Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

THE 6:20 MAN de David Baldacci

A cryptic murder pulls a former soldier turned financial analyst deep into the corruption and menace that prowl beneath the opulent world of finance, in #1 New York Times bestselling author David Baldacci’s new thriller.

THE 6:20 MAN
by David Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing, July 2022
(via Aaron M. Priest Literary)

Every day without fail, Travis Devine puts on a cheap suit, grabs his faux-leather briefcase, and boards the 6:20 commuter train to Manhattan, where he works as an entry-level analyst at the city’s most prestigious investment firm. In the mornings, he gazes out the train window at the lavish homes of the uberwealthy, dreaming about joining their ranks. In the evenings, he listens to the fiscal news on his phone, already preparing for the next grueling day in the cutthroat realm of finance. Then one morning Devine’s tedious routine is shattered by an anonymous email: She is dead.
Sara Ewes, Devine’s coworker and former girlfriend, has been found hanging in a storage room of his office building—presumably a suicide, at least for now—prompting the NYPD to come calling on him. If that wasn’t enough, before the day is out, Devine receives another ominous visit, a confrontation that threatens to dredge up grim secrets from his past in the army unless he participates in a clandestine investigation into his firm. This treacherous role will take him from the impossibly glittering lives he once saw only through a train window, to the darkest corners of the country’s economic halls of power . . . where something rotten lurks. And apart from this high-stakes conspiracy, there’s a killer out there with their own agenda, and Devine is the bull’s-eye.

David Baldacci is a global #1 bestselling author, and one of the world’s favorite storytellers. His books are published in over forty-five languages and in more than eighty countries, with 150 million copies sold worldwide. His works have been adapted for both feature film and television. David Baldacci is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America. Still a resident of his native Virginia, he invites you to visit him at DavidBaldacci.com and his foundation at WishYouWellFoundation.org.

CODIFIED d’Andrew Smith

From award-winning journalist Andrew Smith, contributing writer for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, CODIFIED is an immersive, sharp-eyed tour of the world of computer programming, told through Smith’s own journey to learn how to code.

CODIFIED
by Andrew Smith
‎ Atlantic Monthly Press/Grove Atlantic, Winter 2024

Andrew Smith’s first book, Moondust, was a #1 UK and international bestseller, nominated for two British Book Awards (including Read of the Year), and cited by the Times as one of its “100 Best Books of the Decade.” His follow-up Totally Wired—centered on the late 1990s dot-com bubble and its tumultuous crash—was published to rave reviews, hailed as “effervescent and vivid . . . a book whose time has come” (Sunday Times). Smith’s latest, CODIFIED, is a mesmerizing, up-to-the-minute account of the world of coders, as experienced through his own endeavor to become one.
Throughout history, technological revolutions have been driven by the invention of machines. But today, the power of the tech transforming our world lies in an intangible and impenetrable cosmos of software: algorithmic code. So symbiotic has our relationship with this code become that we barely notice it anymore. We can’t see it, are not even sure how to think about it, and yet we do almost nothing that doesn’t depend on it. In a world increasingly governed by technologies that so few can comprehend, who controls the future?
CODIFIED follows Andrew Smith on his immersive trip into the world of coding, taking us behind the scenes into the lives—and minds—of the new gatekeepers of the 21st century: those who write code. Smith embarks on a quest to understand this sect in what he believes to be the only way possible: by learning to code himself. Along the way, he becomes involved with a wild array of characters and takes part in several lively rituals of initiation into the coding world: he visits a global coding conference in Ohio, where he meets the creator of the Python programming language; and he takes part in a 24-hour “hackathon” in Silicon Valley, a Darwinian race to see who can build the best app overnight. At the start of his odyssey he travels to Magdeburg, Germany to have his brain scanned by a team of scientists studying the effects of coding on the human brain and will share the results of the final comparison scan. Smith delivers a vivid, effervescent portrait of a culture working in an office or coworking space near you—all while wrestling with everything that’s at stake in this stage of technological evolution. How do we control a technology that most people can’t understand? And are we programming ourselves out of existence? By-turns illuminating, alarming, and amusing, CODIFIED is an essential book for our times.

“Smith is an ideal narrator: sharp-eyed yet increasingly affectionate about his subjects; expert enough to dissect Apollo minutiae clearly but not so obsessed as to leave a general reader trailing in the jetwash.”
—Financial Times on Moondust

“A brilliant exploration of madness and genius in the early days of the web. Fascinatingly weird . . . terrific.”
—Guardian on Totally Wired

“A rich mix of cultural history, reportage and personal reflection.” —Evening Standard on Moondust

“Highly entertaining . . . [Smith’s] superb book is a fitting tribute to a unique band of 20th-century heroes.”
—GQ on Moondust

Andrew Smith has worked as a critic and feature writer for the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, and The Face, and has penned documentaries for the BBC. He is the author of the internationally bestselling book Moondust, about the nine remaining men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, and Totally Wired. He was raised in the UK and currently lives in California.

LUSH LIVES de J. Vanessa Lyon

A deliciously queer, whimsical and sexy novel set in the art and auction world, LUSH LIVES features a cast of bold and brilliant women who are unafraid to take big risks, challenge authority and maybe, just maybe, find love along the way.

LUSH LIVES
by J. Vanessa Lyon
Roxane Gay Books/Grove Atlantic, August 2023

For Glory, inheriting her Aunt Lucille’s Harlem brownstone feels like more of a curse than a blessing. She’s a restless West Coast artist struggling to find gallery representation, who doesn’t have the money or time to look after the house of an aunt she hardly knew. She reluctantly moves East, thinking of it as a free residency, but when she decides to see if any of the house’s contents have value, the inheritance leads her to Parkie de Groot, a savvy, ambitious appraiser at a luxury auction house who is on the verge of a coveted promotion if she plays her cards right. Though they are complete opposites, Glory and Parkie form an unlikely alliance and work to unearth the origins of a rare manuscript hidden in the brownstone’s trove. In doing so, they learn more than they could ever have imagined about not only Lucille’s life but the history of Harlem and how it shaped so many artists and thinkers whose footsteps Glory and Parkie hope to walk in.
Though they have an undeniable connection, there are complications. Parkie hasn’t been in a relationship since a toxic ex shattered her belief in herself, and is reluctant to make herself vulnerable with Glory, who is as ambitious as she is passionate about making her art. As intrigued as she is by Parkie, Glory is consumed by her work, not checking her phone for days on end and holding Parkie at arm’s length though she so very much wants to pull the other woman close. When these women do get out of their own way, though, the electricity between them is fierce.
That electricity is tested, however, when Glory and Parkie start keeping secrets from each other, threatening the promise of their relationship and their journey to uncover the mysteries of the brownstone and Harlem and the women who made their lives possible. Will the truths they are searching for bring Parkie and Glory back together or just drive them further apart?
LUSH LIVES is a charming and romantic novel with a sharp enough edge to make things interesting. The prose shoots off the page and into your heart and soul.

J. Vanessa Lyon is the author of The Groves (an Audible Original). She is an art historian, former appraiser, and occasional curator who teaches at a New England liberal arts college.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE de Brooke Jarvis

A scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change.

THE INSECT APOCALYPSE
by Brooke Jarvis
Crown, March 2025

Drawn from the author’s astonishing and deeply disturbing article for the New York Times Magazine (which was downloaded over 1 million times in the first week alone), this will be a fascinating scientific exploration of the insect world that reveals, through extensive research with amateurs and entomologists in the field, the alarming diminishment of insect life across the globe in the era of climate change. The author plans to travel to different countries and environments, including Europe and Latin America, to explore the causes and urgent consequences of life on Earth without insects.

Brooke Jarvis is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, Wired, The California Sunday Magazine, GQ, Harper’s, and others. She also teaches feature writing at NYU’s American Journalism Online Master’s Program and mentors young science journalists through The Open Notebook and the Northwest Science Writers Association. Jarvis’ stories have been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton-Mifflin); The Best American Travel Writing (Mariner Books); Love and Ruin: Tales of Obsession, Danger and Heartbreak from The Atavist Magazine (Norton); and New Stories We Tell: True Tales by America’s Next Generation of Great Women Journalists (The Sager Group).

ALMOST BROWN de Charlotte Gill

An award-winning writer retraces her dysfunctional, biracial, globe-trotting family’s journey as she reckons with ethnicity and belonging, diversity and race, and the complexities of life within a multicultural household.

ALMOST BROWN: A Memoir
by Charlotte Gill
Crown, June 2023

Charlotte Gill’s father is Indian. Her mother is English. They meet in 1960’s London when the world is not quite ready for interracial love. Their union, a revolutionary act, results in a total meltdown of familial relations, a lot of immigration paperwork, and three children, all in varying shades of tan. Together they set off on a journey from the United Kingdom to Canada and to the United States in elusive pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—a dream that eventually tears them apart.
ALMOST BROWN is an exploration of diasporic intermingling involving parents of two different races and their half-brown children as they experience the paradoxes and conundrums of life as it’s lived between race checkboxes. Eventually, her parents drift apart because they just aren’t compatible. But as she finds herself distancing from her father too—why is she embarrassed to walk down the street with him and not her mom?—she doesn’t know if it’s because of his personality or his race. As a mixed-race child, was this her own unconscious bias favoring one parent over the other in the racial tug-of-war that plagues our society? ALMOST BROWN  looks for answers to questions shared by many mixed-race people: What are you? What does it mean to be a person of color when the concept is a societal invention and really only applies halfway if you are half white? And how does your relationship with your parents change as you change and grow older?
In a funny, turbulent, and ultimately heartwarming story, Gill examines the brilliant messiness of ancestry, “diversity,” and the idea of “race,” a historical concept that still informs our beliefs about ethnicity today.

Charlotte Gill is a bestselling and award-winning writer of fiction and narrative nonfiction. Ladykiller, her first book, was the recipient of the Danuta Gleed Award for short fiction. Eating Dirt, a tree-planting memoir, was a #1 national bestseller in Canada. Her work has appeared in Vogue and Hazlitt. Gill teaches writing in the MFA program in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College and is the Rogers Communications Chair of Literary Journalism at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.