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"My name is Saad Saad, which means Hope Hope in Arabic..."Saad wants to leave the chaos of Baghdad for Europe, freedom and a future. But how do you cross borders without a dinar to call your own? How, like Ulysses, do you brave the storms, survive shipwrecks, evade the opium smugglers, turn a deaf ear to the sirens-turned-rock stars, escape the cruelty of a Cyclopean jailer, or tear yourself away from the amorous enchantment of a Sicilian Calypso?By turns violent, slapstick and tragic, Saad's one-way journey begins. From adventures to tribulations interspersed with conversations with a loving father he can't forget, the novel tells of the exodus of one of the millions of men currently in search of a place on earth: a stowaway. Always a captivating and sympathetic story-teller, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt offers this picaresque saga for our time and questions the human condition. Are borders the bulwark of our identities, or the last bastion of our illusions?         ...

At the heart of this African novel is Angel Tungaraza, a Tanzanian woman who has recently moved to Rwanda with her husband Pius and their five orphaned grandchildren. Menopausal and putting on weight, she is an enthusiastic baker of delicious, brightly-iced cakes, which she sells to friends and neighbours. But Baking Cakes in Kigali is not simply a warm story of family life and friendship. For it is set six years after Rwanda's genocide of 1994 – "those hundred days while violence was tearing this country to pieces like a chicken on a plate". The novel is divided into 14 sections, each of which hinges on a special occasion for which Angel bakes a cake. But over each celebration, full of promise for the future, hangs the shadow of the terrible past. A wedding cake celebrates the union of the shopkeeper Leocadie, whose mother has been imprisoned as a génocidaire, with the security guard Modeste, whose whole family were slaughtered. Their marriage is a concrete examp...

Peter ( Liam Neeson ), a software designer who lives near Cambridge, England, discovers e-mail correspondence and pictures on the computer of his absent wife, Lisa ( Laura Linney ), that reveal her affair with another man. Peter, who has fancied himself happily married for 25 years, is seized with sexual jealousy that quakes from within and transforms him into an anguished, wild-eyed monster; you can see his blood boiling. Lisa, a high-end shoe designer, has mysteriously disappeared without leaving word of her whereabouts. Suspecting she has gone to meet her lover, Ralph ( Antonio Banderas ), whose name and address in Milan Peter uncovers through unscrupulous computer sleuthing, he flies to Italy, bent on murdering his rival. Though Mr. Banderas’s Ralph has fiery eyes and dresses nattily, he is a self-described loser who, Peter notes with contempt, has pink hands. Long before Peter leaves Milan, any tension has drained away. No sooner has he arrived and spotted his prey tha...

Moving French drama tackles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via a pair of prodigal sons accidentally switched at birth.       PARIS -- Making a feel-good movie about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could be a recipe for disaster, but French writer-director  Lorraine Levy  manages to avoid many, if not all, of the pitfalls in her touching family drama,  The Other Son  (Les Fils de l’autre). A high-concept tale of two young men – one Israeli, the other Palestinian – accidentally switched at birth and raised on the wrong side of the struggle, the film features terrific performances from its multinational cast and an overtly positive message that never quite succumbs to pure sentimentalism. Art house audiences will easily adopt this certifiable crowd-pleaser, whose U.S. rights were nabbed by Cohen Media Group. Joseph ( Jules Sitruk ), is an 18-year-old musician hoping to join the Israeli air force, though his real goal is to be a folk singer...

I n 1861, the silkworms begin to die.  Herve Joncour and the rest of the citizens living in his small town in France have made their living from silkworms and aren’t sure what to do next. Trips just to Syria and Egypt will not bring back the healthy, thriving silkworms to fuel their economy.  Businessman Baldabiou then tells Herve that the silkworms in Japan are still thriving, legendary for the quality of their silk.  Bidding his lovely wife Helene good-bye, Herve sets off for Japan a total of four times, finding not only silkworms but also a quiet, passionate love in exotic, closed-off Japan. This book is very short, less than 200 pages long, but the amount it packs into those 200 pages is truly breathtaking.  In the space of page-long chapters, Baricco successfully conveys such strong emotion that as a reader, I was deeply moved.  Without speaking, Herve falls in love with a mistress of Hara Kei, his silkworm contact in Japan.  The mistress stand...

Two for one, three for two: no noun without an adjective, never a single adjective where two or more will do. Silence is "utter", hatred "raw and naked", puddles "brown, murky and stagnant". The quirkiest of all appendages in this novel is the heroine's nose: not only "long, straight" but also "impervious".                                                                   That misplaced "v" embodies the ingredients Thrity Umrigar brings to what might have been a tried (or tired) intertwining of genres: a Mumbai novel, a Mumbai Parsi novel, a post-nationalist slum poverty novel and, perhaps most compelling, a maid-and-mistress story: think Douglas Sirk's film Imitation of Life. The varied elements of this tale of affection and class conflict are carried off with a winning ease and enthusiasm that make it both engross...

Whatever respect I had for Haruki Murakami as a writer - which is considerable - it is as nothing to the depth of my bow down before the Japanese novelist on discovering that he has run an ultramarathon. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami Find this on the Guardian bookshop His description of the physical and mental agonies as he struggled to complete the 62-mile course, followed by the near-religious experience of the last few miles, when he knew he was going to finish, is one of the highlights of what he calls "a kind of memoir". Non-running readers of his novels will probably ask: "Why on earth did he run 62 miles when he knew it would hurt so much?" Runners ask a different question: "Why have I never done that?" I did have a plan to run 50 miles on my 50th birthday last year but a cycling injury to my calf - like Murakami, I also do triathlon - grounded me. Now, also like him, my running is accompanied by const...

Readers of her ``Life in the 30s'' column in the New York Times (collected in Living Out Loud ) know Quindlen as an astute observer of family relationships. Her first novel is solid proof that she is equally discerning and skillful as a writer of fiction. To sensitive Maggie Scanlan, the summer when she turns 13 is ``the time when her whole life changed.'' Aware that her father, Tommy, had outraged the wealthy Scanlan clan by marrying the daughter of an Italian cemetery caretaker, Maggie is a bridge between her ``outcast'' mother and her grandfather, whose favorite she is. Domineering, irascible, intolerant John Scanlan looks down on both Pope John XXII and President Kennedy for deviating from traditional Catholic doctrine. His iron hand crushes his wife and grown children, and when he decides that Maggie's parents and their soon-to-be-five offspring should move from their slightly shabby Irish Catholic Bronx suburb to a large house in Westchester which he h...