Tuesday, December 28, 2010

The Painted Kiss by Elizabeth Hickey

Title: The Painted Kiss [Hardbound]
Author: Elizabeth Hickey

Price: Php 180.00
Short URL: http://sulit.com.ph/2985864

About the Book:

Hickey imagines the bonds between Gustav Klimt and his younger lover—whose name he pronounced with his dying breath—in her expressively written debut. Before Emilie Flöge became the owner of a successful Viennese fashion house and Klimt became a famed, controversial painter, she was a privileged 12-year-old reluctantly taking drawing lessons and he was her starving artist teacher. From her WWII hideaway in the Austrian countryside in 1944, where she has transported Gustav's drawings ("all I could bring from Vienna... [perhaps] the only things of his to survive"), the aged Emilie flashes back to her fin-de-siècle hometown. Hickey traces the changing relationship between Klimt and his protégé from when she first became his art student as an adolescent through their on-again, off-again romance as she matures to their complicated relationship that culminates in the famed painting The Kiss. While the novel bears some obvious similarities to Girl with a Pearl Earring, it doesn't quite have that novel's power. But Hickey's language is sensual, lush and unhurried, and the prose wears its author's research gracefully.

Labyrinth by Kate Mosse

Title: Labyrinth [Paperback]
Author: Kate Mosse

Price: Php 180.00
Short URL: http://sulit.com.ph/2985910


About the Book:

Mosse's page-turner takes readers on another quest for the Holy Grail, this time with two closely linked female protagonists born 800 years apart. In 2005, Alice Tanner stumbles into a hidden cave while on an archeological dig in southwest France. Her discovery—two skeletons and a labyrinth pattern engraved on the wall and on a ring—triggers visions of the past and propels her into a dangerous race against those who want the mystery of the cave for themselves. Alaïs, in the year 1209, is a plucky 17-year-old living in the French city of Carcassone, an outpost of the tolerant Cathar Christian sect that has been declared heretical by the Catholic Church. As Carcassonne comes under siege by the Crusaders, Alaïs's father, Bertrand Pelletier,entrusts her with a book that is part of a sacred trilogy connected to the Holy Grail. Guardians of the trilogy are operating against evil forces—including Alaïs's sister, Oriane, a traitorous, sexed-up villainess who wants the books for her own purposes. Sitting securely in the historical religious quest genre, Mosse's fluently written third novel (after Crucifix Lane) may tantalize (if not satisfy) the legions of Da Vinci Code devotees with its promise of revelation about Christianity's truths. 8-city author tour.

The Embers of Heaven by Alma Alexander

Title: The Embers of Heaven [Paperback]
Author: Alma Alexander

Price: Php 150.00
Short URL: http://sulit.com.ph/2924946

About the Book:

In ‘The Secrets of Jin-Shei,’ eight women pledge themselves as sisters in the name of jin-shei, the unbreakable bond, the promise that lasts a lifetime. This sisterhood shapes their lives, their country and their world. ‘The Embers of Heaven’ begins four hundred years later. In eighteenth-century Syai, and its capital city of Linh-an, things have changed beyond recognition.On the face of it, women are more equal than they have ever been. But the men run the machines, the factories, and the technology. Women have lost the ability to weave their fates and influence the course of events. The foundation of an empire once rested on jin-shei and its customs. It connected women from every walk of life and formed a bond that empowered every woman who swore the oath. The advancement of printing, the developments of technology and the changes in society seem to have improved the daily lives of the underclass, but women have been stripped of this sacred pact.Amais is heir to her poet-ancestress's manuscripts and journals. The journals are all in jin-ashu, the women's tongue, taught sketchily to Amais by her mother. Amais has the clear vision of an outsider looking in. Combined with her deep and instinctive bond to her ancestors and her culture, she determines to reinvent the Women's Country and bring the jin-shei back. But just as her crusade begins, she and her family are caught up in the whirlwind of the Golden Rising – a people's revolution that is fated to destroy much that was once valuable, gracious and beautiful.