Books you have to read before you die

Best books in history

What better title is just… light, light, and sibilantly pretentious than this one? Before you die, yes, just a few hours before listening to it, you will take your list of essential books and cross out the best-seller by Belén Esteban that closes the reading circle of your life... (it was a joke, a macabre and bloody joke) No...

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Blue Sky, by Daria Bignardi

Bignardi Blue Sky

It's been a while since heartbreak left romanticism to make an appointment at the psychiatrist, like every neighbor's son. Narrating that raw heartbreak takes on another dimension in the hands of Daria Bignardi. Because it is about undressing miseries that they leave in cold solitude before a Universe that …

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Full Moon, by Aki Shimazaki

Shimazaki full moon

Writing about love has in Aki Shimazaki a unique consideration, existential flashes that range from the emptiness of heartbreak to the paradoxical inexhaustible spring of reciprocated infatuation. Waters that flow parallel and that awaken the same sensation from nowhere as soon as the last drink is drained. Among …

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Shuggie Bain Story by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain's Story

"A hero is anyone who does what he can," Romain Roilland ended up pointing out with all the wisdom in the world. But there is little that we think a child can do to regain his childhood. Because losing a descendant is unnatural while losing a parent ...

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The power of the dog, of Thomas Savage

novel The Power of the Dog Thomas Savage

An history about Thomas Savage born in 1967 that now comes to us with that strange virulence of the most unexpected earthquakes. In the past it could seem like a history of the deep United States, today it is rediscovered as a powerful intimate narrative, at least from the outset, that delves into that notion of what ...

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Mengele Zoo by Gert Nygardshaug

Novel Mengele Zoo

It is always a good time to learn some idiomatic curiosity such as "Mengele Zoo", a phrase made in Brazilian Portuguese that points to the chaos of anything, with the sinister connotation of the insane doctor who ended his days in retirement precisely in Brazil. Between black humor and crude assumption of ...

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Traces of Silence, by John Boyne

The footprints of silence

The fate of every author should be to write his best work shortly before leaving the stage, either by withdrawal from the world of literature or by death. Crude but true. Because later we find cases like that of John Boyne, unable to soar over his child ...

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Frankstein's mother, from Almudena Grandes

Frankstein's mother

I always find the etymology of the word hysteria curious. Because it comes from the womb in Greek. And so the easy and abhorrent association of the feminine with the insane by nature is easily derived. Aberrant. Almudena Grandes in this novel is fixed in a particular female psychiatric that existed in ...

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After Kim, by Ángeles González Sinde

After Kim

Death is the greatest mystery, the greatest enigma that can hang over us if we see life as a novel. The before and after of the temporal thread is cut off for those who are left with doubts, analyzing loneliness as they would never have considered considering it. Of that …

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A Meal in Winter, by Hubert Mingarelli

book-a-winter-meal

A synthetic book in all its aspects, from its few pages to its short sentences. But nothing is accidental in Hubert Mingarelli, everything has its explanation ... The conciseness can become disturbing when he masterfully delves into a dark narrative like this. No need to go into more details ...

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