J.R.R. Tolkien - The Story of Kullervo

 

Títle: The Story of Kullervo

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Publisher: Harper Collins

Year: 2015

Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780008131364

PVP: 9,45€ (Hardcover) Amazon

Mark: 9/10

SYNOPSIS

Kullervo son of Kalervo is perhaps the darkest and most tragic of all J.R.R. Tolkien's characters. Hapless Kullervo', as Tolkien called him, is a luckless orphan boy with supernatural powers and a tragic destiny.

Brought up in the homestead of the dark magician Untamo, who killed his father, kidnapped his mother, and who tries three times to kill him when still a boy, Kullervo is alone save for the love of his twin sister, Wanona, and guarded by the magical powers of the black dog, Musti. When Kullervo is sold into slavery he swears revenge on the magician, but he will learn that even at the point of vengeance there is no escape from the cruellest of fates.

Tolkien wrote that The Story of Kullervo was the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own', and was a major matter in the legends of the First Age'; his Kullervo was the ancestor of Trin Turambar, tragic incestuous hero of The Silmarillion. In addition to being a powerful story in its own right, The Story of Kullervo published here for the first time with the author's drafts, notes and lecture-essays on its source-work, The Kalevala, is a foundation stone in the structure of Tolkien's invented world.

Minna Lindgren - Death at Sunset Grove

 

Title: Death in Sunset Grove

Author: Minna Lindgren

Book: The Lavender Ladies Detective-Agency #1

Publisher: PanMacmillan

Year: 2016

Pages: 348

IBSN-13: 978-1-4472-8932-6

Price: 12.89€ (paperback, Amazon)

Mark: 9/10

 

SYNOPSIS

Good derectives come in all manner of guises... Meet Siiri and Irma, best friends and the queen bees of Sunset Grove, a retirement community for those still young at heart. With a combined age of nearly 180, Siiri and Irma are still just as inquisitive and witty as when they first met decades ago. But when their comfortable world is upturned by a suspicious death at Sunset Grove, Siiri and Irma are shocked into doing something about it. Determined to find out exactly what happened and why, they begin their own private investigations and form The Lavender Ladies Detective Agency. The trouble is, beneath Sunset Grove's calm facade, there is more going on than meets the eye, and Siiri and Irma soon discover far more than they bargained for...

Colections

Hey there!

I have decided to create a section to talk about five editions/collections of books that I love. I hope to collect them all and write reviews of them! They are very care editions published by Penguin written by motley writers.

Here you have the links to each of the collections:

• Little black classics
• Penguin Modern
• Clothbound Classics
• Vintage Minis
• Mini Modern Classics

Mini Modern Classics

This edition was published in 2011 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Penguin. As Penguin Modern collection, it is made up of modernist writers or, as they say, ‘they're full of the best short fiction by the greatest writers of the last 100 years’.

The list of the 50 books:

1.    Ryōnosuke Akutagawa – Hell Screen

2.    Kingsley Amin – All the blood within me

3.    Donald Barthelme – Some of us has been threatening out friend Colby

4.    Samuel Beckett – The expelled

5.    Saul Bellow – Him with his foot in his mouth

6.    Jorge Luis Borges – The widow Ching-pirate

7.    Paul Bowles – The delicate prey

8.    Italo Calvino – The Queen’s necklace

9.    Albert Camus – The adulterous woman

10. Truman Capote – Children on their birthday

11. Angela Carter – Bluebeard

12. Raymond Chandler – Killer in the rain

13. Eileen Chang – Red rose, white rose

14. G.K. Chesternon – The strange crime of John Boulnois

15. Joseph Conrad – Youth

16. Robert Coover – Romance of the thin man and the fat lady

17. Isak Dinesen – Babette’s feast

18. Margaret Drabble – Hassan’s tower

19. Hans Fallada – Short treatise on the joys of morphism

20. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Babylon revisited

21. Ian Fleming – The living daylights

22. E.M. Forster – The machine stops

23. Shirley Jackson – The tooth

24. Henry James – The beast in the jungle

25. M.R. James – Canon Alberic’s scrap-nook

26. James Joyce – Two gallants

27. Franz Kafka – In the penal colony

28. Rudyard Kiplin – They

29. D. H. Lawrence – Odour of chrysanthemus

30. Primo Levi – The magic paint

31. H. P. Lovecraft – The colour of space

32. Marlcom Lowry – Lunar caustic

33. Carson McCullers – Wunderkind

34. Katherine Mansfiel – Bliss

35. Robert Musil – Flypaper

36. Vladimir Nabokov – Terra incognita

37. Rik Narayan – A breath of Lucifer

38. Frank O’Connor – The cornet-player who betrayed Ireland

39. Dorothy Parker – The sexes

40. Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – Trough the wall

41. Jean Rhys – La grosse fifi

42. Saki – Filboid studge, the story of a mouse that helped

43. Isaac Bashevis Singer – The last demon

44. William Trevor – The mark-2 wife

45. John Updike – Rich in Russia

46. H.G. Wells – The door in the wall

47. Eudora Welty – Moon lake

48. P.G. Wodehouse – The crime wave at Blandngs

49. Virginia Woolf – The lady in the looking glass

50. Stefan Zweig - Chess

Vintage Minis

Vintage Minis can be made up by full essays, some short story, excerpts of one of some novels… These books have just two things in common, the title is made up of one word and it has one topic related to the word in the title. Up to now, there are only 35 published books:

1.    Laurie Lee – Summer

2.    Toni Morrison – Race

3.    William Styron – Depression

4.    Jeanette Winterson – Love

5.    Salman Rushdie – Home

6.    Nigella Lawson – Eating

7.    Aldous Huxley – Psychedelics

8.    Louisa May Alcott – Sisters

9.    Anne Enright – Babies

10. Roger Deakin – Swimming

11. Tim Parks – Calm

12. Helen Simpson – Motherhood

13. Joseph Heller – Work

14. Haruki Murakami – Desire

15. John Cheever – Drinking

16. Karl Ove Knausgaard – Fatherhood

17. Julian Barnes – Death

18. Marcel Proust – Jealousy

19. Xiadu Guo – Language

20. Virginia Woolf – Liberty

21. Yuval Noah Harari – Money

22. Rose Tremain – Friendship

23. M. R. James – Ghosts

24. Jane Austen – Marriage

25. Sigmund Freud – Dreams

26. Richard Wright – Injustice

27. Sebastian Faulks – War

28. Margaret Atwood – Freedom

29. Yaris Varoufakis – Austerity

30. A vintage Christmas

31. Stephen Grosz – Therapy

32. Helen Macdonald – Recovery

33. Mark Haddon – Family

34. Ian McEwan – Science

35. Irvine Welsh – Rave

These books are in presale:

36. Karen Armstrong – Religion

37. Simon Schama – Art

38. Arthur Conan Doyle – Murder

39. Charles Dickens – London

40. William Shakespeare – Power

41. Oscar Wilde – Lies

42. Charlotte Brontë – Independence

43. F. Scott Fitzgerald - Parties

Clothbound Classics

I can totally affirm that this is my favorite Penguin edition. The cover is so beautiful, hardcover, soft, made of cloth, the drawings are usually related with the topic of the book, the letter has the perfect font and size that makes the reading so pleasant, enjoyable and easy.

The only problem is that they are a bit expensive (comparing them with their paperback counterpart), but I assure you that it worth each euro spend on them!

Here you have the list of published books of this collection:

1.    Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

2.    Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

3.    Charles Dickens – Bleak house

4.    Charles Dickens – Hard Times

5.    Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist

6.    Charles Dickens – A Christmas carol and other christmas stories

7.    Charles Dickens – A tale of two cities

8.    Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights

9.    Charlotte Brontë – Jane Eyre

10. Emily Brontë – The tenant of Wildfield hall

11. Anne Brontë - Villette

12. Jane Austen – Sense and sensibility

13. Jane Austen – Pride and prejudice

14. Jane Austen – Emma

15. Jane Austen – Pesuasion

16. Jane Austen – Mansfield Park

17. Jane Austen – Northanger Abbey

18. Jane Austen – Love and friendship: another youthful writings

19. Jane Austen  - Sanditon

20. Elizabeth Gaskell – Cranford

21. Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Ubervilles

22. Thomas Hardy – Far from the maddening crowd

23. Thomas Hardy – The mayor of Casterbridge

24. Thomas Hardy – Jude the obscure

25. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and punishment

26. Oscar Wilde – The picture of Dorian Gray

27. Louisa May Alcott – Little Women

28. Wilkie Colliens – The woman in white

29. Arthur Conan Doyle – The hound of the Baskervilles

30. Homer – Odyssey

31. Homer – Illiad

32. Robert Louis Stevenson – Treasure Island

33. Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland and through the looking-glass

34. Lewis Carroll – Jabberwocky and other nonsense: collected poems

35. D.H. Lawrence – Lady Chatterley’s lover

36. William Shakespeare – The sonnet’s and A lover’s complaint

37. Dante – Inferno: The Divine Comedy I

38. Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s travels

39. The Qur’an

40. The Ramayana

41. The Mahabharata

42. The Bhagavad Gita

43. Bram Stoker – Dracula

44. George Eliot – Middlemarch

45. Victor Hugo – Les miserables

46. Alexandre Dumas – The cound of Monte Cristo

47. William Thackeray – Vanity fair

48. Herman Melville – Moby Dick

49. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein

50. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales

51. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina

52. Leo Tolstoy – War and peace

53. Mark Twain – The adventures of Huckleberry Finn

54. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe

55. Ovid – Metamorphoses

56. Rudyard Kipling – The jungle books

57. John Milton – Paradise Lost

58. Charles Dickens – David Copperfield

59. John Steinbeck – The Pearl

60. Henry James – The portrait of a lady

61. Marco Polo – The travels

62. William S. Burroughs – Naked lunch

63. Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

64. Virginia Woolf – Orlando

65. John Kennedy Toole – A confederacy of dunces

66. Evelyn Waugh – Brideshead revisited

67. John Wyndham – The day of the triffids

68. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 1

69. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 2

70. Marcel Proust – Rememberance of things past vol. 3

71. Jules Verne – Twenty thousand leagues under the sea

72. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote

73. Richard Wagner – The ring of the Nibelung

74. Arthur Conan Doyle – The adventures of Sherlock Holmes

75. H. W. Wells – The war of the worlds

76. Tales from 1001 nights