Fatherland, Robert Harris

The body of a man is found in the Havel river close to Berlin, drowned in his bathsuit. Xavier March, Sturmbannführer in the Kripo, the German Kriminapolizei, is in charge of the case. It appears that that man was Josef Buhler, one of the founder of the Nazi party back in 1933. Herr Globocnik, Obergruppenführer in the Gestapo, is quite eager to close the case, especially with the 75th birthday of Adolf Hitler a few days later. But as other high rank NSDAP officers are found mysteriously suicided, March keeps digging. We are in April 1964, and the Reich dominates Europe from the actual Germany to the Caspian Sea.

Ubik, Philip K. Dick

We are in the year 1992, in the North American Confederation. People travel to the Moon and to the other colonies with space ships. And yet, doors ask for coins to be opened, and fridges do the same, the homeostatic mechanical slaves are here to make a penny. Joe Chip works for Glen Runciter, of Runciter Associates. He tests persons with peculiar talents, inertials as they are called. They block the psychic power of telepaths, precogs and other psis, who mostly work for Hollis, an anti-talent for each talent. As this is how the universe works, maintaining its balance in everything.

Doors Open, Ian Rankin

Freeing masterpieces of art from the banks and corporate vaults, that was the plan from the beginning. A plan where the boredom and art taste of an Edinburgh millionaire are the motivations under the surface, but Mike Mackenzie never lies to himself about it. Then the carefully thought plan takes a life of its own, helped with a few friends of him and the chance meeting with Chib Calloway, the mafia baron of the city who happens to be an old-time school acquaintance, already a bully then.

Out of the woods, Chris Offutt

Chris Offut’s characters often had to leave their Kentucky hills and woods, because nothing changes much there and everything is always the same, while others stayed there for the very same reasons, a deep sense of belonging rooted in those woods. His dialogs from people of few words are dense with all that is not said, pruning out all the obvious and concentrating on deeper meaning and cultural traits coming from the first settlers like the folk hero Daniel Boone to the white Indians nearly gone native.

The Coral Thief, Rebecca Stott

When he arrived in Paris, on a hot July night of 1815, Daniel Connor was full of expectations. He was to work with Professor Cuvier at the Jardin des Plantes, with an offering of rare coral specimens, a mammoth bone, an introduction letter, and the preface for the English translation of Cuvier’s book by Jameson, his professor in Edinburgh. But he fell asleep on the mail coach alongside a mysterious beautiful woman who stole it all, while leaving his money untouched.

Light on life, B.K.S. Iyengar

Yoga practice is not only about physical well-being and stress release, it reunites body and mind, our different selves to the deity within us and the wholeness around us, to become one with everything. In the yoga tradition, spirit is not separate from body, they are one.

The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

Martians were people like us, so to speak. They had cities and villas, feelings and philosophy, a way of living true to the world and themselves. Telepathy eased it up, as well as a tens of thousands year-old civilization. Then men arrived from Earth, one rocket and one crew at a time. They arrived with their American way of life, their newly found atom power already brewing new wars on Earth. And the Martians disappeared, leaving behind themselves the epitome of their civilization for us to discover, for the few ones to be able to. And Mars worked it through, changing earthlings from within, making them the new Martians.

You should test that, Chris Goward

Each website, each landing page, is built with an objective in mind, and often multiple objectives competing against each others. When the SEO has played its role and the visitors have landed on your page, how many of them meet these objectives, how many of them fill your form, order your product, share your content, convert?

The scheme for full employment, Magnus Mills

In the Scheme, UniVans deliver goods from depot to depot, following the daily schedule and a set of rules, with each worker performing his duties along the Ring Road, drivers and assistants, gatekeepers and superintendents, fuel attendants and forklift men alike. But even though the Scheme has been providing an honest day's wage for an honest day's labor for the last thirty years, it can still be perverted when some of its members use it for their personal purpose, like George and his cakes delivery scheme within the Scheme, or those who liked to have an early swerve from time to time and have now decided this exception is a granted right. But the real danger may come from an ideologic turn surreptitiously seeping through its mere fabric.

Polar shift, Clive Cussler & Paul Kemprecos

During WWII a scientist evades both the Russians and the Nazi army with a secret knowledge about electromagnetism warfare. Nowadays, giant waves of more than eithy feet coming out of nowhere sink huge ships in a matter of minutes. Enters Kurt Austin in action, director of the Special Assignment Team of the NUMA, the National Underwater and Marine Agency. He will discover the mysteries of the sea, and the strange implications of neo-anarchists working against the domination of corporate elites.

Wrong about Japan, Peter Carey

In Wrong about Japan, Peter Carey brings us along with his twelve-year-old son Charley in a travel to Japan through the lens of manga and anime. While interviewing the most reknown artists of the genre, from Mr. Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam) to Mr. Miyazaki (Grave of the Fireflies, Totoro) and Mr. Kitakubo (Blood: the last vampire), he highlights some glimpses of the Japanese culture and history that appear in sometimes tiny details in the artworks, such as why an anime warrior uses clogs with only one heel or tooth, or the meaning of the single rope around Totoro's camphor tree.

The death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave

Bunny Munro is a salesman, going from door to door to sell beauty products, creams, balms and lotions. But Bunny Munro has an obsession: sex. Each encounter with a woman, whether she is a middle-aged client, a young fast-food attendant, or even a police officer wearing the full outfit of her profession, sexual drives his wild imagination and makes him believe that everything is possible (which is often the case though).

Pure, Andrew Miller

The Parisian cemetery of les Innocents is so full of corpses in this year of 1785 that it crumbles down in the neighborhood caves. Its common pits and charnels have been filled up through the centuries and its pestilence is contaminating the city, its air and its very food.

This is when Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young engineer from Normandy, is hired by the minister to dig them up and send their bones to the quarry where we can still see some of them in the Catacombes.

Voyage to the end of the room, Tibor Fischer

Oceane works at home, through computer networks and phone calls, her contact with the outside world being limited to her neighbours, and the letters her neigbours from years before still receive, mostly injunctions to pay their debts by distant collecting companies. But it was not always like that. In her early twenties, she spent some time working in Barcelona, in a strip-club where she performed as a dancer. There, she met quite crazy people, learnt some dancing tricks, and enjoyed life, mostly by the swimming-pool at the top of the building. But everything has an end, and this period ended up with the death of Walter, who inexplicably sent her a letter ten years after his death.

The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

The day she made her wish to never see her mother again, when she wished her to disappear right there, right then, The Ice Queen won her inner secret name. For when her mother died in a car accident, she stopped feelings to enter her realm. The cold companions of silence and solitude have been walking on her side since the age of eight. A good reason to choose a librarian career, plus she likes fairy tales, rather Grimm's than Andersen's, as she prefers darker fates to nice bed stories.

Heliopolis, James Scudamore

Brought up from the shantytown of Heliopolis during the first year of his life, Ludo has been adopted by Zé Generoso, super-wealthy supermarket-chain mogul, and his family. He then lives in the family's fazenda with his mother who serves as a cook, and sees them on weekends when they arrive by helicopter from the city.

The end of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas

The end of Mr. Y is a supposedly cursed book written by Thomas E. Lumas, an obscure nineteenth century British writer. Ariel Manto, who meagerly lives on a monthly column in a magazine and is working on her PhD about thought experiments, unexpectedly finds a copy of it in a second-hand bookshop.

The eponymous book within the book tells the story of Mr. Y who can enter the head of someone else by drinking a mysterious mixture of which he reveals the recipe, passing through a strange space he calls the Troposphere.