Charlotte Mandell

"In 1506, Michelangelo -- young but already renowned sculptor -- is invited by the Sultan of Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn. The sultan has offered, alongside an enormous payment, the promise of immortality, since Leonardo da Vinci's design had been rejected: "You will surpass him in glory if you accept, for you will succeed where he has failed, and you will give the world a monument without equal." Michelangelo, after some...

One single noise reached her ears now, the voice of the parrot.
With an attention to the details of bourgeois life considered almost scandalous at the time, A Simple Heart will remind many why Gustave Flaubert was acclaimed as the first great master of realism. But this heart-breaking tale of a simple servant woman and her life-long search for love meant something else to Flaubert. Written near the end of his life, the work...

Exiled from his family for religious transgressions related to his feelings for his cousin, Lakhdar finds himself on the streets of Barcelona, hiding from both the police and the Muslim Group for the Propagation of Koranic Thoughts -- a group he worked in Tangier, Morocco, not long after being thrown out on the streets by his father. Lakhdar's transformations -- from a boy into a man, from a devout Muslim into a sinner -- take place against the backdrop...