From the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home, a dazzling new novel already being hailed as an “instantly addictive...tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.” (Booklist)After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn’t quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl. Art’s neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund. Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Fosters’ handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: his father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers. As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society.

In this mesmerizing saga of one ordinary American family—proud, flawed, hopeful—navigating the tumultuous final decades of the American century, Jean Thompson delivers a sweeping, powerful novel that simultaneously captures the turbulent history of the country at large. Spanning from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to contemporary Chicago and far beyond, The Year We Left Home is a vivid, moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of our national character.

1973. Mentre la guerra in Vietnam sembra volgere al termine, la storia di una famiglia ha inizio. In una piccola cittadina dell'Iowa, i coniugi Erickson hanno allevato i loro figli secondo i rigorosi valori dell'America del dopoguerra: l'amore per la terra e per il prossimo sono i princìpi fondamentali con i quali i ragazzi sono cresciuti. Anita, la bellissima figlia maggiore, innamorata di un ragazzo del posto, sta per coronare il suo sogno più grande: sposarsi e avere dei figli. Ryan, il secondogenito, ribelle e tormentato, dopo aver conosciuto una giovane poetessa hippie è deciso a fuggire dalla città in cui è cresciuto e che disprezza. Torrie, la più giovane, sognatrice e anticonformista, desidera un futuro tra le sfavillanti luci di una metropoli. A vent'anni dalla fine della guerra, quando l'America si è lasciata alle spalle la sua più grande disfatta, la famiglia Erickson deve invece fare i conti con più di un fallimento. Il matrimonio di Anita è crollato sotto il peso delle aspettative, la libertà che Ryan inseguiva si è rivelata ingannevole e i sogni di Torrie si sono scontrati con la tragicità dell'esistenza, segnando per sempre le sorti della famiglia. Un ritratto lucido e disincantato dell'America di ieri e di oggi attraverso le vicissitudini di una famiglia la cui storia può diventare universale.

The National Book Award finalist author of Who Do You Love and Throw Like a Girl chronicles the happiness pursuits of the Eriksons from their 1970s coming-of-age to the near-present day, in a story told from revolving viewpoints. Simultaneous. Book available.

€ 27,40

From National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson comes a mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family—proud, flawed, hopeful— whose story simultaneously captures the turbulent history of the country at large.

Over the course of a thirty-year career, Jean Thompson has been celebrated by critics as “a writer of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity” (O, The Oprah Magazine), “an American Alice Munro” (The Wall Street Journal), and “one of our most lucid and insightful writers” (San Francisco Chronicle). Her peers have been no less vocal, from Jennifer Egan (“bracing . . . boldly unconventional”) to David Sedaris (“if there are 'Jean Thompson characters,' they're us, and never have we been as articulate and worthy of compassion”).

Now, in The Year We Left Home, Thompson brings together all of her talents to deliver the career-defining novel her admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century. It begins in 1973 when the Erickson family of Grenada, Iowa, gathers for the wedding of their eldest daughter, Anita. Even as they celebrate, the fault lines in the family emerge. The bride wants nothing more than to raise a family in her hometown, while her brother Ryan watches restlessly from the sidelines, planning his escape. He is joined by their cousin Chip, an unpredictable, war-damaged loner who will show Ryan both the appeal and the perils of freedom. Torrie, the Ericksons' youngest daughter, is another rebel intent on escape, but the choices she makes will bring about a tragedy that leaves the entire family changed forever.

Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago to the coast of contemporary Italy—and moving through the Vietnam War's aftermath, the farm crisis, the numerous economic boomsand busts—The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change. Ambitious, richly told, and fiercely American, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character.

The National Book Award finalist author of Who Do You Love and Throw Like a Girl chronicles the happiness pursuits of the Eriksons from their 1970s coming-of-age to the near-present day, in a story told from revolving viewpoints. Simultaneous. Book available.

€ 29,80

When Jean Thompson—“America's Alice Munro” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)—is telling stories, “You cannot put the book down” (The Seattle Times), and her superlative new collection, Do Not Deny Me, is one to be savored, word by word.

 • Award-winning storyteller gaining popularity: Jean Thompson's short fiction has been honored by the National endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation; Who Do You Love: Stories was a National Book Award finalist for fiction and was promoted by David Sedaris during his own lecture tour; and Throw Like a Girl: Stories was a New York Times Notable Book and a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. The collection is also in its sixth printing, as Thompson's longstanding critical acclaim crosses over into a popular following. Do Not Deny Me is perfectly positioned to gain an even wider audience.

• Do Not Deny Me: Here is a title that demands—and commands—attention in and of itself. Yet Thompson's latest collection is no literary dare, delivering as it does twelve dazzling new stories that together offer, with wit, humor, and razor-sharp perception, a fictional primer on how Americans live day to day. In Thompson's writing, The New York Times Book Review has noted, “some of the biggest satisfactions happen line by line, thanks to Thompson's effortless ability to tip her prose into the universal.” Thompson succeeds as “one of our most astute diagnosticians of contemporary experience” (The Boston Globe).

A master of short fiction whose 'best pieces are as good as it gets in contemporary cction' (Newsday) returns, as Jean Thompson follows her National Book Award finalist collection Who Do You Love with Throw Like a Girl.

Here are twelve new stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, arcing from youth to experience. Each one of Thompson's indelible characters -- lovers, wives, friends, and mothers -- speaks her piece -- wry, angry, hopeful -- about the world and women's places in it.

The notion of addressing bad health and promoting good health among people with learning disabilities is relatively new. Concepts of 'normalization' of services, integration of people into local communities and providing an 'inclusive' (rather than exclusive) ethos for care have led to the understanding that people with learning disabilities have the right to be treated with the same respect as everyone else. Recognition of their spiritual, legal, political, and sexual rights has therefore been near the top of the agenda for some time now. The last piece in the jigsaw is recognition of their right to live long and healthy lives - the subject of this book.