNG ADULTS From renowned author Julia Alvarez comes an unforgettable story about adolescence, perseverance, and one girl’s struggle to be free while living in the Dominican Republic under the rule of a dictator. Anita de la Torre never questioned her freedom living in the Dominican Republic. But by her twelfth birthday in 1960, most of her relatives have immigrated to the United States, her Tío Toni has disappeared without a trace, and the government’s secret police terrorize her remaining family because of their suspected opposition to Trujillo’s iron-fisted rule. Using the strength and courage of her family, Anita must overcome her fears and fly to freedom, leaving all that she once knew behind. “A stirring work of art.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “A realistic and compelling account of a girl growing up too quickly while coming to terms with the cost of freedom.” —The Horn Book, Starred Review “Diary entries written by the child while in hiding will remind readers of Anne Frank’s story. . . . Readers will bite their nails as the story moves to its inexorable conclusion.” —SLJ
- 2003
The Wind on Fire Trilogy - 3: Firesong
- 560 pages
- 20 hours of reading
Twins Bowman and Kestrel have saved their family and the rest of the Manth people from slavery and helped bring about the downfall of the cruel city-state of the Mastery. Now, led by their mother, a prophetess, they are free to seek their promised land. But the journey is long and hard, filled with many dangers, enemies, distractions, and temptations. And each of the travelers is preoccupied with his or her own worries. Hanno Hath, the twins' father, is troubled to see his beloved wife weaken as they draw close to the promised land. As well, he must bolster the endurance of the often doubting and disgruntled Manth people. Bowman is torn between his attraction to Sisi, a former princess, and his destiny, as he perceives it, to sacrifice himself for the good of the people. Kestrel also feels a pull toward a mission, toward something-but for some reason, she cannot envision her life beyond the journey. This is the satisfying and profound ending to the trilogy, which began with The Wind Singer, winner of the coveted Smarties Prize in England.
- 2003
This Newbery Honor winner and #1 New York Times bestseller is a beloved modern classic. Hoot features a new kid and his new bully, alligators, some burrowing owls, a renegade eco-avenger, and several extremely poisonous snakes. Everybody loves Mother Paula's pancakes. Everybody, that is, except the colony of cute but endangered owls that live on the building site of the new restaurant. Can the awkward new kid and his feral friend prank the pancake people out of town? Or is the owls' fate cemented in pancake batter? Welcome to Carl Hiaasen's Florida—where the creatures are wild and the people are wilder!
- 2001
`It's OK, I'm wearing really big knickers!'
- 254 pages
- 9 hours of reading
Brilliantly funny, teenage angst author Louise Rennison's second book about the confessions of crazy but lovable Georgia Nicolson. Now repackaged in a gorgeous new paperback and looking even fabber than ever. Louise is an international bestselling author and her books can't fail to make you laugh out loud.
- 2000
"I am not my own subject," Gore Vidal used to say. But now, surprisingly, he has turned his wit and elegant storytelling gifts to a candid memoir of the first forty years of his life. Palimpsest is written from the vantage point of Vidal's library in his villa on the Italian coast. As visitors come and go, his memory ranges back and forth across a rich history. Vidal's childhood was spent in Washington, D.C., in the household of his grandfather, the blind senator from Oklahoma, T. P. Gore, and in the various domestic situations of his complicated and exasperating mother, Nina. Then come schooldays at St. Albans and Exeter; the army; life as a literary wunderkind in New York, London, Rome, and Paris in the forties and fifties; sex in an age of promiscuity; and a campaign for Congress in 1960. Vidal's famous skills as a raconteur, his forthrightness, and his wicked wit are brilliantly at work in these recollections of a difficult family, talented friends, and interesting enemies. The cast includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Christopher Isherwood, Jack Kerouac, Jane and Paul Bowles, Santayana, Anais Nin, Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, among others. Beautifully rendered anecdotes are intermixed with meditations on writing, history, acting, and politics. Perhaps most surprising is the leitmotif of a great, lost love. "A memoir is how one remembers one's own life," Vidal says, "while an autobiography is history." Palimpsest is a true story, but also an extraordinary work of literary imagination.

