Mark Helprin – författare

Mark Helprin, the #1 New York Times, best-selling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier ofthe Great War, has returned with a fast-paced, beautifully written novel about the majesty of the sea; a life dedicated to duty, honor, and country; and the gift of falling in loveWhen Stephen Rensselaer, a Navy captain near the end of his career, is called upon to defend the politically doomed development of a variant of the Navy’s smallest ship, he does so without hesitation, thereby alienating the President of the United States. The program is cancelled after its first prototype, Athena, Patrol Coastal 15, and Rensselaer—his place on the promotion list for admiral all but forgotten—is given command, an intended humiliation for someone of his rank. Rather than resign, he carries on, and while supervising Athena’s fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in love. After failed marriages for both, this is a completely unexpected and exhilarating last chance. Soon thereafter, he is deployed to the Persian Gulf. However, while refueling and taking on provisions in Israel, he discovers that his mission has been changed, which subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy. As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps Rensselaer alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial. In classic literary form, an enthralling new novel that extolls the virtues of living by the laws of conscience, decency, and sacrifice, The Oceans and the Stars is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Mark Helprin, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, presents a fast-paced, beautifully written novel about the majesty of the sea; a life dedicated to duty, honor, and country; and the gift of falling in love.A Navy captain near the end of a decorated career, Stephen Rensselaer is disciplined, intelligent, and determined to always do what’s right. In defending the development of a new variant of warship, he makes an enemy of the president of the United States, who assigns him to command the doomed line’s only prototype––Athena, Patrol Coastal 15––with the intent to humiliate a man who should have been an admiral.Rather than resign, Rensselaer takes the new assignment in stride, and while supervising Athena’s fitting out in New Orleans, encounters a brilliant lawyer, Katy Farrar, with whom he falls in last-chance love. Soon thereafter, he is deployed on a mission that subjects his integrity, morality, and skill to the ultimate test, and ensures that Athena will live forever in the annals of the Navy.As in the Odyssey, Katy is the force that keeps him alive and the beacon that lights the way home through seven battles, mutiny, and court martial. In classic literary form, an enthralling new novel that extolls the virtues of living by the laws of conscience, decency, and sacrifice, The Oceans and the Stars is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Mark Helprin, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Oceans and the Stars, Winter’s Tale, and A Soldier of the Great War, returns with an unforgettable tale of love, loss, and remembrance set in Brooklyn.Told in an exceptional literary voice, mixing comedy and tragedy, Elegy in Blue is a hymn to New York, memory, loyalty, and love.High in a subsidized studio apartment, the unnamed 82-year-old narrator of Elegy in Blue looks out across the rooftops of Brooklyn all the way to the sea.His distinguished career on Wall Street is in ruins, his mansion in Brooklyn Heights has been burned to the ground, and most of all, his father, his son, and his wife—the stunningly beautiful and equally kind Clare—have been taken from him, one by one, over the decades, by war and an act of violence.Now his “allegiance is to his ghosts.” He’s almost lost to memory, reflection, and a purposeful letting go of life. But when violence threatens to destroy another family, he takes drastic action in hope of restoring a portion of justice to the world.Can he fashion his life into an elegy, one that heals a broken heart and relieves the sting of death?

Mark Helprin’s powerful, rapturous new novel is set in a present-day Paris caught between violent unrest and its well-known, inescapable glories. Seventy-four-year-old Jules Lacour—a maître at Paris-Sorbonne, cellist, widower, veteran of the war in Algeria, and child of the Holocaust—must find a balance between his strong obligations to the past and the attractions and beauties of life and love in the present. In the midst of what should be an effulgent time of life—days bright with music, family, rowing on the Seine—Jules is confronted headlong and all at once by a series of challenges to his principles, livelihood, and home, forcing him to grapple with his complex past and find a way forward. He risks fraud to save his terminally ill infant grandson, matches wits with a renegade insurance investigator, is drawn into an act of savage violence, and falls deeply, excitingly in love with a young cellist a third his age. Against the backdrop of an exquisite and knowing vision of Paris and the way it can uniquely shape a life, he forges a denouement that is staggering in its humanity, elegance, and truth. In the intoxicating beauty of its prose and emotional amplitude of its storytelling, Mark Helprin’s Paris in the Present Tense is a soaring achievement, a deep, dizzying look at a life through the purifying lenses of art and memory.