One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state.
From Uzbek author-in-exile Hamid Ismailov comes a dark new parable of power, corruption, fraud, and deception. Ismailov narrates an intimate clash of civilizations as he follows the lives of three expatriates living in England. Domrul is a young Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife in the Uzbekistan of his childhood. His Irish girlfriend Emer struggles with her own adolescent trauma from growing up in war-torn Bosnia. Domrul is the caretaker for Gaia, the eighty-year-old, powerful wife of a Soviet party boss with a mysterious past. One of Ismailov’s few novels written in Uzbek... continue
Un hombre atraviesa en ferrocarril la infinita estepa de Kazajistán. En una de las paradas que hace el tren en un remoto apeadero sube a bordo un niño de unos doce años interpretando magistralmente al violín una de las Danzas húngaras de Brahms. Al instante, los pasajeros despiertan de su sopor. Sin embargo, muy pronto el viajero descubre que el pueril violinista es en realidad todo un hombre de veintisiete años.
Tomando como hilo conductor los avatares de un manuscrito que, con el nombre de la mítica ciudad de Samarcanda, contiene las famosas «Ruba1iyyat» del poeta persa Omar Jayyám, Amin Maalouf recrea en esta novela un fascinante y tumultuoso mundo oriental. En el marco de la Persia medieval, desgarrada por profundas contradicciones, dos figuras destacan junto a la del que, además de poeta, fuera astrónomo, geómetra y filósofo: la de Nizam el-Molk, gran visir del sultán Malikxah, y la del misterioso ismaelí Hassan Sabbah, fundador de la secta de los Asesinos, que desde su fortaleza de Alamut mantuvo... continue
The story of Samarkand is woven around the history of the manuscript of the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam, from its creation by the poet and sage in eleventh-century Persia to its loss when the Titanic sank in 1912. Unwittingly involved in a brawl on the streets of Samarkand, Omar Khayyam is brought before a local judge who recognizes his genius as a poet and gives him a blank book in which to inscribe his verses. Thus the head of a great poet is saved and the Rubaiyaat of Omar Khayyam is born. The threads of his life become interwoven with the designs of the vizier, Nizam al Mulk, and of Hassan S... continue