Katia Guido Female, 37. Bolzano, Italy

It's the first of a series of books about an African Miss Marple, Mma Ramotswe, owner of the No. 1 ladies' detective agency. She inherited a small fortune from his father, a former miner in South Africa, who died from a long lung illness. His wish is for her to start her own business such as a butchery or similar, but Precious, the name of Mma Ramotswe, decides to be a detective. Among her clients there are very powerful people like Mr. Patel, an Indian trader who settled down in Africa with his family. There are also wives who wants the proof of their husbands' betrayals... and even a missed child, a boy, who is supposed to have died after he was caught by a witch doctor.
A really nice and funny book.
It gives lots of smiles and good humour!

***

È il primo di una serie di libri (anche in italiano) sulla Miss Marple africana Mma Ramotswe, titolare della prima agenzia di detective diretta da una donna. Suo padre morto dopo una lunga malattia ai polmoni, ricordo dei suo anni in miniera, le lascia una piccola fortuna per aprire una sua attività. Lui pensava più ad una macelleria o ad un altro tipo di negozio più "normale", ma Precious (così il nome di Mma Ramotswe) decide di fare la detective privata. Tra i suoi tanti clienti, anche nomi prestigiosi come il Signor Patel, ricco indiano stabilitosi con la famiglia in Africa. Poi ci sono mogli che vogliono prove dell'infedeltà dei propri mariti... e persino un bambino scomparso, che si teme sia finito in mano a uno "stregone" per fare una bruttissima fine.
Un libro veramente carino e divertente.
Regala sorrisi e buon umore!

The night circus arrives unannounced and leaves unexpectedly. It is a peculiar circus, which opens at midnight and closes at dawn. To the eyes of a common spectator it would appear as an illusion of countless tents, each more mysterious than the other. Strolling around the circus he may find artists able to enchant his eyes, rob his attention, kidnap his imagination.
But the circus is more than that. It is a very strange family of all different sort of unrelated people, who never age and never leave for more than a short period at a time. Two twins are born on the night the never fading bonfire was lit and they seem to possess the strangest of the gifts, inherited from the magic atmosphere that surrounds the circus. What the common spectator does not know is that the circus itself is a game board. Two men, we would not be very wrong to call magicians, are watching a game they have once created, long time ago. Every single time there are two players involved, but only one can win. This time a young woman, whose magic is a inherited talent, trained hard and pitilessly by her father, and a young man, once an orphan, now a student to an equally cruel teacher as the young woman's father.
But though they have played this game with other players countless times already, they have never considered unforeseen difficulties such as love yet. While the two players grow up without knowing each other, they grow fond of their respective work in the circus, until they finally meet and realise the goal of this cruel game, but one thing they will learn together: even if there seems to be no way out, the future is never set in stone.

"I mean all of them. Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys"... "They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book written in a tongue they don't even understand."... "God help us if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands."

"...there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. Do you understand that?"

…

"When you kill a man, you steal a life." Baba said. "You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheatm you steal the right to fairness. Do you see?"

"Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing. But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or religion was giong to change that either. I spent most of the first twelve years of my life playing with Hassan."

Amir and Hassan, two stories, two religions very similar though very different, two kids in the free and liberal Afghanistan, two teenagers during the Russian occupation and two completely different dooms after and during the regimen of talibans.
As my colleague told me before lending it to me: "a truly beautiful book but also a truly sad one."
So sad, that I couldn't even feel moved or cry. Lumps growing in my throat every time I turned a page, hoping for a happy end.

I can't say I liked it. It would be telling a lie. I am very happy I read it though! The story is not a nice one and nobody would like to read some of the things written in this book, maybe just fiction, but there are such things happening daily again and again in this world, unluckily we should say! I really hope some of you will read it just to tell me if they felt what I felt.

Mia is a keeper. She's the descendant of great warriors, healers and protectors. Her task is to protect fighters. It's an ancient legacy and she takes it very seriously. She's also a body artist and her tatoos are not mere drawings on the skin. They're signs, blessings.
Nick, her best friend, is a fighter. One night a nightmare tells her about a peculiar book. The book of light and dust. She knows that it's not only a dream. Everything takes a bad turn when a strange, handsome man steps into her life. And when fighters, she used to protect drop dead for unknown reasons. She will have to dig deeper into her soul and fight for her and Nick's survival. It's an intense story, a page turner and I enjoyed reading it!

It’s so bloody difficult to write something about a book, which is definitely going to take an important place among my favourites on my bookshelf!
So many emotions and thoughts tangle up in my head and stomach and I’d love to pass them on to you, who are probably reading these lines now. How to convince you of reading this book, how to spread the word, to inflame the same passion I’m feeling? And it’s so bloody difficult!
A summary perhaps? Shallow somehow, but anyway…
This is a book, in which “the odd-numbered chapters are set mainly in the years 1983-84 and the even-numbered chapters are set in the last two weeks of June, 1996”. There’s this student house in Ashdown.
Sarah’s narcoleptic. She doesn’t know yet. She falls asleep during the day without notice and the worst is that she dreams. She dreams of events taking place in her fantasy and when she wakes up the dream has become her reality. Of course this causes quite a lot of misunderstanding and chaos. Robert is in love. He fell in love with Sarah almost instantly, but he doesn’t stand a chance. She used to have a boyfriend, Gregory, quite a disturbed man he was. He used to watch her sleep and play a strange game with her eyes. But that’s not the reason he doesn’t stand a chance. She’s seeing someone else, Victoria aka Ronnie. It’s hard for a man to compete with the female partner of the woman he loves. And then there’s Terry, a fellow student who sleeps even fourteen hours through.
Apparently “ordinary”, apparently “peculiar” students sharing a house, being friends, falling in and out of love.
The years go by.
There’s this “sleep clinic” in Ashdown.
Gregory is the director. Still a quite disturbed man. He thinks sleep is a waste of time, a life-shortening disease. He loathes this woman (probably not the only woman he loathes), Cleo, a colleague, who befriends the patients trying to help them instead of treating them like test animals. Sarah’s in London, a divorced narcoleptic teacher. Robert has disappeared without a trace. Terry developed the strange habit of sleeping no more than a couple of hours per night. He lost his job due to someone else’s “sleep disorder” and is still obsessed with films. Victoria… is the past living in the present. “All these people are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep – and each other…”(from the book cover).
I failed. I reread the lines I’ve just written and I feel I really couldn’t transmit the fascination, the bewitching effect of this book, not to mention the eagerness to finish it, the delight in reading page after page and the stunning feeling after the last word. The strange sensation of loss and sorrow because this story is already over.

“He would in the purest possible sense, make her dreams come true. Wasn’t that the most that any lover could offer?”