Ann-Marie MacDonald Knihy

Ve svém dlouho očekávaném druhém románu se Ann-Marie MacDonaldová vrací do šedesátých let, období naplněného sebevědomým optimismem úspěšného dobývání vesmíru, ale také hrozbou studené války a mezinárodních strategických intrik. Madeleine McCarthyová, na začátku románu devítiletá dívenka nadaná nevšední představivostí a pozorovacím talentem, přijíždí se svou rodinou na leteckou základnu Centralia v Ontariu, kde se zakládá osa tragického příběhu brutálního zločinu lokálního významu, propojeného s neznámými tajemnými silami a zájmy globálního charakteru. MacDonaldová podmanivým způsobem evokuje bolest, zmatek, humor i radost dětství konfrontovaného s nebezpečným a těžko pochopitelným světem dospělých. Kam létají vrány je mistrovskou kronikou novodobé historie Kanady v kontextu klíčových událostí v našem světě, ale především neodolatelným, hluboce přesvědčivým příběhem lidského utrpení, nezdolnosti a hojivé síly lásky.

Když v roce 1996 vyšel románový debut Kanaďanky Anny Marie MacDonaldové Padněte na kolena, vzbudil nebývalou pozornost jak literární kritiky, tak širokých čtenářských vrstev, získal řadu prestižních ocenění a brzy se dočkal i značného ohlasu mezinárodního. Na rozmáchlém epickém příběhu sester Piperových a jejich složitém vztahu k otci, zasazeném do prostředí novoskotského ostrova Cape Breton odehrávajícím se v první polovině 20. století pracovala autorka pět let a podařilo se jí vytvořit fascinující, mnohovrstevné dílo, které čtenáře dovede znovu a znovu strhovat, často šokovat a průběžně v dobrém slova smyslu bavit.

THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year • A beloved writer returns with a tale of science, magic, love, and identity •“Engrossing, gorgeous, funny.” —The Globe and Mail • “Magnificent.” —Montreal Review of Books • “A reinvention for the bestselling author. . . . MacDonald’s fourth novel is a paean to the act of storytelling and a triumph that challenges the constructs of gender.” —Quill & Quire (starred review) In the late nineteenth century, Charlotte Bell is growing up at Fayne, a vast and lonely estate straddling the border between England and Scotland, where she has been kept from the world by her adoring father, Lord Henry Bell, owing to a mysterious condition. Charlotte, strong and insatiably curious, revels in the moorlands, and has learned the treacherous and healing ways of the bog from the old hired man, Byrn, whose own origins are shrouded in mystery. Her idyllic existence is shadowed by the magnificent portrait on the landing in Fayne House which depicts her mother, a beautiful Irish-American heiress, holding Charlotte’s brother, Charles Bell. Charlotte has grown up with the knowledge that her mother died in giving birth to her, and that her older brother, Charles, the long-awaited heir, died soon afterwards at the age of two. When Charlotte’s appetite for learning threatens to exceed the bounds of the estate, her father breaks with tradition and hires a tutor to teach his daughter “as you would my son, had I one.” But when Charlotte and her tutor’s explorations of the bog turn up an unexpected artefact, her father announces he has arranged for her to be cured of her condition, and her world is upended. Charlotte’s passion for knowledge and adventure will take her to the bottom of family secrets and to the heart of her own identity.

Mary Rose McKinnon has two children with her partner Hilary and a fractured relationship with her mother Dolly; she also has issues with anger management and lives in fear of hurting the children, these feelings seem somehow rooted in a part of her childhood she has trouble remembering. Is Dolly - the kind of big personality who makes all Mary Rose's friends, and even waiters in coffee shops, exclaim 'I love your Mum!' - really harbouring a dark secret about what caused Mary Rose's childhood injuries, and is Mary Rose doomed to follow the same path with her own children?

In this exuberant comedy, MacDonald asks, What if Desdemona and Juliet were allowed to live? Constance Ledbelly, a tweedy academic, has ghostwritten the papers of her mentor for years, when suddenly he announces he's marrying a rival. Escaping into her research, Constance decodes the Gustav Manuscript, and discovers a pair of comedies that she believes are the source for Shakespeare's Othello and Romeo and Juliet. Transported into the world of her theory, she comes face-to-face with Desdemona and Juliet and discovers that, far from shrinking violets, they are hellions full of surprises. What follows is a riotous retelling of theatrical legend that brings Constance out of her gloom and straight into a new and confident self.

Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is an exuberant comedy and feminist revisioning of Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo and Juliet. It takes us from a dusty office in Canada’s Queen’s University, into the fraught and furious worlds of two of Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, and turns them upside-down. Constance Ledbelly is the beleaguered “spinster” academic, and unlikely heroine who embarks on a quest for Shakespearean origins and, ultimately, her own identity. When she deciphers an ancient and neglected manuscript, Constance is propelled through a very modern rabbit hole and lands smack in the middle of the tragic turning points of each play in turn. Her attempts to save first Desdemona, then Juliet, from their harrowing fates, result in a wild unpredictable ride through comedy and near-tragedy, as mild-mannered Constance learns to love, sword-fight, dance Renaissance-style, and master a series of disguises… Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) a gender-bendy, big-hearted and crazily intelligent romp, where irony and anger sing in perfect harmony with innocence and poignancy.

Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, rond 1900: de jonge pianostemmer James wordt met zijn kindbruidje Materia verbannen naar een eenzaam huis op een klif. Tot elkaar veroordeeld vechten zij en hun dochters zich door het leven. Laten wij aanbidden is een adembenemende geschiedenis die de lezer nog lang bijblijft. Een roman voor wie houdt van de Brontës, Annie Proulx en Carol Shields.