Domenico Scarpa Book order (chronological)

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..." "This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves further into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.

As the Orient express crosses Europe, it seems to draw a trail of lust, murder, revolution and intrigue from Ostend to Constantinople ...

The city is Rome, the hub of Italian life and culture. The house is Le Margherite, a home where the sprawling cast of The City and the House is welcome. At the center of this lush epistolary novel is Lucrezia, mother of five, and lover of many. Among her lovers—and perhaps the father of one of her children—is Giuseppe. After the sale of Le Margherite, the characters wander aimlessly as if in search of a lost paradise.

Robin, a postgrad student in Coventry, has spent four and a half years not writing his thesis. Now it languishes in a drawer, and Robin hides in his room, increasingly frightened by a world he doesn't understand. His friends have failed him and romance eludes him.

"As far as the education of children is concerned, states Natalia Ginzburg in this collection of her finest and best-known short essays, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know. Whether she writes of the loss of a friend, Cesare Pavese; or what is inexpugnable of World War II; or the Abruzzi, where she and her first husband lived in forced residence under Fascist rule; or the importance of silence in our society; or her vocation as a writer; or even a pair of worn-out shoes, Ginzburg brings to her reflections the wisdom of a survivor and the spare, wry, and poetically resonant style her readers have come to recognize. A glowing light of modern Italian literature. Ginzburg's magic is the utter simplicity of her prose, suddenly illuminated by one word that makes a lightning streak of a plain phrase"--Publisher's description

Ein anonymer Liebesbrief bringt die wohlgeordnete Welt der attraktiven Helen McFarquhar aus dem Gleichgewicht: ob geschrieben vom »Jungen in Flammen« oder nur ein belangloser Scherz, der Brief verstrickt die kühle Verführerin in Leidenschaften, die in ihrem Leben eigentlich gar keinen Platz mehr haben. Ein unbeschwerter, sommerlicher Wandel auf dem Pfad der Selbsterkenntnis, wenn man sich Helen McFarquhar verwandt fühlt.