Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

DER LÄNGSTE SCHLAF de Melanie Raabe

A sleep researcher who can’t sleep. Dreams that spill over into reality. An old man struggling to make amends.

DER LÄNGSTE SCHLAF
(The Longest Sleep)
by Melanie Raabe
btb/PRH Germany, September 2024

In young scientist Mara Lux’s life, practically everything revolves around sleep. She lives in London, and is a leading scholar in the field – but has herself been tortured by insomnia for years. She’s scared of her dreams, because they have an uncanny habit of blurring with reality. Which is particularly tough for Mara, because she’s nothing if not rational, and likes to be in control.

Mara’s parents died a long time ago, and she hardly ever visits Germany, so she’s surprised when she learns from a notary that someone wants to give her a big, old villa as a gift – anonymously. Mara thinks it must be a case of mistaken identity. Still, she’s curious, and decides to check it out. When she arrives in the small town she’s never heard of, she discovers that the place has somehow been in her dreams all along…

For fans of Lauren Groff, Mariana Leky, Alex Schulman and Ewald Arenz

Melanie Raabe was born in 1981. After her studies she worked as a journalist during the day and secretly wrote books at night. The Trap was published in 2015, followed by The Truth in 2016, The Shadow in 2018, and The Woods in 2019. Her novel Die Kunst des Verschwindens (‘The Art of Disappearing’, 2022) was her first thriller. Her books have been translated into 22 languages so far, and many have been adapted for the screen.

THE BALANCE d’Aimee Boorman

From Paris Olympics star and legendary gymnast Simone Biles’s longtime coach, an insider’s look at the making of a champion.

THE BALANCE:
My Years Coaching Simone Biles
by Aimee Boorman
with Steve Cooper
foreword by Simone Biles
Abrams Press, Frankfurt 2024

THE BALANCE is coach Aimee Boorman’s inside account of the growth of a transcendent athlete and the tumultuous events—from the dictatorial coaching of Martha Karolyi to the sexual abuse by Larry Nassar—that upended the lives of many girls, including Biles.

Simone Biles is one of the greatest athletes of all time. She’s won six all-around world championships and eleven Olympic medals (seven gold). Five gymnastics moves are named after her, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (the youngest recipient ever), and at an age when most elite gymnasts have retired, Biles is not just still competing—she’s dominating. She soared in Paris last summer, bringing home more Olympic gold. She’s having so much fun that LA 2028 is not out of the question.

But when coach Aimee Borman met her at a gym in Texas, Simone was just a seven-year-old kid. An exceptionally athletically gifted one, to be sure, but not yet great. That would take time, care, love, and balance.

Boorman helped shape Biles, both pushing her and holding her back, protecting both her mental and physical health. “She’s like a second mom to me,” writes Biles, and Boorman was the National Team coach in 2016, where the US—and Biles—took home all-around gold.

THE BALANCE combines unprecedented insider perspective on a legend, newsworthy details on gymnastics history, and compelling lessons on coaching, leadership, and development.

Aimee Boorman, a Chicago native, is a decorated and globally respected gymnastics coach, whose career included 12 years coaching the sport’s all-time greatest, Simone Biles. Boorman was named USA Gymnastics Coach of the Year four times (2013–2016) and US Olympic Committee Coach of the Year (2016). She was head coach of the US Women’s Gymnastics Team at the Rio Olympic Games and coached for the Dutch Gymnastics Federation at the European Championship, the Tokyo Olympic Games, and the World Artistic Gymnastics Championships in Japan in 2021. Boorman holds a bachelor of science in management and a master of sport from USA Gymnastics, and is actively representing the United States as a FIG Brevet judge. She is also a cofounder of Global Impact Gymnastics Alliance. She has three sons—Jamie, Chris, and Ben—with her husband, James Boorman, whom she has been married to for 25 years.

Steve Cooper is a journalist with over two decades of writing, reporting, and editing experience, covering marriage, business, technology, entrepreneurship, and gymnastics, which he has also covered as a photographer. He is the coauthor of Life is Short, Don’t Wait to Dance with former UCLA Gymnastics head coach Valerie Kondos Field, and is COO of GymCastic, the largest gymnastics podcast in the world.

MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE d’Isabel Allende

In this spellbinding novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young journalist comes of age in the late 1800’s and attempts to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE
by Isabel Allende
Ballantine, May 2025
(via Writers House)

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can’t contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, she meets her estranged father and delves into the violent confrontation in the country where her roots lie. As she and Eric discover love, the war escalates and Emilia finds herself in extreme danger, fearing for her life and questioning her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, MY NAME IS EMILIA DEL VALLE introduces a character you will never forget.

Isabel Allende, born in Peru and raised in Chile, is a novelist, feminist, and philanthropist. She is one of the most widely read authors in the world, having sold more than eighty million copies of her twenty-eight books across forty-two languages. She is the author of several bestselling and critically acclaimed books, including The Wind Knows My Name, Violeta, A Long Petal of the Sea, The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna, and Paula. In addition to her work as a writer, Isabel devotes much of her time to human rights causes. She has received fifteen honorary doctorates, been inducted into the California Hall of Fame, and received the PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and in 2018, she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

SEDUCTION THEORY d’Emily Adrian

With the raw emotional complexity of Conversations with Friends, the dark academia of Bunny, and filled with the sharp intimacy, heart, and humor of Splinters, SEDUCTION THEORY is a profound exploration of the challenges of monogamy, marital betrayal in all its forms, the dangerous intimacy of student-professor relationships, and the power of forgiveness.

SEDUCTION THEORY
by Emily Adrian
Little, Brown, August 2025
(via Writers House)

Simone is the star of the Edwards University Creative Writing Department: renowned Woolf scholar, grief memoirist, and campus sex icon. Her less glamorous and ostensibly devoted husband, Ethan, is a forgotten novelist and lecturer in the same department. But when Ethan and the department administrative assistant Abigail have sex, Simone’s graduate student Roberta “Robbie” Green fictionalizes the affair in a breathtakingly invasive MFA thesis.

Determined to tell her version of the story, Robbie’s youthful and sardonic voice weaves in and out of the novel until she finally takes charge of the plot. Vivid, innovative, witty, and tender, SEDUCTION THEORY is a story about how love and betrayal can coexist.

Emily Adrian is the author of Everything Here Is Under Control and The Second Season, as well as two critically acclaimed novels for young adults. Most recently, her memoir, Daughterhood was published. Her work has appeared in Granta, Joyland, EPOCH, Alta Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD de David George Haskell

Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world. Almost all of nature now depends on them. We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their beauty, not their world-changing power. In this revealing new book, internationally renowned nature writer David Haskell puts flowers back where they belong, at the center of the story about how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

HOW FLOWERS MADE OUR WORLD:
Revolutions of Cooperation, Beauty, and Illusion
by David George Haskell
Viking, 2026
(via The Martell Agency)

Flowers are innovators. They used beauty to transform former enemies into cooperative partners. They reinvented plant growth, sex, and motherhood. Through genetic nimbleness, they turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rain forests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.

Flowers create opportunities for others. Butterflies and bees would not exist without them. Modern birds diversified in lockstep with flowers. Flowers shaped our species’ history, too. Grasses caused our ape ancestors to come down from the trees. Agriculture, with flowering plants at its heart, is the foundation of all modern civilizations.

Although flowers lack nerves, they created a language of beauty to converse with animals. We draw this conversation into human social networks, using cut blooms, floral aromas, and flower symbolism to mediate our signals to one another. Illusion is beauty’s companion. Flowers dupe many pollinators, and we use flowers to conceal, mask, or deflect. By breeding and growing flowers, we create both beauty and illusions: paradoxically, flowers produced by horticulture can be dangerous to pollinators.

The study of flowers revolutionized science and was a foundation of the horrors of colonialism. Today, we look to the resilience and genetic flexibility of flowering plants to help us face the crises of climate change and extinction. Flowers thrived in the face of past calamity and can do so again.

Flowers are the among most consequential creatures ever to have evolved, but no book to date centers and elevates this story, much of which has been discovered only in the last decade. Today, interest among the reading public in the wonders of plants is high, as is our need to learn from them. Now is a perfect time to celebrate the story of how flowers made our world.

David Haskell’s work integrates scientific, literary, and contemplative studies of the natural world. He is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South and a Guggenheim Fellow. His 2017 book The Songs of Trees won the John Burroughs Medal for Outstanding Nature Writing. His 2012 book The Forest Unseen and 2022 book Sounds Wild and Broken were both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and were shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.