ALICE & MARTINA: 8 BOOKS, 8 GENRES

      ROMANCE -  “SEE ME”

It’s one of the latest books by Nicholas  Sparks. It has been published  in 2016. The novel, titled See Me, tells about Colin Hancock, who has a violent stormy past, who decides to go back to his previous life. Maria Sanchez is a student and a young model with a traumatic story behind. Their lives will cross and they will try to defend their love.

      FANTASY  - “FALLEN”

Fallen is the first instalment in the saga written by Lauren Kate. In the United States the book was published on 8 December 2009 by Random House. Rizzoli published it in Italy on May 21, 2010.   17-year-old Lucinda falls in love with a gorgeous, intelligent boy, Daniel, at her new school, the grim, foreboding Sword & Cross . . . only to find out that Daniel is a fallen angel, and that they have spent lifetimes finding and losing one another as good & evil forces plot to keep them apart.

MYSTERY - “THE SHADOWS OF THE WIND”

The Shadow of the Wind (Spanish: La sombra del viento) is a 2001 novel by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón and a worldwide bestseller.

The novel, set in Barcelona in the period following the Spanish Civil War, tells the story of a  boy, Daniel Sempere. Just after the war, Daniel's father takes him to the secret Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a huge library of old, forgotten titles lovingly preserved by a select few initiates. According to tradition, everyone initiated to this secret place is allowed to take one book from it and must protect it for life. Daniel selects a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julián Carax. That morning he takes the book home and reads it. Daniel then tries to look for other books by this unknown author but can find none. All he comes across are stories of a strange man—calling himself Laín Coubert, after a character in the book who happens to be the Devil—who has been seeking out Carax's books for decades, buying and burning them all.

HISTORICAL FICTION: “THE BOOK THIEF”

The Book Thief is a novel by Australian author Markus Zusak.

The Book Thief focuses on the life of Liesel Meminger, a ten-year-old girl living in Germany during World War II. Liesel's experiences are narrated by Death, who describes both the beauty and the destruction of life in that era.

      ADVENTURE: “WILD”

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is a 2012 memoir by the American author Cheryl Strayed. Wild is Cheryl Strayed's memoir of her 1,100 mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, beginning in the Mojave Desert and hiking through California and Oregon to the Bridge of the Gods into Washington. The book also contains flashbacks to prior life occurrences that led her to begin her journey. At age 22, Strayed had been devastated by the lung cancer death of her mother at 45. Her stepfather disengaged from Strayed's family, and her brother and sister remained distant. Strayed started using heroin, and eventually she and her husband divorced. Seeking self-discovery and resolution of her enduring grief and personal challenges, at age 26 Strayed set out on her journey, alone and with no prior hiking experience. Wild intertwines the stories of Strayed's life before and during the journey, describing her physical challenges and spiritual realizations while on the trail.

      HORROR: “MISERY”

Misery is a 1987 psychological horror novel by Stephen King.

Paul Sheldon is the author of a best-selling series of Victorian era romance novels surrounding the character of  Misery Chastain. He has just finished the manuscript of his new crime novel, Fast Cars, while staying at the Hotel Boulderado. Since 1974, he has completed the first draft of every one of his novels in the same hotel room in Colorado. With his latest project finished, he has an alcohol-induced impulse to drive to Los Angeles rather than fly back home to New York City. However, a snowstorm hits while he is driving through the mountains. Sheldon drives off a cliff and crashes upside down into a snowbank.

      SCIENCE FICTION: “1984”

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government's invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as "thoughtcrime."

      EPISTOLARY NOVEL :  L’ARTE DI ESSERE FRAGILI

Last but not least,  we want to write about a book we both loved. It’s a book by Alessandro D’Avenia, an Italian literature teacher and a writer. "Is there a way to lasting happiness? Can you learn the difficult art of living day by day happily?" Our  questions about joy and happiness remain mostly unanswered, very difficult to  find the right answers. Yet the solutions can reach us suddenly because of something that happens to us thanks to someone. In these pages Alessandro D'Avenia explains his method for happiness and how the great Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi,  helped him to understand. Leopardi a pessimist? Not in Alessandro D’Avenia’s opinion.

Alice & Martina