Jacques Thiériot Books

Fascinated by the Hungarian language - he is after all a man who lives by language, ghost writing speeches, advertisements, books - he spends the night watching television, trying to pick out words in this tongue, 'the only one the devil respects'. In charting the life of a Brazilian ghost writer enamoured with the Magyar, Chico Buarque has created his most original fiction yet. The novel coils round the reader like a magical snake from "The Arabian Nights". It is a storytelling labyrinth in Borges or Calvino mode, as Costa's myth-making, love-making and essays into another culture become mired in the world where celebrities make reputations and fortunes from the writing of anonymous others, where the reader is not sure what language, what reality is being offered.

The new novel from Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, told with his usual masterly blend of wisdom, humour, and drama. A stranger arrives in the small mountain village. He carries with him a backpack containing a notebook and eleven gold bars. Burying these in the vicinity, the stranger strikes up a curious friendship with a young woman from the village -- Miss Prym. His mission is to discover whether human beings are essentially good or evil. In this stunning new novel, Paulo Coelho's unusual protagonist acts as the devil, setting the town a moral challenge from which they may never recover. A fascinating meditation on the human soul, The Devil and Miss Prym illuminates the reality of good and evil within us all, and our uniquely human capacity to choose between them