Love in the Clouds

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Amélie Nothomb

""I lived everything during these three years: heroism, glory, treachery, love, indifference, suffering, humiliation. It was China, I was seven years old."". "So announces the narrator of Loving Sabotage, Amelie Nothomb's novel about a young girl who seems already stripped of illusions. The daughter of diplomats posted to Peking for three years in the mid-seventies, she charges about the grim confines of the gated government housing ghetto of San Li Tun on her "horse" (bicycle). In a tireless battle against boredom, she concocts a fantasy life as rich as her surroundings are bleak. During one of her tours of duty as a pathfinder in a war that has broken out in the ghetto between the children of various nations - a hilarious microcosm of "adult" world politics - she encounters a young Italian girl, Elena: beautiful, aloof, disdainful of silly games. Our heroine is instantly infatuated, and comes to realize the only fight worthy of her energies is shattering Elena's indifference."--BOOK JACKET.

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Linda Markowiak

He'll do anything to get his daughter back Nathan Perry has a perfect motive for marriage. He's going to lose his daughter for the second time unless he can persuade Libby Jamieson, the woman who's planning to adopt motherless little Sara, to marry him. Nate hasn't seen his daughter since she was placed in a witness protection program with her mother, Nate's ex-wife, eight years ago. More than anything, he wants his child back. But his daughter loves Libby and Nate's beginning to understand the little girl's feelings. In fact, his real motive for marrying Libby is beginning to change .

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Tomás Eloy Martínez

From one of Latin America's finest writers, a mesmerizing, blackly comic novel about the amazing real-life afterlife of the legendary Eva Peron. Suddenly struck down by cancer, she was given no hope to live. As thousands of the poor filled the park around her palace, chanting and praying for their "Saint Evita," she died. Some days before the end, she begged her husband that she not be forgotten. Grief-crazed (but politically crazy like a fox), he seized upon this idea quite literally. Sending for Europe's finest embalmer, he had the man waiting at her deathbed, and within minutes of her last breath, this Michelangelo of the mortuary was hard at work making her body physically immortal. Put on display on a pure glass slab suspended in a single beam of light from the ceiling of a darkened chamber, Evita entered everlasting life as the sacred object of national pilgrimage. Peron did less well: hated, rebelled against, and deposed, he had to flee. But his mere mortal - and equally ugly - successors realized to their acute discomfort that Evita's body was much more powerful than they were. Whoever controlled it controlled Argentina. And here begins Evita's fantastical true-life (if post-mortem) odyssey. Hidden away, stolen, replicated (three perfect copies of her body were made and used in a mad shell game by various factions), smuggled abroad, buried, dug up, and hijacked again, she traveled two continents exerting strange, unshakable power over everyone in her path.

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Rhoda Lerman

In the summer of 1918, thirty-three-year-old Eleanor Roosevelt discovers a packet of love letters in her husband's chiffonier at her rented Washington home. Franklin is touring the recent battlefields of Europe and the children are staying at Hyde Park. How Eleanor changes over the course of the summer will become legendary, as she knows what she is but not what she can become.