Jean-Patrick Manchette

"Set in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s, in the days leading up to the Revolution--Manchette's unfinished masterpiece with a fearless female protagonist. Four of the ten titles in Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated 1970s cycle of hard-boiled novels, which the author originally dubbed neo-polars, or "neo-crime novels," have now appeared in English translation. Manchette is beginning to have a significant following among English-language readers, as witness chatter in cyberspace, favorable reviews, increasing sales, and the fact that the latest entrant, The Mad and the Bad (New York Review Books), won the 2014 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for Donald Nicholson-Smith. Ivory Pearl, aka Princesse du sang, published posthumously -and unfinished- in 1996, is considered by many French critics to be Manchette's masterpiece. In the early 1980s Manchette abandoned his attempt to "press the roman noir into the service of the social revolution" and turned his pen to other things. By the end of that decade, however, he resolved to start anew, though now working on a broader, "geopolitical" canvas. Inspiration came now less from Hammett's Red Harvest than from John Le Carre and, especially, from the works of Ross Thomas that Manchette had been translating. Sadly, Manchette's early death from cancer in 1995 put an end to this grand project. What remains, however, is Ivory Pearl, set mainly in Cuba's Sierra Maestra in the 1950s. The book will not disappoint those who admire Manchette's mastery of suspense and penchant for dauntless feminine protagonists"--

"Michel Hartog, a sometime architect, is a powerful businessman and famous philanthropist whose immense fortune has just grown that much greater following the death of his brother in an accident. Peter is his orphaned nephew--a spoiled brat. Julie is in an insane asylum. Thompson is a hired gunman with an ulcerated gut. Michel, known for his kindly interest in the disadvantaged, hires Julie to look after Peter. And he hires Thompson to kill them. Julie and Peter escape. Thompson, gut groaning, pursues. Hunter and hunted make their way across France to the remote mountain estate to which Michel has retreated. Bullets fly. Bodies accumulate. The craziness is just getting started. Like Jean-Patrick Manchette's celebrated Fatale, The Mad and the Bad is a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, pitch-perfect work of creative destruction"--

Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game — so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. After all, that's why he took up this profession! But "the company" won't let him go: they have other plans. Once again, the gunman must assume the prone firing position. A tour de force, this violent tale shatters as many illusions about life and politics as it does bodies. Jean-Patrick Manchette subjects his characters and the reader alike to a fierce exercise in style. This tightly plotted, corrosive parody of "the success story" is widely considered to be Manchette's masterpiece, and was named a New York Times "Notable Book" in 2002. The Prone Gunman is a classic of modern noir.

Nada es la primera novela de la escritora barcelonesa Carmen Laforet y una de las obras literarias más importantes de la España del siglo XX. Se trata de una obra existencialista que representa el estancamiento y la pobreza que se vivieron en la posguerra española, durante los primeros años del franquismo. Dotada de un estilo literario que supuso una renovación en la prosa de la época, Nada refleja también la lenta desaparición de la pequeña burguesía tras la Guerra Civil. La protagonista de la novela es una joven huérfana de padres, llamada Andrea, que recién terminada la Guerra Civil Española se traslada a la ciudad de Barcelona para estudiar y empezar una nueva vida. Cuando Andrea llega a casa de su abuela, de donde solo tiene recuerdos de su infancia, sus ilusiones se ven rotas. (Wikipedia)

Modern day reporter Nicolas Lash learns of a secret involving an ageless woman who has been on the run since the 1930s, while reporter Hank Raines meets the same woman in 1950s San Francisco.

"Martin Terrier, ice-cold mercenary-turned-contract-killer, has his future all mapped out: He has just executed what he intends to be his final job and is ready to move on to the next phase of his life, which involves discreet retirement accompanied by a long-lost girlfriend. But Terrier's employers are emphatically not pleased with his decision, old enemies begin to re-emerge, and soon Terrier is forced to once agian ply his brutal trade."--Cover, p. 4.