New Releases by Patrick Dewitt

Bob Comet, un bibliotecar pensionar, duce o viață liniștită și retrasă într-o casă de culoarea mentei din Portland, înconjurat de cărți și plăceri mărunte. Totul se schimbă când, într-o dimineață, întâlnește o femeie în vârstă cu mințile rătăcite și o duce la centrul pentru seniori unde aceasta locuiește. Sperând să umple golul pe care îl resimte de când s-a pensionat, Bob începe să facă muncă de voluntariat la centru, unde se va împrieteni cu personaje excentrice și pitorești. Sub exteriorul său rezervat, Bob Comet ascunde amintiri puternice: povestea unui copil care fuge de acasă în ultimele zile ale celui de-Al Doilea Război Mondial, iubirea vieții sale pierdută în favoarea celui mai bun prieten, sensul și bucuria descoperite printre rafturile bibliotecii, într-o viață trăită discret, de pe margine. Experiențele lui Bob sunt înțesate de melancolie, dar totodată luminate de zâmbetul vieții sale petrecute în preajma cărților. Patrick deWitt spune cu umor și delicatețe povestea unui om aparent banal, dar plin de surprize – o celebrare emoționantă a celor care trăiesc tăcut, însă cu inima deschisă. „Portretul ficțional captivant al unui bibliotecar pensionar care face voluntariat la un centru pentru seniori ne dezvăluie viața personajului principal – trădările, pierderile, triumfurile – cu umor și tandrețe.” Vanity Fair „Marele dar al lui deWitt este capacitatea sa de a-l descrie pe Omul Obișnuit in extremis – eroismul tăcut care se ascunde chiar sub ochii noștri.” Telegraph (UK) „În Omul care iubea cărțile, deWitt creează un personaj încântător în persoana lui Bob Comet, care, la șaptezeci și doi de ani și după o viață fără așteptări prea mari, găsește răspunsuri la întrebările existențiale și prieteni adevărați. O lectură irezistibilă!” Booklist „Un roman discret, melancolic, perfect pentru serile lungi de vară.” Town & Country „Premisa ficțiunii lui deWitt este simplă: e nevoie de vreme îndelungată ca să treci peste unele episoade din viață. Exprimându-se adesea în aforisme tăioase, personajele lui retrăiesc în minte câte un incident definitoriu, a cărui poveste trebuie spusă și respusă până se întinde ca o pată, pătrunzând în toate aspectele propriilor vieți. [...] Într-o singură scenă, deWitt reușește să redea întregul parcurs al unei vieți solitare.” NICOLE FLATTERY, London Review of Books „Experiența lecturii a fost de-a dreptul fermecătoare, de la un capăt la altul. [...] Dialogul este proaspăt, iar personajele prind viață numaidecât. Cărțile lui deWitt au pur și simplu o energie care le face încântătoare.”Chicago Tribune „Povestea dulce-amară a unui bibliotecar pensionar. [...] Cartea ne prinde în mrejele sale treptat, pentru ca, în cele din urmă, să nu ne mai dea drumul.”Publishers Weekly ISBN ebook:9786303610740

THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER Winner, 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself. Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed. Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life. With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert’s condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.

Una madre, un hijo y un gato habitado por el espíritu del difunto marido. Una comedia desopilante y melancólica. Frances Price y su hijo Malcolm –ya adulto, pero que sigue viviendo con ella– llevan una vida sofisticada y regalada en el más glamouroso Manhattan, gracias a la fabulosa herencia del difunto marido de ella: un marido sobre cuya muerte planean ciertas sospechas que la señalan. Esos rumores la han dotado de un aura de viuda negra, pero no le han impedido seguir disfrutando de infinitos caprichos a golpe de tarjeta de crédito. Hasta que tanto exceso acaba agotando la cuenta bancaria y de pronto madre e hijo se ven en la ruina y con la necesidad de comenzar de nuevo. Emprenden una huida hacia adelante con destino a París, donde ambos fueron felices en algún momento de su pasado. Frances apenas deja nada atrás, y Malcolm tan solo a una novia eterna con la que nunca ha acabado de llegar a ningún lado. Los acompaña en el viaje –por mar, en un transatlántico– Pequeño Frank, el gato de la familia, al que deberán introducir clandestinamente en Francia. Hay un motivo de peso para llevarlo con ellos: Frances está convencida de que en el cuerpo de ese felino habita el espíritu de su difunto marido. Y cuando, ya en París, el gato se da a la fuga, madre e hijo iniciarán una búsqueda que reunirá a un excéntrico plantel de personajes: una pitonisa con la que Malcolm ha mantenido una relación carnal en el transatlántico, una expatriada americana deseosa de aventuras, un tímido detective privado... Manejando con endiablada precisión su particularísimo y delicioso humor, Patrick deWitt nos regala una historia extravagante protagonizada por personajes estrafalarios, incapaces de desenvolverse en el mundo real, incapaces de madurar, refugiados en ensueños y pequeños placeres para tratar de escabullirse de su inmensa soledad.

Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges, directed by Azazael Jacobs A Recommended Read from: Vanity Fair * Entertainment Weekly * Vulture * The Millions * Publishers Weekly * Esquire From bestselling author Patrick deWitt, a brilliant and darkly comic novel about a wealthy widow and her adult son who flee New York for Paris in the wake of scandal and financial disintegration. Frances Price – tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature – is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son Malcolm is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there''s the Price''s aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamously immoral litigator and world-class cad whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts. Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Light serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self destruction and economical ruin – to riotous effect. A number of singular characters serve to round out the cast: a bashful private investigator, an aimless psychic proposing a seance, and a doctor who makes house calls with his wine merchant in tow, to name a few. Brimming with pathos, French Exit is a one-of-a-kind ''tragedy of manners,'' a send-up of high society, as well as a moving mother/son caper which only Patrick deWitt could conceive and execute.

Una hilarante y emocionante novela de iniciación sobre un joven mayordomo que descubre los misterios de la vida y las heridas del amor. Lucy Minor, un joven que está dejando atrás la adolescencia y adentrándose en el mundo adulto, se marcha del pueblo entre montañas del que no ha salido jamás. Lo hace después de sufrir un desengaño amoroso y constatar que en ese lugar en el que abundan los rudos gigantones será siempre un marginado. Lleva en el bolsillo una carta con una oferta de trabajo: un puesto de ayudante de mayordomo en el castillo Von Aux. El ingenuo Lucy se topará con personajes variopintos: un mayordomo dado a filosofar y a la melancolía; una cocinera inepta que no acepta críticas; un aristócrata que cada día envía una desesperada carta de amor sin obtener nunca respuesta; unos peculiares guerrilleros que combaten en las montañas sin saber muy bien por qué; dos ladrones profesionales que ejercen su oficio en los trenes, y Klara, la hija de uno de ellos... Rodeado por esta galería de excéntricos, Lucy indagará en la misteriosa desaparición de su antecesor, descubrirá en el castillo a un ser humano salvaje que come roedores, será testigo de una extraña orgía en la que una tarta se convierte en instrumento sadomasoquista, escuchará algunas historias sobre pérfidos seductores y maestros del engaño y, sobre todo, irá descubriendo las pasiones y pesares del mundo adulto y los vaivenes del amor, que «no es para pusilánimes». DeWitt toma como punto de partida la novela centroeuropea, los antihéroes de Robert Walser y el universo kafkiano, y los mezcla con un protagonista que parece salido de un slapstick con unas gotas de cine expresionista. El resultado es un Bildungsroman posmoderno, que combina un humor descacharrante con una profunda mirada sobre las incertezas y perplejidades de un joven ante las paradojas de la vida.

From the bestselling, Man Booker–short-listed author of The Sisters Brothers comes a brilliant and boisterous novel that reimagines the folk tale A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners, Undermajordomo Minor is Patrick deWitt''s long-awaited follow-up to the internationally bestselling and critically acclaimed novel The Sisters Brothers. Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the bucolic hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for producing brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the Majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as Undermajordomo, Lucy soon discovers the place harbors many dark secrets, not least of which being the whereabouts of the castle''s master, Baron Von Aux. He also encounters the colorful people of the local village—thieves, madmen, aristocrats, and Klara, a delicate beauty for whose love he must compete with the exceptionally handsome soldier Adolphus. Thus begins a tale of polite theft, bitter heartbreak, domestic mystery, and cold-blooded murder in which every aspect of humanity is laid bare for our hero to observe. Undermajordomo Minor is an adventure, a mystery, and a searing portrayal of rural Alpine bad behavior, but above all it is a love story—and Lucy must be careful, for love is a violent thing.

Charlie and Eli Sisters live in Oregon City and work for the Commodore, magnate and possible political aspirer who pulls a lot of strings in the shadows and has multiple and varied businesses. The brothers are his hired killers, to call a spade a spade, and at times his executioners. This time they are on their way to Sacramento, California to carry out a new job for their boss, and make sure Hermann Kermit Warm, a gold digger, ends up dead. The novel takes place in 1851, at the height of the Gold Rush.

Het Wilde Westen, omstreeks 1850. Het zijn de dagen van de goudkoorts en Hermann Kermit Warm moet dood. Aldus is bevolen door de mysterieuze Commodore. Zijn twee handlangers, de beruchte huurmoordenaars Eli en Charlie Sisters, gaan op pad om hun prooi te zoeken en ervoor te zorgen dat de wil van de Commodore geschiedt. Voor de liefhebbers van de Coen-brothers en Cormac McCarthy.

Traditional Chinese edition of The Sisters Brothers, a historical novel which won the 75th Governor General''s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011. In Traditional Chinese. Annotation copyright Tsai Fong Books, Inc. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

From the author of the award-winning The Sisters Brothers comes a dark, boozy, and hilarious tale from the LA underworld. A nameless barman tends a decaying bar in Hollywood and takes notes for a book about his clientele. Initially, he is morbidly amused by watching the regulars roll in and fall into their nightly oblivion, pitying them and their loneliness. In hopes of uncovering their secrets and motives, he establishes tentative friendships with them. He also knocks back pills indiscriminately and treats himself to gallons of Jameson''s. But as his tenure at the bar continues, he begins to lose himself, trapped by addiction and indecision. When his wife leaves him, he embarks on a series of squalidly random sexual encounters and a downward spiral of self-damage and irrational violence. To cleanse himself and save his soul, he attempts to escape ...

Winner of the Governor General''s Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers'' Trust Fiction Prize, the Prix des libraires du Quebec and the Stephen Leacock Medal. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die: Eli and Charlie Sisters can be counted on for that. Though Eli has never shared his brother’s penchant for whiskey and killing, he’s never known anything else. On the road to Warm’s gold-mining claim outside San Francisco — and from the back of his long-suffering one-eyed horse — Eli struggles to make sense of his life without abandoning the job he''s sworn to do. Patrick deWitt, acclaimed author of Ablutions, doffs his hat to the classic Western, and then transforms it into a comic tour-de-force with an unforgettable narrative voice that captures all the absurdity, melancholy, and grit of the West — and of these two brothers, bound to each other by blood and scars and love.

In our third anthology, Aimee Bender introduces us to a young woman unable to summon the desire to sleep with her husband without payment in cash, Matt Sumell''s protagonist feels capable of anything but can save no one, Rick Moody charts the rise an fall of a romance via Twitter, Patrick deWitt presents a bleak, funny tale of two movers who are going nowhere, and Jenny Offill chronicles the awkward vigil of a man caring for his terminally ill ex-wife.