Roberto Bacci Book order (chronological)

A box of Latin manuscripts comes to light in an Argentine flea market. An apocryphal invention by some 17th or 18th century scholar, or a transcript of what it appears to be - a hitherto unheard of letter to St. Augustine from a woman he renounced for chastity? Vita Brevis is both an entrancing human document and a fascinating insight into the life and philosophy of St. Augustine. Gaarder's interpretation of Floria's letter is as playful, inventive and questioning as Sophie's World .

Conversations about life and death, between a girl and an angel. As Cecelia lies ill in bed, and her family valiantly make their Christmas preparations in the knowledge that she is not going to get better, an angel steps through her window. The death os a teenage girl from cancer is, in Gardner's hands, an occasion to reflect on the meaning of life and to celebrate it.It is the springboard for a spirited and thoroughly engaging series of conversations between Cecelia and her angel, who likes to sit around and chat. As Cecelia thinks about her own experiences and prepares herself for dying, we see subtle changes in her and her relationships with her family. No one could fail to be moved by the ending, when the angel takes her by the hand and they fly away together. Jostein Gaarder is a profoundly optimistic writer who approaches the subject of death and loss with wisdom, compassion and the open minded and enquiring spirit that characterises all his work. This is a book that will bring comfort to the bereaved: but more than that, it continues the wonderful exploration of universal ideas that made SOPHIE'S WORLD great.

They meet on a spring day in the local garden center: Inge, a native Swede, lovely and refined, is a woman ruled by reason and her own deeply held moral beliefs; and Mira, a Chilean immigrant who still feels out of place in the cold Scandinavian north, and has spent far too much of her life searching for meaning. Intrigued by one another, the two women are nevertheless wary of the great cultural differences that seem to separate their lives. Yet both are single mothers devoted to their children, and both find joy and comfort in cultivating plants and flowers -- and so together, they begin to develop a close bond. Through many afternoons spent amid the beauty of Inge's garden, Mira slowly reveals the horrors of a shadowed past and the heartbreak involving her beloved daughter. As Mira and her family begin a wrenching journey of discovery, Inge unwittingly uncovers secrets in her own life that make her question the very order of her world . . . and wonder whether the truth is really what any of them needs to find -- or if, in fact, it is the truth that will destroy them.