Sjaak Commandeur Book order (chronological)

The story of the actor Jack Burns. His mother, Alice, is a Toronto tattoo artist. When Jack is four, he travels with Alice to several North Sea ports; they are trying to find Jack's missing father, William, a church organist who is addicted to being tattooed. But Alice is a mystery, and William can't be found. Even Jack's memories are subject to doubt. Jack Burns goes to schools in Canada and New England, but what shapes him are his relationships with older women. John Irving renders Jack's life as an actor in Hollywood with the same richness of detail and range of emotions he uses to describe the tattoo parlors in those North Sea ports and the reverberating music Jack heard as a child in European churches.

/ 9789045849317 / Literature translated into Dutch / Nederlands / Dutch / Néerlandais / Niederländisch / soft cover / 14 x 21 cm / 302 .pp /

Een Australische acteur belandt op het eiland Korfoe en besluit daar voor een paar maanden een huis te huren om de recente gebeurtenissen in zijn persoonlijk leven te overpeinzen. Terwijl hij het eiland verkent en nieuwe vrienden maakt, raakt hij geobsedeerd door de bijzondere levenswandel van degene wiens huis hij tijdelijk bewoont. Naarmate hij meer over hem weet te achterhalen, lijken zijn eigen ervaringen steeds sterker het leven van zijn afwezige huisbaas te weerspiegelen. Met de Griekse eilanden Adelaide en Londen op de achtergrond schrijft Robdert Dessaix in Korfoe over vriendschap en liefde, het alledaagse en onalledaagse, over ballingschap en thuiskomen. Maar Korfoe is ook een ode aan de literaire landschappen van Homerus, Sapfo en Tsjechov en aan het vermogen van de kunst om schoonheid te brengen in het leven.

'Imagine a young man on his way to a less-than-thirty-second event - the loss of his left hand, long before he reached middle age.' While reporting a story from India, a New York television journalist has his left hand eaten by a lion; millions of TV viewers witness the accident. In Boston, a renowned hand surgeon awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant. A married woman in Wisconsin wants to give the one-handed reporter her husband's left hand, that is, after her husband dies. But the husband is alive, relatively young, and healthy ...

In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, the narrative intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future. May, beautiful and charismatic, escapes an arranged marriage in rural China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where she meets Arthur, an Australian involved with the Foot Emancipation Society. His mission to rehabilitate May quickly turns into an irresistible attraction to her bound feet. Unable to reform her, Arthur marries May and brings her home to live with his family, including his two daughters, Alice and Cecily. May sees in Alice the possibility of redemption, a surrogate for a lost child, while Alice seeks the love her own mother withholds. However, when Alice is caught preparing her aunt's opium pipe, she is sent to a London boarding school, far from May's influence. The story unfolds amid beauty and cruelty, in a lawless place where traditions clash, and tragedy looms over a world built on unsettled waters. By turns shocking, exquisite, and hilarious, this work is a spellbinding literary triumph.

Twenty years after The World According to Gary, John Irving gives us a new novel about a family marked by tragedy and the "difficult" women who survive. --back cover