terça-feira, 31 de janeiro de 2017

A Dance With Dragons - A Song Of Ice And Fire #5

Genre: fanasy, romance, fiction.

Dubbed “the American Tolkien” by Time magazine, George R. R. Martin has earned international acclaim for his monumental cycle of epic fantasy. Now the 1 New York Times bestselling author delivers the fifth book in his landmark series as both familiar faces and surprising new forces vie for a foothold in a fragmented empire

Author: George R. R. Martin (American)
King Stannis Baratheon and his forces occupy the Wall as Jon Snow, the newly elected 998th Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, sends Samwell Tarly to the Citadel in Oldtown to be trained as a Maester. Sam is accompanied by the ancient Maester Aemon, the wildling girl Gilly, and the newborn son of the wildling leader Mance Rayder, whom Jon has switched with Gilly's baby to save the wildling "prince" from sacrifice by Stannis' red priestess Melisandre. Janos Slynt refuses to acknowledge Jon's authority, and after three public warnings, Jon personally beheads Slynt for disobedience. Though intended to solidify Jon's new position as Lord Commander, it only sows more discord with Slynt's faction. Stannis executes Mance for refusing to submit to him. Jon brokers a truce with Tormund Giantsbane, the leader of the surviving wildlings, allowing them through the Wall and into Westeros in exchange for wildling assistance in defending the Wall against the Others. This creates further unrest among the brothers of the Night's Watch, who have considered the wildlings their enemies for centuries.


A Feast For Crows - A Song Of Ice And Fire #4

Genre: famtasy, epic.

Author: George R. R. Martin (American)
After centuries of bitter strife, the seven powers dividing the land have beaten one another into an uneasy truce. Few legitimate claims to the Iron Throne still exist, and the war that has turned the world into little more than a wasteland has finally burned itself out. Or so it appears. For it’s not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters of the Seven Kingdoms gather. Now, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed, while surprising faces some familiar, others only just appearing emerge from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges of the terrible times ahead. Nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages, are coming together to stake their fortunes and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests but only a few are the survivors.


A Storm Of Swords - A Song Of Ice And Fire #3

Genre: fantasy.

Author: George R. R. Martin (American)
Of the five contenders for power, one is dead, another in disfavor, and still the wars rage, as alliances are made and broken. Joffrey sits on the Iron Throne, the uneasy ruler of the Seven Kingdoms. His most bitter rival, Lord Stannis, stands defeated and disgraced, victim of the sorceress who holds him in her thrall. Young Robb still rules the North from the fortress of Riverrun. Meanwhile, making her way across a blood-drenched continent is the exiled queen, Daenerys, mistress of the only three dragons left in the world. And as opposing forces maneuver for the final showdown, an army of barbaric wildlings arrives from the outermost limits of civilization, accompanied by a horde of mythical Others a supernatural army of the living dead whose animated corpses are unstoppable. As the future of the land hangs in the balance, no one will rest until the Seven Kingdoms have exploded in a veritable storm of swords.



Sense And Sensibility

Genre: love romance.

Sense and Sensibility is a novel by Jane Austen, published in 1811. It was published anonymously; By A Lady appears on the cover page where the author's name might have been. It tells the story of the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, both of age to marry.
The novel follows the young women to their new home with their widowed mother, a meagre cottage on the property of a distant relative, where they experience love, romance and heartbreak. The novel is set in southwest England, London and Sussex between 1792 and 1797.[1]
The novel sold out its first print run of 750 copies in the middle of 1813, marking a success for its author, who then had a second print run later that year. The novel continued in publication throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

Author: Jane Austen (English)
Marianne Dashwood can’t understand her sister. How could the attractive, witty, and charming Elinor fall for the quiet, self-effacing, and rather dull Edward Ferrars? And, if the two are in love, why don’t they shout it to the world? Meanwhile, Elinor worries that Marianne’s all-out, heart-first approach to life will hurt her, especially when it comes to the dashing, passionate John Willoughby. Ever since Willoughby carried Marianne home after she was injured in a fall, he has become a fixture in the small cottage Elinor and Marianne have recently moved into with their mother and younger sister. The two sisters spar good-naturedly over the merits of full-blown emotionalism versus reticence and self-discipline in matters of the heart. Fond as they are of each other, each is certain that hers is the only true path to love. Meanwhile, both Edward and Willoughby harbor secrets that will force these women to doubt their philosophies, their judgment, and their chances for happiness. With Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel, Jane Austen served notice that a new and important author had arrived—one whose style, wit, and piercing sense of satire supported a compelling story peopled with finely drawn characters and punctuated with remarkable insights into the human condition.




Pride And Prejudice

Genre: satire, romance, fiction.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story charts the emotional development of the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of making hasty judgements and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential. The comedy of the writing lies in the depiction of manners, education, and marriage and money in the British Regency.

In a remote Hertfordshire village, far off the good coach roads of George III's England, a country squire of no great means must marry off his five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are his headstrong second daughter Elizabeth Bennet and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy — two lovers whose pride must be humbled and prejudice dissolved before the novel can come to its splendid conclusion.
Author: Jane Auten (English)
A tour de force of wit and sparkling dialogue, 'Pride and Prejudice' is also a sumptuously detailed picture of contemporary society, which, in its exploration of manner and motives, has a great deal to say about the society of today. Austen's best-loved novel is a memorable story about the power of reason, and above all about the strange dynamics of human relationships and emotions.



The Phantom of the Opera

Genre: gothic literature, romance, horror, fiction.

Under the Paris Opera House lives a disfigured musical genius who uses music to win the love of a beautiful opera singer.

The Phantom of the Opera (French: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra) is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialisation in Le Gaulois from September 23, 1909, to January 8, 1910. It was published in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil's skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber's 1841 production of Der Freischütz.


Author: Gaston Leroux (French)

Arabian Nights

Genre: romance, fantasy, drama, action, adventure.

One Thousand and One Nights (Arabic: كِتَاب أَلْف لَيْلَة وَلَيْلَة‎‎ kitāb ʾalf layla wa-layla) is a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English language edition (1706), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights' Entertainment.

The work was collected over many centuries by various authors, translators, and scholars across West, Central, and South Asia and North Africa. The tales themselves trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Indian, Jewish[2] and Egyptian folklore and literature. In particular, many tales were originally folk stories from the Caliphate era, while others, especially the frame story, are most probably drawn from the Pahlavi Persian work Hazār Afsān (Persian: هزار افسان‎‎, lit. A Thousand Tales) which in turn relied partly on Indian elements.


The Jungle Book

Genre: fable, tale, children's literature.

The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories are fables, using animals in an anthropomorphic manner to give moral lessons. A principal character is the boy or "man-cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. Other characters include Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear. The book has been adapted many times for film and other media.
Author: Rudyard Kipling (English)



Moby Dick

Genre: fiction, romance adventure, epic, nautical fiction.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is a novel by American writer Herman Melville, published in 1851 during the period of the American Renaissance. Sailor Ishmael tells the story of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaler the Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that on the previous whaling voyage bit off Ahab's leg at the knee. The novel was a commercial failure and out of print at the time of the author's death in 1891, but during the 20th century, its reputation as a Great American Novel was established. William Faulkner confessed he wished he had written it himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world", and "the greatest book of the sea ever written".

Author: Herman Melville (American)



Animal Farm

Genre: political satire, allegory.

Orwell's classic political fable is often cited as simply a condemnation of Stalinism, which it certainly was, but its political relevance is both wider and more enduring, as novelist Ann Patchett notes in her introductory essay to this new edition. Among the lessons contained in its pages is the need of politicians for 'The Enemy' (think Axis of Evil) and the dangers of individuality to oppressive political order.


Author: George Orwell (english)

Oliver Twist

Genre: social novel, romance, fiction.

The story is of the orphan Oliver Twist, who starts his life in a workhouse and is then sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. He escapes from there and travels to London, where he meets the Artful Dodger, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal, Fagin.
Oliver Twist is notable for its unromantic portrayal by Dickens of criminals and their sordid lives, as well as for exposing the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.

Author: Charles Dickens (english)




The Little Prince


Genre: tale, speculative fiction, children's literature.

The Little Prince , first published in 1943, is a novella, the most famous work of French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944).
The novella is the fourth most-translated book in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France. Translated into more than 250 languages and dialects (as well as Braille), selling nearly two million copies annually with sales totaling over 140 million copies worldwide, it has become one of the best-selling books ever published.

The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman's discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet - the Little Prince of the title - and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition.
First published in 1943, the year before the author's death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery's delightful illustrations.


Author: Antoine de Saint-Exupery (French)

sexta-feira, 27 de janeiro de 2017

The Call of the Wild

 Genre: Romance, Adventure.

An abridged version of the tale of an unusual dog, part St. Bernard, part Scotch shepherd, that is forcibly taken to the Klondike gold fields where he eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack.

The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild.


Author: Jack London (American)

The da Vinci Code

Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction.

As millions of readers around the globe have already discovered, The Da Vinci Code is a reading experience unlike any other. Simultaneously lightning-paced, intelligent, and intricately layered with remarkable research and detail, Dan Brown's novel is a thrilling masterpiece—from its opening pages to its stunning conclusion.


It follows symbologist Robert Langdon and cryptologist Sophie Neveu Abraham after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris, when they become involved in a battle between the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei over the possibility of Jesus Christ having been a companion to Mary Magdalene. The title of the novel refers, among other things, to the finding of the first murder victim in the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, naked and posed similar to Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a pentacle drawn on his chest in his own blood.

The novel explores an alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descended from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, ideas derived from Clive Prince's The Templar Revelation (1997) and books by Margaret Starbird. The book also refers to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) though Dan Brown has stated that it was not used as research material.

Author: Dan Brown (American)

To Sir Phillip, With Love


 Genre: Romance, Historical Romance.

Sir Phillip knew that Eloise Bridgerton was a spinster, and so he'd proposed, figuring that she'd be homely and unassuming, and more than a little desperate for an offer of marriage. Except . . . she wasn't. The beautiful woman on his doorstep was anything but quiet, and when she stopped talking long enough to close her mouth, all he wanted to do was kiss her . . . and more.

Did he think she was mad? Eloise Bridgerton couldn't marry a man she had never met! But then she started thinking . . . and wondering . . . and before she knew it, she was in a hired carriage in the middle of the night, on her way to meet the man she hoped might be her perfect match. Except . . . he wasn't. Her perfect husband wouldn't be so moody and ill-mannered, and while Phillip was certainly handsome, he was a large brute of a man, rough and rugged, and totally unlike the London gentlemen vying for her hand. But when he smiled . . . and when he kissed her . . . the rest of the world simply fell away, and she couldn't help but wonder . . . could this imperfect man be perfect for her?



Author: Julia Quinn (American)