Nadia Cicognini Ordre des livres (chronologique)

La notte di Mosca è cupa e pericolosa, non solo per i criminali che si aggirano in cerca di vittime. Vampiri, stregoni, animali magici e altre creature misteriose si mescolano agli esseri umani. Solo Anton e gli altri guardiani possono riconoscerli: il loro compito è quello di far rispettare la tregua tra Bene e Male, che impegna le forze della Luce e quelle delle Tenebre a vegliare l’una sull’altra, perché nessuna prevalga. Ma qualcosa nella pace millenaria che divide il popolo notturno da quello del giorno sta cambiando e il destino dell’umanità è legato a quello di un ragazzo che non sa di possedere un enorme potere. Un ragazzo che sia le forze della Luce che quelle delle Tenebre vogliono arruolare nella propria fazione. Comincia così una lotta sfrenata per la sopravvivenza dell’umanità, tra cellulari costosi e corvi parlanti, mafia russa e minacce apocalittiche, vodka e sortilegi.

Others. They walk among us. Observing. Set in contemporary Moscow, where shape shifters, vampires, and street-sorcerers linger in the shadows, Night Watch is the first book of the hyper-imaginative fantasy pentalogy from best-selling Russian author Sergei Lukyanenko. This epic saga chronicles the eternal war of the “Others,” an ancient race of humans with supernatural powers who must swear allegiance to either the Dark or the Light. The agents of the Dark – the Night Watch – oversee nocturnal activity, while the agents of the Light keep watch over the day. For a thousand years both sides have maintained a precarious balance of power, but an ancient prophecy has decreed that a supreme Other will one day emerge, threatening to tip the scales. Now, that day has arrived. When a mid-level Night Watch agent named Anton stumbles upon a cursed young woman – an uninitiated Other with magnificent potential – both sides prepare for a battle that could lay waste to the entire city, possible the world. With language that throbs like darkly humorous hard-rock lyrics about blood and power, freedom and responsibility, Night Watch is a chilling, cutting-edge thriller, a pulse-pounding ride of fusion fiction that will leave you breathless for the next instalment.

Mikhail Bulgakov's absurdist parable of the Russian Revolution. A world-famous Moscow professor-rich, successful, and violently envied by his neighbors-befriends a stray dog and resolves to achieve a daring scientific "first" by transplanting into it the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead man. But the results are wholly a distinctly and worryingly human animal is on the loose, and the professor's hitherto respectable life becomes a nightmare beyond endurance. As in The Master and Margarita, the masterpiece he completed shortly before his death, Mikhail Bulgakov's early novel, written in 1925, combines outrageously grotesque ideas with a narrative of deadpan naturalism. The Heart of a Dog can be read as an absurd and wonderfully comic story; it can also be read as a fierce parable of the Russian Revolution.