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Harm Damsma

    The Blind Man's Garden
    Lord of the Flies
    The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
    Het Courage Ensemble: Honderdnegenennegentig treden
    The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
    The Underground Railroad
    • The Underground Railroad

      • 336 pages
      • 12 hours of reading

      #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "An American masterpiece" (NPR) that chronicles a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. One of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the 21st Century The basis for the acclaimed original Prime Video series directed by Barry Jenkins. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. An outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is on the cusp of womanhood—where greater pain awaits. And so when Caesar, a slave who has recently arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, she seizes the opportunity and escapes with him. In Colson Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor: engineers and conductors operate a secret network of actual tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight from one state to the next, encountering, like Gulliver, strange yet familiar iterations of her own world at each stop. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is both the gripping tale of one woman's will to escape the horrors of bondage—and a powerful meditation on the history we all share. Look for Colson Whitehead’s new novel, Crook Manifesto!

      The Underground Railroad
      4.2
    • The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories

      • 228 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      An acclaimed collection of stories from the internationally bestselling author of The Crimson Petal and the White

      The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories
      4.1
    • 1799, Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor. Jacob de Zoet, a devout and resourceful young clerk, has a chance encounter with Orito Aibagawa, the disfigured daughter of a samurai doctor and midwife to the city's powerful magistrate. The borders between propriety, profit, and pleasure blur until Jacob finds his vision clouded, one rash promise made and then fatefully broken--the consequences of which will extend beyond Jacob's worst imaginings.

      The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
      4.0
    • Originally published in 1954, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is one of the most disturbing and celebrated novels of modern times. A plane crashes on a desert island. The only survivors are a group of schoolboys. At first they revel in the freedom and celebrate the absence of grown-ups. Soon though, as the boys' fragile sense of order begins to collapse, their fears start to take on a sinister, primitive significance. Suddenly, the world of cricket, homework and adventure stories seems a long way away. The boys are faced with a more pressing reality - survival - and the appearance of a terrifying beast who haunts their dreams.

      Lord of the Flies
      4.0
    • The Blind Man's Garden

      • 480 pages
      • 17 hours of reading

      Jeo and Mikal, foster-brothers from a small Pakistani city, secretly enter Afghanistan: not to fight with the Taliban, but to help and care for wounded civilians. But it soon becomes apparent that good intentions can't keep them out of harm's way...

      The Blind Man's Garden
      3.9
    • Rick Martin loved music and the music loved him. He could pick up a tune so quickly that it didn’t matter to the Cotton Club boss that he was underage, or to the guys in the band that he was just a white kid. He started out in the slums of LA with nothing, and he ended up on top of the game in the speakeasies and nightclubs of New York. But while talent and drive are all you need to make it in music, they aren’t enough to make it through a life. Dorothy Baker’s Young Man with a Horn is widely regarded as the first jazz novel, and it pulses with the music that defined an era. Baker took her inspiration from the artistry—though not the life—of legendary horn player Bix Beiderbecke, and the novel went on to be adapted into a successful movie starring Kirk Douglas, Lauren Bacall, and Doris Day.

      Young Man with a Horn
      4.0
    • Helena, Helena, mijn liefste

      • 264 pages
      • 10 hours of reading

      Il romanzo comincia nello stesso anno dell'Iliade con il litigio fra Achillee Agamennone. L'ambientazione è quella mitologica, ma nelle vicende narrate da Omero, l'autore inserisce una trama inventata che vede protagonista un giovane ragazzo, Leonte, recatosi a Troia per ritrovare il padre disperso da anni. Sullo sfondo delle battaglie omeriche si svolgono le avventure del giovane, che saranno anche avventure amorose, poiché Leonte si innamorerà di Ekto, una fanciulla che ha le fattezze e il fascino di Elena.

      Helena, Helena, mijn liefste
      3.8
    • The Uncommon Reader

      • 128 pages
      • 5 hours of reading

      The Queen of England comes across a travelling library and ends up taking out a novel. One read leads to another and a passion awakes, resulting in a decline of her public duties.

      The Uncommon Reader
      3.8