Vie des sections
Lycée de Sèvres
Nouveaux livres au CDI du Lycée
Mise à jour : Janvier 2009
New English Books
Engleby By Sebastian FAULKS This is the story of Mike Engleby, a working-class boy who wins a place at an esteemed English university. But with the disappearance of Jennifer, the undergraduate Engleby admires from afar, the story turns into a mystery of gripping power.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close By Jonathan SAFRAN FOER In a vase in a closet, a couple of years after his father died in 9/11, nine-year old Oskar discovers a key... Which of New York’s 162 million locks does it open ? So begins a quest that takes Oskar across New York’s five boroughs and into the jumbled lives of friends, relatives and complete strangers.
The Road By Cormac McCARTHY A father and his young son walk alone through burned America, heading slowly for the coast. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing but a pistol to defend themselves against the men who stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food, and each other.
Angela’s Ashes By Frank McCOURT Recounting scenes from his childhood in New York City and Limerick, Ireland, McCourt paints a brutal yet poignant picture of his early days when there was rarely enough food on the table, and boots and coats were a luxury.
Falling Man By Don DeLILLO The book begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and traces the aftermath of that day in the lives of members of a fractured family.
Mr Vertigo By Paul AUSTER Walt Rawley recounts his life : an orphan born in 1924 with "the gift," he was seized by his master, Mr. Yehudi, a Hungarian Jew who taught him to levitate.
Chance By Joseph CONRAD It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl. After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position "has no resources but in herself." Her only means of action is to be what she is.
Asking for Love By Roxanna ROBINSON These short stories are about what the title suggests, love (and its troubles...)
A Thousand Splendid Suns By Khaled HOSSEINI The story covers three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny through the lives of two women. Mariam is the scorned illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, forced at age 15 into marrying the 40-year-old Rasheed, who grows increasingly brutal as she fails to produce a child. Eighteen later, Rasheed takes another wife, 14-year-old Laila, a smart and spirited girl whose only other options, after her parents are killed by rocket fire, are prostitution or starvation. Against a backdrop of unending war, Mariam and Laila become allies in an asymmetrical battle with Rasheed, whose violent misogyny is endorsed by custom and law.
Burning Bright By Tracy CHEVALIER Following the accidental death of their middle son, the Kellaways, a Dorsetshire chair maker and family, arrive in London’s Lambeth district during the anti-Jacobin scare of 1792. Thomas Kellaway talks his way into set design work for the amiable circus impresario Philip Astley. Astley’s libertine horseman son, John, sets his sights on Kellaway’s daughter, Maisie. Meanwhile, youngest surviving Kellaway boy Jem falls for poor, sexy firebrand Maggie Butterfield.
The Rain Before It Falls By Jonathan COE the story of two cousins’ friendship is keyed to a hatred that is handed down from mother to daughter across generations, as in a Greek tragedy. Evacuated from London to her aunt and uncle’s Shropshire farm, Rosamond bonds with her older cousin, Beatrix, who is emotionally abused by her mother. Beatrix grows up to abuse her daughter, Thea, with repercussions that reach the next generation.
My Dream of you By Nuala O’FAOLAIN The heroine, Kathleen de Burca, is an Irish travel writer living in London. Estranged from her homeland and her family, pushing 50 but still living in the same dingy basement flat that’s been her home for two decades, Kathleen’s is a life gone "even and dry”. It’s history—her own, and Ireland’s—that brings Kathleen back to life. Shattered by a close friend’s death, she leaves her job and London to immerse herself in a 150-year-old divorce case. In 1849, according to court documents, the Anglo-Irish landowner Richard Talbot divorced his wife because she committed adultery with their ragged Irish groom. Or did she ?
Evening in Byzantium By Irwin SHAW It is 1970s Movies Festival in Cannes. Jesse Craig, 48 years old producer, with receding fame, very tangled person life, and drinking problem, comes to the festival looking for answers.
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh By Franz WERFEL The Great War is raging through Europe, and in the ancient, mountainous lands southwest of the Caspian Sea the Turks have begun systematically to exterminate their Christian subjects. Unable to deny his birthright or his people, one man, Gabriel Bagradian-born an Armenian, educated in Paris, married to a Frenchwoman, and an officer doing his duty as a Turkish subject in the Ottoman army-will strive to resist death at the hands of his blood enemy by leading 5,000 Armenian villagers to the top of Musa Dagh, "the mountain of Moses."
Magister Ludi (The Bead Game) Hermann HESSE Set in the 23rd century, it is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, the remote place his society has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).
My Mortal Enemy By Willa CATHER Through the eyes of a young girl, Nellie, we view the life of Myra, a legend in the Southern town where both were born. Myra has romantically abandoned the luxury she was born into to elope with the impoverished Oswald Henshawe. Twenty-five years later, Nellie is dazzled when she meets them living in the elegant poverty of an apartment frequented by singers, actors, poets - in the heart of the artistic community of old New York.
Nobody Knows my Name By James Baldwin These essays focus on the political and social divides in the United States. They were wrote while the author was self exiled in Europe. the experiences he describes are how a black man in American society feels.
Elizabeth Costello By J.M. COETZEE Elizabeth Costello, is a distinguished and aging Australian novelist whose life is revealed through an ingenious series of eight formal addresses. On its surface, it is the story of a woman’s life as mother, sister, lover and writer. It is also a profound and haunting meditation on the nature of storytelling.
Carolina Moon By Jill McCorkle The setting, is a small North Carolina town. There, the charismatic widow Quee Purdy intercedes in the lives of a number of young couples, creating several mysteries, the details of which are disclosed from varying points of view.
Portrait in Sepia By Isabel ALLENDE The heroine Aurora del Valle’s mother is a Chilean-Chinese beauty, while her father is a dissolute scion of the wealthy and powerful del Valle family. At the heart of Aurora’s slow, painful re-creation of her childhood towers one of Allende’s greatest fictional creations, the heroine’s grandmother, Paulina del Valle. She holds both the del Valle family and Allende’s novel together as she presides over Aurora’s adolescence in a haze of pastries, taffeta, and overweening love.
Tristram Shandy By Laurence STERNE Experimental novel by the author, published in nine volumes from 1759 to 1767. Narrated by Shandy, the story begins at the moment of his conception and diverts into endless digressions, interruptions, stories-within-stories, and other narrative devices. The focus shifts from the fortunes of the hero himself to the nature of his family, environment, and heredity, and the dealings within that family offer repeated images of human unrelatedness and disconnection.
Adam Bede By George ELIOT Published in three volumes in 1859, the title character, a carpenter, is in love with a woman who bears a child by another man
Spirit Song By Mary SUMMER RAIN No Eyes, a blind Chippewa visionary living in a remote Colorado area and Many Heart, a dreamwalker, are the teachers in this profound journey through the spirit world for Summer Rain. In the Ancient oral tradition they guide the novice along the true path to understanding of who she is and her place in the continuing life of their people.
The Kingdomby the sea - A journey around Great Britain By Paul Theroux From the white cliffs of Dover to Cornwall and Wales, on to Ulster and Scotland, Paul Theroux sets out on a three-month journey around Britain’s coast.
Snow Country By Yasunari KAWABATA As the author chronicles the affair between a wealthy dilettante and the mountain geisha who gives herself to him without illusions or regrets, one of Japan’s greatest writers creates a work that is dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
Gilgamesh By Herbert MASON One of the oldest and most universal stories known in literature, the epic of Gilgamesh presents the grand, timeless themes of love and death, loss and reparations within the stirring tale of a hero-king and his doomed friend.
Natural History By Maureen HOWARD The author relates the tortured history of the Brays, an Irish-American family living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, at the close of World War II.
Kaleidoscope - The Way of Woman and Other Essays By Helen M. LUKE The autor employs her distinctive blend of Jungian and Christian analysis to explore the quest for individuation as portrayed in ancient and modern literature. Among the works she discusses are the biblical tales of the Exodus, Jacob and Saul, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the allegorical novels of Charles Williams.
Rain of Gold By Victor VILLASEñOR Rain of Gold is the story of three generations of the author’s family’s migration from revolutionary Mexico in the 20th century to California. His style is naive and disturbing, he ranges back and forth between his family’s historical past and a more contemporary setting.
Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart By Kay BOYLE The material for many of the short stories in this book was gathered while the author was in Germany between 1946 and 1953.
Bones of the Master - A Journey to Secret Mongolia By George CRANE The last of the monks from his Chinese monastery, Tsung Tsai felt he had to return one last time to find and honor his master’s bones and rekindle his tradition. Crane recounts their joint adventure, opening with Tsung Tsai’s harrowing decades-earlier escape from newly communist China, walking from Inner Mongolia to Hong Kong through a war-torn, famine-struck, psychotic land, nearly starving along the way.
Victory By Joseph CONRAD Axel Heyst, the skeptic hero, lives oon Samburan, out of everyone’s way. No one invades either his island or his moral self-sufficiency. Then he brings Lena to Samburan and suddenly finds himself caught in the world from which he tries to rescue her.
Tun-Huang By Yasushi INOUE A romantic adventure and an explanation of one of the great mysteries of western China - how the sacred scrolls of the Sung dynasty were saved from the barbarian tribes of the Hsi-hsia.
Notes from Underground and The Grand Inquisitor By Fyodor DOSTOEVSKY On the surface the story of one man’s rant against a corrupt, oppressive society, this philosophical book explores the deeper themes of alienation, torment and hatred.
An interrupted Life - the diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-43 By Etty HILLESUM The author, a young Jewish woman, died at Auschwitz in November, 1943, at the age of twenty-nine. Composed during the last two years of her life, but only recently discovered, her diaries reveal the gradual transformation of an independent woman preoccupied with worldly pleasures into a vibrant, brave one of new spiritual depth.
A Passage to India By E.M. FORSTER Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster’s novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India—Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding—and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. The idea of true friendship between the races was a radical one in Forster’s time, and he makes it abundantly clear that it was not one that either side welcomed.
Anil’s Ghost By Michael ONDAATJE This novel is set during a war, but the enemy is difficult to identify in the bloody sectarian upheaval that ripped Sri Lanka apart in the 1980s and ’90s. The protagonist, Anil Tissera, a native Sri Lankan, left her homeland at 18 and returns to it 15 years later only as part of an international human rights fact-finding mission.
Camera Lucida By Roland BARTHES Although the book is ostensibly about Barthes’ attempt to work out why he is moved by some photographs and not by others, it soon reveals itself to be a meditation on the absence inherent in photography.
Some Prefer Nettles By Junichiro TANIZAKI The dilatory dilemma of Kaname and Misako serves to point up not only the disaffection of a marriage - but of a culture, in which the new ways of the western world, in contemporary Japan, have intruded on the old traditions of the East. For Kaname and Misako have acquired a modern outlook and for some time have equivocated and deliberated over the divorce they should secure since Kaname has found that his passion has cooled, and, with his encouragement, Misako has taken a lover.
The Peppered Moth By Margaret DRABBLE The author chronicles four generations in the life of a family, homing in on the female line and attempting to explain how genes, DNA, and environment can change or challenge an individual. The tale begins with Bessie Bawtry, a gifted young woman from a South Yorkshire mining town who fails to live up to her promise.
The Distance Between Us By Masha HAMILTON The author paints here a poignant portrait of a woman facing a major crossroad in her life which will change her forever. Catherine (Caddie) Blair is an American journalist stationed in Jerusalem, who has been covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for years. On a trip to Lebanon for an important interview, Caddie’s Land Rover is ambushed and her lover, Marcus, is killed.
Dernière modification le 16-02-09 par
