Jill Ciment Livres

In 1970, Sara Ehrenreich boards a small plane and returns to New York City with much fanfare; she will be featured in Life magazine. She has not left Ta'un'uu–the South Seas island upon which she and her husband, Philip, were marooned during a storm–in more than thirty years. Sara doesn’t know that man has landed on the moon. She has never seen a ballpoint pen. Her body is covered, head to toe, in tattoos.Flashback: it’s 1918 and Sara, a shop girl and aspiring artist, meets Philip, a wealthy member of the avant-garde elite. The two fall in love, marry, and collaborate to make art, surrounded by socialites and revolutionaries–until the Depression cripples not just Sara and Philip, but most of their patrons. When Philip is offered a job gathering masks from the South Seas, they jump at a chance to escape America’s sorrows, traveling to Ta’un’uu for what they think will be a week’s stay. The rest is history–a history Sara records on her skin through the traditional tattoos that become her masterpiece and provide an accounting of her days. Narrated in vivid and starkly moving prose, The Tattoo Artist reminds us of the unforeseeable forces that shape each human life.

Moving on is never easy. Ruth and Alex Cohen are saying goodbye to their beloved New York apartment – because how can they turn down a million dollars? Tomorrow they will open their doors to the eclectic, maddening house-hunters of this city. But Manhattan is in chaos; an unmarked petrol truck is blocking the city’s main tunnel, spreading fears of terrorism and threatening to disrupt a sacred bidding war over the ageing couple’s home. Across town, their adored old dachshund Dorothy lies sick in a hospital cage. She doesn’t understand why she has been abandoned – all she knows is that Death is coming for her, and she isn’t ready. Unravelling over a long weekend, Heroic Measures is a bittersweet, comic tale of what it means to grow old in a world you no longer recognise. It is also a gentle paean to New York, to fleeting beauty, and to holding on to what we love with all our might.

Gloria, a modern "snake-oil" saleswoman, travels from town to town with her teenaged daughter, Kim, but her life abruptly changes when Kim falls in love with Arthur, a gentle widower, thirty years her senior

A 52 year-old photographer and a 41 year-old anatomy professor are jurors sequestered during a sensational three-week trial: a toddler murdered by one of his twin sisters. At the court appointed cut-rate motel off the interstate, they fall into an intense, furtive affair, but it is only during deliberations that the lovers learn they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens. After the trial, the photographer returns to her much older husband amidst an ongoing media frenzy over the case. But the judge has received an anonymous letter about the affair, and she is preparing to release the jurors names. From that point on, the photographer's "one last dalliance before she is too old" takes on profoundly personal and moral consequences, as The Body in Question moves to its affecting, powerful, and surprising conclusion.*** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ***

It's the summer of 2015, Brooklyn. The city is sweltering from another record-breaking heat wave, this one accompanied by biblical rains. Edith, a recently retired legal librarian, and her identical twin sister, Kat, a feckless romantic who's mistaken her own eccentricity for originality, discover something ominous in their hall closet: it seems to be phosphorescent, it's a mushroom ... and it's sprouting from their wall. Upstairs, their landlady, Vida Cebu, a Shakespearian actress far more famous for her TV commercials for Ziberax (the first female sexual enhancement pill) than for her stage work, discovers that a petite Russian girl, a runaway au pair, has been secretly living in her guest room closet. When the police arrest the intruder, they find a second mushroom, also glowing, under the intruder's bedding. Soon the HAZMAT squad arrives, and the four women are forced to evacuate the contaminated row house with only the clothes on their backs. As the mold infestation spreads from row house to high-rise, and frightened, bewildered New Yorkers wait out this plague (is it an act of God?) on their city and property, the four women become caught up in a centrifugal nightmare. Part horror story, part screwball comedy, Jill Ciment's brilliant suspense novel looks at what happens when our lives--so seemingly set and ordered yet so precariously balanced--break down in the wake of calamity. It is, as well, a novel about love (familial and profound) and how it can appear from the most unlikely circumstances. (Amazon)

In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Jill Ciment reflects on how their love ignited and interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself whether she told the whole truth back then. What did truth look like to her in the era of love-bead curtains, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility of May-December romance? With new understanding about the imbalance of power between an older man and a minor girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at age ninety-three.

Ein bildstarker literarischer Thriller voller unerwarteter Wendungen um einen spektakulären Prozess und eine verhängnisvolle Affäre Die Jugendliche Anca Butler ist angeklagt, ihren Babybruder getötet zu haben. Fraglich ist jedoch, ob sie als Autistin überhaupt schuldfähig und ihre Zwillingsschwester als Zeugin glaubwürdig ist. Die Jurymitglieder werden über Wochen in Gerichtssaal und Motel abgekapselt; unter ihnen eine verheiratete Fotografin, die sich – »auf der Suche nach einem letzten Abenteuer, bevor sie zu alt dafür ist« – auf eine Affäre mit einem Mitgeschworenen einlässt. Schon bald finden die beiden sich in einem ausweglosen Konflikt aus körperlichem Begehren und moralischen Bedenken wieder – in einem bildstarken literarischen Thriller, der kein Wort zu viel enthält.

Die fünfzehnjährige Kim und ihre Mutter Gloria kämpfen in den USA mit dem Pech, während sie versuchen, moderne Produkte zu verkaufen. Nach einem Unfall mit dem Flugzeugingenieur Arthur ändert sich ihr Schicksal. Der Vorfall wird zum Wendepunkt im Leben der drei Protagonisten.

Pewnego sobotniego wieczoru spokojne życie starszego małżeństwa z Nowego Jorku nabiera gwałtownego przyśpieszenia: właśnie podjęli decyzję o sprzedaży mieszkania, następnego dnia czeka ich tzw. ?dzień otwarty?, a tymczasem ich stara jamniczka Dorothy doznaje poważnego urazu kręgosłupa. Kiedy Alex i Ruth transportują sparaliżowaną suczkę do szpitala, okazuje się, że w pobliskim tunelu nastąpiła awaria cysterny z benzyną ? i być może jest to pr�ba zamachu terrorystycznego. Telewizja nadaje coraz bardziej alarmujące wiadomości, co nie pozostaje bez wpływu nie tylko na ceny nieruchomości, ale także na postawy moralne małżonk�w.