Bøger udgivet af Cuidono Press

Fumiani is dead...again. In 1706, the artist Giovanni Fumiani fell to his death while painting the immense ceiling of Venice's San Pantalon. When he turns up dead again four years later, the parish priest asks Stefano Bigio, an impoverished nobleman, to unravel the circumstances of the artist's deaths and disappearance. So begins a journey into the corrupt underbelly of the dying Republic of Venice. Lies, murder, and the ambition of the powerful block Bigio's way. He has no choice but to seek clues to the mystery in the magnificent art of the city to which he has paid little attention. *Like Raymond Chandler's true detective, Bigio is a man of honor and character who travels down the mean byways of a secretive and corrupt city seeking the truth for the sake of the dead and the living. Blending a historical mystery with a tour of the great works of the city, The Three Deaths of Giovanni Fumiani draws a compelling picture of 18th-century Venice and the power of honor, love, and art to open eyes and change lives.

1066Alaric the Norman of Ewyas might be William the Conqueror's greatest weapon. A mercenary knight born and raised among the English, his knowledge of the people and countryside-and his ferocity in battle-are invaluable. Distrusted by his peers, he stands alone after the murder of his pro-Saxon family. To bind his feuding allies, William forces Alaric to marry the murderer's niece. Genevieve Elysia de Fontenay, known as Elise, is canny, well-connected, and a wealthy Norman countess in her own right. Unaware of the machinations behind her marriage but knowing her future husband signed the terms in anger, she travels amid the hostile English to Tutbury Castle, where they will wed. While Alaric balances respect for the vanquished people against the triumphal savagery of the victor, and Elise navigates between her husband's spiteful mistress and a volatile king, they both make powerful alliances-and equally powerful enemies.

Traveling through the French countryside in their brightly painted wagons, the actors of the Augusto Troupe perform comedies and spectacles in villages and chateaux, and hope for a warm place to spend the winter. The group encounters religious fanatics, desperate maidens, greedy peasants, nefarious nobles, and the scourge of the plague. Their director Bejart tries to cajole his actors into performing his masterpiece correctly, while obsessively scribbling a possibly scandalous new play inspired by a mummy's ghost. Lead actress Isabelle dreams of the Theatre du Palais-Royal where her rare talents will be appreciated. And Argon's beautiful voice has become a rough croak that he can only intermittently rely on, leading him to chase a cure-and maybe even to steal a powerful relic from the grave of the recently-deceased Moliere.

After Marie O'Dea dies in a plane crash in the Everglades, her husband David Lenihan returns to Dublin, back to where they first met two decades before. Revisiting memories of their life together and confronted by his own role in the tragedy, he finds little comfort even in his beloved circle of friends. Next door, a troubled boy named Emmett cradles a hurt bird in his hands, sparking a confrontation between David and Emmett that reveals the deep wounds in both of their lives. As David spirals into depression, he discovers two gifts from Marie. Her first gift brings David and Emmett together in a moment of powerful understanding, and the second gift provides David the solace needed to carry on without her.

Once a boy player in Shakespeare's company, Sander Cooke is now a hired man playing female roles. When Frances Field reveals she is pregnant by Sander's brother, Johnny, a fellow actor and aspiring playwright, Johnny makes it clear that marriage is not in his plans. But if Frances gives birth to a bastard, she'll lose her shop on London Bridge and her position as one of Queen Elizabeth's silkwomen. Sander would like to come to Frances' rescue: only Sander has a secret, kept both onstage and off-she is actually a woman. Even their friend Moll Frith, who goes around blatantly as a man, wouldn't marry a woman, but she does find Sander and Frances a wayward, short-sighted priest to solemnize the union. It is a marriage of convenience, but can these two women make a true union of it? Winding around this unconventional marriage, the London stage of the period comes alive, alongside political anxieties and rebellion, troubles in Ireland, the plague, and the aging Queen's failure to name a successor.

In this lively retelling of the infamous Diamond Necklace Affair, the daughter of a bastard branch of French royalty, Jeanne de La Motte-Valois descends like a whirlwind on 1780s Paris. Jeanne rises by luck and pluck from the depths of childhood beggary to the pinnacle of court and Paris society, and cannot rest until she amasses the riches needed to support a life style befitting a princess. When she crosses paths with Prince Cardinal Louis de Rohan, the handsome, wealthy scion of the mighty house of Rohan, his own obsessive ambitions play perfectly into her plans. Add to this volatile mix the crown jewelers Bohmer and Bassenge, who in their bid for artistic immortality create a diamond necklace whose purchase would bankrupt a nation. From the glittering intricacies of the royal court to the dreaded cells of the Bastille, the La Motte woman concocts a masterful swindle that will rock the French throne and drag Marie Antoinette's name into the gutter.

Mary Godwin is a teenager with a formidable pedigree. Both of her parents are philosophers but it is Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother she never met, who haunts her waking and dreaming worlds. Reading about her mother's life and death inspires Mary to keep a journal. Just as the tumult of her parents' relationship comes alive in her imagination, she meets emerging poet Percy Shelley. Even though he is married and his wife is pregnant, Shelley threatens to kill himself if Mary will not elope with him. It's possible that Shelley is mad, but their intellectual and creative affinities convince her that she is his Child of Light.Passionate and intellectual, Mary struggles with the demands of her volatile husband and their circle of friends, including her stepsister Claire and George Gordon, Lord Byron. But as she writes Frankenstein, she also muses about her encounters with her creature and the philosophical questions of life, death, and creation that undergird her novel. Justifying their unconventional life and enduring personal tragedies, Mary follows in her mother's footsteps, as she contemplates a woman's place in literature and the world.

The last thing Gebirga of Flanders remembers seeing is the argument between her parents that ended in her mother's death. In the years since, she has learned to negotiate her family's castle of Gistel as a blind woman but everyone assumes that one day her home will be the convent founded in her mother's honor. An accidental encounter offers another path, and Gebirga flees her callous family with a pack of pilgrims that includes a count's daughter bound for marriage, two clerics writing a guidebook, and a mysterious messenger with an unknown agenda, all headed along the pilgrimage road to Compostela. The journey takes Gebirga from her home on the edge of the North Sea across the kingdoms of France and into the Iberian Peninsula, where her mission to escort a young noblewoman becomes a dangerous adventure involving power-hungry kings and queens and even the Roman Pope. But can a blind woman navigate the shoals of international politics? To find a place where she can belong, Gebirga must learn there are other ways of seeing the truth than with her eyes. For the rest of twelfth-century Europe, Spain was a far-off and exotic place, home to the holy site of Compostela, shrine of Saint James. The saint's tomb drew a perpetual wave of pilgrims, coming for adventure, or seeking a miracle from the saint. Pilgrimage is the story of one of those pilgrims.

"e;Pages, Isabel, I need pages."e;Isabel Toledo's publisher is getting impatient. An American living in the Galilee, Isabel has been telling other people's stories for twenty years - as a ghostwriter for Holocaust survivors. But her latest project has bogged her down in a way no other has. Barking dogs, a clerk asking for her papers, a shadowy figure glimpsed in the streets of Prague. The stories are slipping out of her control, collapsing boundaries between past and present.Isabel has two grown daughters and a seven-year-old son to keep her grounded. She has an official boyfriend who wants to be more than that, a young lover who understands her demons, and another man on the side in Prague. But the temporary relief she finds in their arms is not enough to keep the ghosts at bay. And the story she most wants to uncover, her own mother's ordeal, defies all efforts to be brought to light. Why won't her mother share her story? Why has her father's story, which was never even on Isabel's radar, inserted itself unwanted into her life? Isabel wants concrete realities. She needs to slam the brakes on using the Holocaust as her measuring stick in the world.

Recently widowed, Sarah Laforge arrives in Zaire to take up her new post at the U.S. Embassy, determined to find meaningful work. The year is 1989 and the expatriate Europeans and Americans Sarah encounters in Kinshasa live in a privileged world where they drink, flirt, and gossip about who is sleeping with whom. But throughout all of this petty activity important business is getting done. Information is being gathered. Big power plays are being made. Jacques Delpech, a Belgian businessman born and raised in Zaire, also moves in these circles. His deep commitment to the country opens up another world for Sarah, while her idealism and openness help to soften his own painful memories. As a plot to overthrow the dictator Mobutu gains momentum, power, corruption, and sexual jealousy threaten to shatter their idyllic love affair.

A traumatized American living on a kibbutz is drawn to a stray dog. An artist meets her lover during a missile attack. A pregnant woman consumed by the legacy of her grandparents generation sits shiva with Kafkas grandson. From New York City to Haifa and Tel Aviv, from Afghanistan to the Galilee, Miryam Sivan presents a dozen stories of women and men experiencing cross-cultural pollination and coping with the very serious business of war and love. History, dogs, obsession, religion, and the lost promise of romance weave their way through tales of mad partners, passionate lovers, wearied fighters, and folk just trying to make it through.