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I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s watching Alfred Hitchcock movies and reading Dashiell Hammett—I’m from San Francisco. Then opera got hold of me. So, I dropped out of my PhD program, left Dante’s Inferno behind, and moved to Paris to live a modern-day La Bohème. Because I’m half-Italian, I decided I had to divide my life between Paris and Italy. Mystery, murder, romance, longing, and betrayal were what fueled my passions and still do. To earn a living, I became a travel, food, and arts reporter. These interests and the locales of my life come together in my own crime and mystery novels.
Tangled canals. Crooked alleyways. Slumping palazzi 500-hundred years old. Venice is Italy’s most atmospheric city, right? Maybe. Genoa runs a close second. Both are misunderstood and misrepresented in literature. Outsiders don’t dip below the theme-park surface. Except for the late, great Michael Dibden. Dead Lagoon features Commissario Aurelio Zen, a flawlessly drawn Italian detective. What makes me so sure? Genetics, experience, passion. My mother’s family is Venetian (via Rome). I’ve spent decades diving deep into the Lagoon City. I even did a year of college there. When I follow Zen into those crumbling palaces to unnail their intrigues, or watch him dart down bleak alleys stinking of fish and corruption, I know the writing rings true. Dibden “gets” Italy, unlike other, better-known novelists using Venice as a soft-boiled backdrop.
Among the emerging generation of crime writers, none is as stylish and intelligent as Michael Dibdin, who, in Dead Lagoon, gives us a deliciously creepy new novel featuring the urbane and skeptical Aurelio Zen, a detective whose unenviable task it is to combat crime in a country where today's superiors may be tomorrow's defendants.Zen returns to his native Venice. He is searching for the ghostly tormentors of a half-demented contessa and a vanished American millionaire whose family is paying Zen under the table to determine his whereabouts-dead or alive. But he keeps stumbling over corpses that are distressingly concrete: from…
Growing up as the child of a damaged, resentful mother certainly took its emotional toll and led me to embark on some pretty destructive early relationships. After a series of painful personal losses I spent time as a single mum, struggling to parent, deal with grief and hold down a job as a TV producer. I tried self-help books, therapy, and nicotine to get by, but it was the support and humour of women who had survived their own ordeals which enabled me to come out the other side. But as a writer and a reader I'm intrigued by troubled women, the traumas that shape them, and the things they do to survive.
My long-held obsession with Victorian sensationalist fiction is probably why I write psychological thrillers.
The Woman in White has always been an inspiration and for me one of its most intriguing characters is Laura Fairlie, whose emotional frailty, like that of so many women, makes her prey to the hideous machinations of abusers who seek to control her. Unlike modern women however, she is not merely at the mercy of people, she is at the mercy of the restrictive laws of the society in which she lives.
And yet, with the help of determined friends, her extraordinary stoicism, and some pretty outlandish coincidences she manages to survive against the odds. Hurrah!
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'The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.'
One of the earliest works of 'detective' fiction with a narrative woven together from multiple characters, Wilkie Collins partly based his infamous novel on a real-life eighteenth century case of abduction and wrongful imprisonment. In 1859, the story caused a sensation with its readers, hooking their attention with the ghostly first scene where the mysterious 'Woman in White'…
Writers often get labeled as either nonfiction or fiction writers. In grad school, it was very difficult to study across genres, which I found very frustrating: To me, the most important thing about a book has always been the voice. A novel? A memoir? Essays? Stories? Don’t pin me down, just give me something with a voice that propels me forward, that is unique and sparkling and unputdownable. When I find books with voices so singular and propulsive, I return to them over and over.
This book begins with only the most famous first line of a novel in English literature. (Move over, Jane Austen.)
Wistful, mysterious, and yearning, the unnamed narrator of Rebecca follows her much older husband to his luxe estate in England after a hasty marriage in France. There, she encounters a housekeeper bent on humiliating her (or worse) and the specter of her new husband’s perfect first wife, who died unexpectedly.
Even knowing what will happen, I am sucked in every time. This hits that great spot between outright horror and suspense, and my next book will be heavily influenced by this one.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
I grew up in the ‘60s and ‘70s watching Alfred Hitchcock movies and reading Dashiell Hammett—I’m from San Francisco. Then opera got hold of me. So, I dropped out of my PhD program, left Dante’s Inferno behind, and moved to Paris to live a modern-day La Bohème. Because I’m half-Italian, I decided I had to divide my life between Paris and Italy. Mystery, murder, romance, longing, and betrayal were what fueled my passions and still do. To earn a living, I became a travel, food, and arts reporter. These interests and the locales of my life come together in my own crime and mystery novels.
Do you want the gritty, pungent beauty of Paris during the heyday of the Romantics—the 1830s? You want perversion, decadence, a crazy, kinky plot revolving around sex, dominance, Sapphic passion, murder, and intrigue, set in the Trocadero neighborhood? Only Honoré de Balzac could dream up something this wild and get away with it. One of the wonders of this short novel is how, through casual descriptions, Paris comes to life. It’s not a picture-postcard version of the city. Au contraire. It’s a seamy, real place I recognize after 35 years living there. While I was reading The Girl with the Golden Eyes, I actually went out and found the locations. The city has changed less than you’d think in 190 years. Above all, the seamy, perverse side remains.
Beginning with a visceral description of the society and politics of Paris, The Girl with the Golden Eyes considers the sex life of the upper class by its raw depiction of the underside of Parisian life. Henri de Marsay is a young, rich man who is nearly devoid of morals and virtue. After he meets Paquita Valdes, a mysterious and beautiful woman, he becomes infested with a deviant lust for her. When his plan to seduce her succeeds, Henri and Paquita maintain an intensely sexual relationship. However, when Henri starts to suspect Paquita is involved with another lover, he becomes…
Like many travelers and writers, I was drawn to the Mediterranean Sea because of its vibrant cultures, sun-drenched landscapes, and delicious foods. As a medieval historian, I am attracted to stories of people and cultures in communication with each other across religious and cultural divides. I found the perfect combination in the history of Sicily, which in the Middle Ages had populations of Greek Christians, Latin Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together in both peace and conflict. I study the histories of travel, trade, and exchange in and around Sicily, which allows me to think about big questions of how medieval people related to each other even when they came from different religions or cultures.
No other book has inspired my own work as much as this one, although it is about far more than the history of Sicily.
McCormick found extensive evidence for travel and communication in the early medieval Mediterranean—a period in which it was previously thought that long-distance trade had all but stopped after the decline of the Roman Empire.
McCormick’s method was to collect every tiny anecdote he could find about something or someone that went from one place to another across the Sea. All these tidbits of data added up to something huge, and showed clearly that travel and exchange across the Mediterranean did not end when the Roman Empire did. To the contrary, the Mediterranean Sea in these centuries was teeming with people of all faiths, carrying coins and packages of trade goods on ships sailing between Christian and Muslim controlled regions.
For fifty years debate has raged about early European commerce during the period between antiquity and the middle ages. Was there trade? If so, in what - and with whom? New evidence and new ways of looking at old evidence are now breaking the stalemate. Analysis of communications - the movements of people, ideas and things - is transforming our vision of Europe and the Mediterranean in the age of Charlemagne and Harun al Rashid. This is the first comprehensive analysis of the economic transition during this period for over sixty years. Using new materials and new methodology, it will…
I’ve been a traveler and a dreamer ever since I was a little girl. I used to write to the tourism bureaus of different countries and tape pictures of faraway places onto the walls of my bedroom. It’s no surprise I ended up living in Europe, my home base for excursions all over the world. My historical fiction always features places that mean a lot to me, whether it’s Germany (where I live now), or Sicily – where my mother’s family came from. Digging into my Sicilian heritage and the culture and life of the island for my third novel was like discovering a new home.
I have very romantic notions of Sicily, and I look to the Inspector Montalbano series of detective novels to show me the grit and corruption that Sicily is actually known for.
This is the first novel in the series and introduces Montalbano as an honest cop in a dishonest world, a Sicilian town where everyone hustles for work and murders are common. Even if everybody is corrupt in their own ways, they’re still very human, and Montalbano’s tolerance of human failings makes him one of the great detectives to read.
The Shape of Water is the first in Andrea Camilleri's wry, brilliantly compelling Sicilian crime series, featuring Inspector Montalbano. This edition with a stunning redesigned cover.
The goats of Vigata once grazed on the trash-strewn site still known as the Pasture. Now local enterprise of a different sort flourishes: drug dealers and prostitutes of every flavour. But their discreet trade is upset when two employees of the Splendour Refuse Collection Company discover the body of engineer Silvio Luparello, one of the local movers and shakers, apparently deceased in flagrante at the Pasture. The coroner's verdict is death from natural causes…
Often, historians choose their field or specialty, but sometimes, the field chooses the historian. Being a historian of southern Italy, the land of my ancestors reflects far more than a merely academic interest. As a personal pursuit, it isn’t just what I am but who I am. I write the kind of books that I wish had existed when I wrote my first peer-reviewed article in 1984. This has come to include everything from general histories to specialised studies to translations of medieval chronicles. Through the website Best of Sicily, online since 1999, my work has reached a readership of millions over the course of two decades.
This is the first general history of Sicily’s Muslims in English and the lengthiest, full of information, with a special emphasis on the era from the Aghlabid conquest in 827 until the demise of the Kalbid emirs around 1070.
Leonard Chiarelli’s endnotes are more interesting than the main texts of most other books on this topic, striking for details such as phylogeography (genetics) and his discovery of an Ibadi community in Sicily.
The author is unique among Anglophone Arabists for being raised speaking Sicilian as well as English, something that facilitates his unique ability to explain which Sicilian words derive from Arabic. This is something that, as a Sicilian, I appreciate.
A History of Muslim Sicily is a study of the period of Muslim Arab rule on the island from A.D. 827 to the Norman conquest in A.D. 1070. It is first the detailed study in English covering the various aspects of this 243-year period. It incorporates new Arabic sources and draws upon archaeological studies that hitherto have not been used. The book covers the political, social, economic, demographic, and cultural impacts that during this period forever changed the islands character. All aspects of society underwent change, making Sicily part of the Arabo-Muslim world for more than two hundred years. The…
Like many travelers and writers, I was drawn to the Mediterranean Sea because of its vibrant cultures, sun-drenched landscapes, and delicious foods. As a medieval historian, I am attracted to stories of people and cultures in communication with each other across religious and cultural divides. I found the perfect combination in the history of Sicily, which in the Middle Ages had populations of Greek Christians, Latin Christians, Muslims, and Jews living together in both peace and conflict. I study the histories of travel, trade, and exchange in and around Sicily, which allows me to think about big questions of how medieval people related to each other even when they came from different religions or cultures.
One of medieval Sicily’s most well-known rulers was the man known as the “Wonder of the World,” the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.
He was born in Sicily, where the intellectual and artistic culture of the royal court was still deeply influenced by Byzantine and Islamic traditions. Frederick was learned in Arabic, wrote a manual on hunting with falcons, and was excommunicated three times by popes who were both his greatest allies and his greatest enemies.
This biography of him by one of the most important living historians of medieval Sicily and the Mediterranean is a riveting story in addition to being a deeply researched and informative biography. Written with both the specialist and the general reader in mind, this is a book that captures both the complexities and the contradictions of Frederick’s life, mirroring those of Sicily itself.
This is a biography of Frederick II (1194-1250), King of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Jerusalem, concentrating on the complete history of his kingdoms and placing his reign in a wide context. David Abulafia presents Frederick as less tolerant, less far-sighted in his cultural interests and less ambitious to break the power of the Roman Church than has previously been thought. Until now too, the success of Frederick's enemies in denigrating him has grossly distorted the understanding of his reign and its effects, but David Abulafia aims to redress the balance, presenting the man as a traditionalist and a…
Often, historians choose their field or specialty, but sometimes, the field chooses the historian. Being a historian of southern Italy, the land of my ancestors reflects far more than a merely academic interest. As a personal pursuit, it isn’t just what I am but who I am. I write the kind of books that I wish had existed when I wrote my first peer-reviewed article in 1984. This has come to include everything from general histories to specialised studies to translations of medieval chronicles. Through the website Best of Sicily, online since 1999, my work has reached a readership of millions over the course of two decades.
The most powerful woman in Europe for at least five years, Margaret of Navarre, was all but ignored until this 512-page biography appeared. Reading a “secret” story drawn from original sources in Italy and Spain was part of the book’s appeal for me.
Born near Pamplona in 1135 to a descendant of El Cid, Margaret wed William I, son of Roger II, first King of Sicily. Following her husband’s death, she was queen regent for a young son, William II, for five eventful years. Ruling two million in a multicultural realm that encompassed Sicily and almost half of the Italian peninsula, she undertook all kinds of decisions, some with Roger’s widow and other women.
Sometimes it takes just one strong woman to tame a pack of zealous men. Meet Margaret of Sicily.
For five years during the twelfth century, Margaret of Navarre, Queen of Sicily, was the most powerful woman in Europe and the Mediterranean. Her life and times make for the compelling story of a wife, sister, mother and leader. This landmark work is the first biography of the great-granddaughter of El Cid and friend of Thomas Becket who could govern a nation and inspire millions.
In Margaret's story sisterhood is just the beginning. The Basque princess who rose to confront unimagined adversity…
I’ve been a traveler and a dreamer ever since I was a little girl. I used to write to the tourism bureaus of different countries and tape pictures of faraway places onto the walls of my bedroom. It’s no surprise I ended up living in Europe, my home base for excursions all over the world. My historical fiction always features places that mean a lot to me, whether it’s Germany (where I live now), or Sicily – where my mother’s family came from. Digging into my Sicilian heritage and the culture and life of the island for my third novel was like discovering a new home.
Sicily is part of my family’s heritage, and back when they emigrated to America, they left a lot of their language and culture behind or didn’t pass it down to the next generation.
Seeking Sicily fills in some of those blanks in my family’s cultural history. It does what I haven’t been able to do, roam around the island meeting many different people and asking about everything from food to religious rituals to life amid the ruins of old palaces and ancient monuments.
It’s a really intimate book that still gives a great overview of Sicilian life.
Sicily has a timeless allure, and much of what one sees there today has changed little over the centuries. With Sicily's literary greats as a guide, Keahey discerns what lies behind the soul of its inhabitants, touching on history, archaeology, food, art, and politics. He looks to contemporary Sicilians who have never shaken off the influences of their forbearers, who believed in the ancient gods & goddesses; and who have always come under the thumb of outsiders. Most importantly, he will explore the Mediterranean's largest and most mysterious island through the eyes of a visitor - making this book a…
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