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Showing 121 - 140 of 17020 items
By Henry James.
By Mary Hoffman. 2015
Emily Crawford, a young American wife and mother, seeks a long-overdue self-respect in this absorbing and dramatic portrait of an…
expatriate family experi-encing life in an exotic Arab culture at the start of the 1960s. Revelatory episodes unfold against the enter¬tainments of the well-to-do and influential, among the lives of ordinary citizens, and during explorations of ancient cities in the Holy Land and beyond.By Hana Sklenkova, Martin Vopenka. 2015
A contemporary classic from the Czech Republic. To support his family, a man submits himself to a solo science experiment…
in the High Andes. A cosmic adventure story of big ideas and murder. 'I loved it: simple as that. I started reading thinking I'd start with a few chapters and pace it over a week or two, but I found I couldn't stop. A potent and haunting novel of black holes, solitude and the sublime, it is never less than immensely readable and absorbing.' - Adam Roberts, winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Your business is dead. It seems like a deal - leave your family behind in Prague for a year, isolate yourself in a research station in the Andes, and come home with a fortune. With a treatise on black holes for company, Jakob settles in at altitude. The air is thin. Strangers pass by on dangerous pilgrimage while his young wife and kids take life in his mind. In mountain starkness, the big questions take shape - like what happens to love inside a black hole?By Washington Irving.
In the centre of the great city of London lies a small neighborhood, consisting of a cluster of narrow streets…
and courts, of very venerable and debilitated houses, which goes by the name of LITTLE BRITAIN. Christ Church School and St. Bartholomew's Hospital bound it on the west; Smithfield and Long Lane on the north; Aldersgate Street, like an arm of the sea, divides it from the eastern part of the city; whilst the yawning gulf of Bull-and-Mouth Street separates it from Butcher Lane, and the regions of Newgate. Over this little territory, thus bounded and designated, the great dome of St. Paul's, swelling above the intervening houses of Paternoster Row, Amen Corner, and Ave Maria Lane, looks down with an air of motherly protectionBy Theodore Dreiser.
By Josephine Humphreys. 1987
When the fabric of her family is suddenly torn apart, 17-year-old Lucille Odom, a wise and precocious high-school student, locates…
new inner resources and steps across the thresholds of womanhood and emotional maturity. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.By Jamie Lisa Forbes. 2014
Thirty years of browbeating from rancher Bud Smalls has penned his wife, Leah, into emotional isolation. Now Bud is gone…
and Leah owns the ranch, but there is no help forthcoming from Bud's brothers who want to force her out and take the ranch for themselves. When their attempt to humiliate her instead becomes her opportunity to succeed, Leah begins to find her way back to herself and learns how much she can gain by opening her heart. The Widow Smalls is just one of the stories in this collection by the WILLA Award winning author of Unbroken, Jamie Lisa Forbes, who writes about the hardships of making a living from the land with an understanding that comes from first-hand experience. Her deftly drawn characters include star-crossed lovers, a young rancher facing his first test of moral courage, an inscrutable ranch hand claiming an impressive relative, a father making one last grasp for his daughter's love and a child's struggle to make sense of the world around her. Each will pull readers into the middle of their stories and keep them turning the pages.By Katharine Prescott Wormeley, Honoré De Balzac.
By Don Delillo. 1972
'Nobody, it seems, could write better than this. No one could have a clearer vision of the micro-circuitry of post-modern…
life' Evening Standard Ostensibly, DeLillo's blackly comic second novel is about Gary Harkness, a football player and student at Logos College, west Texas. During a season of unprecedented success, Gary becomes increasingly fixated on the threat of nuclear war. Both frightened and fascinated by the prospect, he listens to his team-mates discussing match tactics in much the same terms as generals might contemplate global conflict. But as the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchanged, the polysemous nature of words emerges, and DeLillo forces us to see beyond the sterile reality of substitution. This clever and playful novel is a timeless and topical study of human beings' obsession with conflict and confrontation. 'Powerfully funny, oblique, testy, and playful, tearing along in dazzling cinematic spurts . . . A masterful novel' Washington PostBy Amor Towles. 2013
The further adventures of Eve Ross, best friend of Katey Kontent in Rules of Civility, the New York Times bestselling…
novel by Amor Towles Near the end of Amor Towles's bestselling novel Rules of Civility, the fiercely independent Evelyn Ross boards a train from New York to Chicago to visit her parents, but never disembarks. Six months later, she appears in a photograph in a gossip magazine exiting the Tropicana Club on Sunset Boulevard on the arm of Olivia de Havilland. In this novella made up of six richly detailed and atmospheric stories, each told from a different perspective, Towles unfolds the events that take Eve to the heart of Old Hollywood. Beginning in the dining car of the Golden State Limited in September 1938, we follow Eve to the elegant rooms of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the fabled tables of Antonio's, the amusement parks on the Santa Monica piers, the afro-Cuban dance clubs off Central Avenue, and ultimately the set of Gone with the Wind. With the glamour and grit of the studio system's golden age as a backdrop, Towles introduces in each story a memorable new character whose fate may well be altered by their encounter with Eve. In following the thread of these varied encounters, we watch as Eve forges a new and unexpected life for herself in late 1930s Los Angeles.By Alex Grecian. 2013
From the author of the nationally bestselling suspense novel The Yard and the forthcoming The Black Country, both novels of…
Scotland Yard's Murder Squad, comes a short story of the Squad, a cautionary tale: Be careful what you wish for. October 1889: Constable Colin Pringle is a man of few illusions, but there is something about the girl in the canal, her skin a delicate shade of blue, that bothers him more than he expected it would. Perhaps it's because Dr. Kingsley's forensic examination suggests that she was a just-married bride. Someone needs to find out just who she was and what happened to her, Pringle decides, and he sets out to do exactly that. But the answers will not be anything like what he expects. In fact, they will shake his view of the world to the core.By Iman Verjee. 2016
Haunted by a past that has kept her from Nairobi for over three years, Leena returns home to discover her…
family unchanged: her father is still a staunch patriot dreaming of a better country; her mother is still an arch traditionalist, unwilling or unable to let go of the past; and her brother, always the rebellious one, spends his days provoking the establishment as a political activist. When Leena meets a local Kikuyu artist whose past is linked to her own, the two begin a secret affair - one that forces Leena to again question her place in a country she once called home.Interlinked with Leena's story is that of Jeffery: a corrupt policeman burdened with his own angers and regrets, and whose questionable actions have unexpected and catastrophic consequences for those closest to him. Spanning a period of twelve years, Who Will Catch Us As We Fall is a gripping and epic story of love, loss and identity in contemporary Kenya.By Shirley Jackson. 1948
Reminiscent of her classic story 'The Lottery', Jackson's disturbing and darkly funny first novel exposes the underside of American suburban…
life. 'Her books penetrate keenly to the terrible truths which sometimes hide behind comfortable fictions, to the treachery beneath cheery neighborhood faces and the plain manners of country folk; to the threat that sparkles at the rainbow's edge of the sprinkler spray on even the greenest lawns, on the sunniest of midsummer mornings' Donna TarttIn Pepper Street, an attractive suburban neighbourhood filled with bullies and egotistical bigots, the feelings of the inhabitants are shallow and selfish: what can a neighbour gain from another neighbour, what may be won from a friend? One child stands alone in her goodness: little Caroline Desmond, kind, sweet and gentle, and the pride of her family. But the malice and self-absorption of the people of Pepper Street lead to a terrible event that will destroy the community of which they are so proud. Exposing the murderous cruelty of children, and the blindness and selfishness of adults, Shirley Jackson reveals the ugly truth behind a 'perfect' world. Shirley Jackson's chilling tales have the power to unsettle and terrify unlike any other. She was born in California in 1916. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail; it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five more: Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48. 'An amazing writer' Neil Gaiman'Shirley Jackson is one of those highly idiosyncratic, inimitable writers . . . whose work exerts an enduring spell' Joyce Carol Oates'An unburnished exercise in the sinister' The New York TimesBy Wilkie Collins.
By Bruce Jay Friedman. 2008
Three Balconies brings together 17 new stories by the celebrated humorist, vintage Friedman all. In sumptuously simple language, the language…
of the street, the bar, the store, the office, Friedman gives us a collection of moral fables that explores friendship and faith and failure unswervingly, yet with compassion and, as always, tremendous humour.By Robert Louis Stevenson.
By Thomas Hardy.
By Dale Peck. 2015
Dale Peck's second novel offers a searing, nuanced portrait of a marriage across the decades. Beatrice and Henry--the parents of…
the protagonist of Peck's debut novel, Martin and John--are first drawn together when the teenaged Henry is battling a brain tumor that he believes will soon claim his life. But forty years later they're still a couple, in a story that moves from Long Island to the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and from love to hate and back again. Peck bisects the story of Henry and Beatrice's marriage with a stunning 50-page memoir about his own father, mother, and three stepmothers, which combines with the primary narrative to build an unforgettable and deeply moving book about the ways that family both creates and destroys us.The Law of Enclosures is the second volume of Gospel Harmonies, a series of seven stand-alone books (four have been written) that follow the character of John in various guises as he attempts to navigate the uneasy relationship between the self and the postmodern world.From the Trade Paperback edition.By Honore De Balzac, Ellen Marriage.
By Henry James.