"This is a wonderful novel. Original, suspenseful, funny, and profoundly moving. It's about family, community, the human bond with animals, and – oh yeah – spaceships. I am in awe of Yannick Murphy's achievement and I plan to recommend it to everyone I know." – Geraldine BrooksThe daily rhythm of a veterinarian's family in rural New England is shaken when a hunting accident leaves their eldest son in a coma. With the lives of his loved ones unhinged, the veterinarian struggles to maintain stability while searching for the man responsible. But in the midst of their great trial an unexpected ...
Ackroyd's retelling of Chaucer's classic isn't exactly like the Ethan Hawke'd film version of Hamlet, but it's not altogether different, either. Noting in his introduction that the source material is as close to a contemporary novel as Wells Cathedral is to an apartment block, Ackroyd translates the original verse into clean and enjoyable prose that clears up the roadblocks readers could face in tackling the classic. The Knight's Tale, the first of 24 stories, sets the pace by removing distracting tics but keeping those that are characteristic, if occasionally cringe-inducing, like the narrator's insistence on lines like, Well. Enough of ...
"I am not in a contest. I never wanted fame or money. I wanted to get the word down the way I wanted it, that's all. And I had to get the words down or be overcome by something worse than death." So writes the late Charles Bukowski in his entry for 6/23/92 (12:34 AM). The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship, a delightful, posthumous gathering of excerpts from Bukowski notebooks, is loaded with such direct ruminations about writing, death, money, humanity, and how the author located meaning and value in his daily life ...
Peter Ackroyd's imagination dazzles in this brilliant novel written in the voice of Victor Frankenstein himself. Mary Shelley and Shelley are characters in the novel.It was at Oxford that I first met Bysshe. We arrived at our college on the same day; confusing to a mere foreigner, it is called University College. I had seen him from my window and had been struck by his auburn locks.The long-haired poet – 'Mad Shelley' – and the serious-minded student from Switzerland spark each other's interest in the new philosophy of science which is overturning long-cherished beliefs. Perhaps there is ...
When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock.Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty facade is a town at war.Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils… Pagford is not what it first seems.And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?Blackly comic, thought-provoking and constantly surprising, is J.K. Rowling’s first novel for adults.
An automaton, a man and a woman who can never meet, two stories of love—all are brought to incandescent life in this hauntingly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time. London 2010: Catherine Gehrig, conservator at the Swinburne museum, learns of the sudden death of her colleague and lover of thirteen years. As the mistress of a married man, she must struggle to keep the depth of her anguish to herself. The one other person who knows Catherine’s secret—her boss—arranges for her to be given a special project away from prying ...
Stunned by his mother's recent death and appalled by the way his father sleepwalks through life, Jerry Renault, a New England high school student, ponders the poster in his locker — Part of his universe is Archie Costello, leader of a secret school societ — the Virgils — and master of intimidation. Archie himself is intimidated by a cool, ambitious teacher into having the Virgils spearhead the annual fund-raising event — a chocolate sale. When Jerry refuses to be bullied into selling chocolates, he becomes a hero, but his defiance is a threat to Archie, the Virgils, and the school. In the inevitable showdown, Archie's skill at intimidation turns Jerry from hero to outcast, to victim, leaving him alone and terribly vulnerable.
With dramatic force, with a simplicity that seizes the heart, The Chosen illumines-for us, for now-the eternal, powerful bonds of love and pain that join father and son, and the ways in which these bonds are, and must be, broken if the boy is to become a man.The novel opens in the 1940's, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Two boys who have grown up within a few blocks of each other, but in two entirely different worlds, meet for the first time in a bizarre and explosive encounter-a baseball game between two Jewish parochial schools that ...
Set among the apple orchards of rural Maine, it is a perverse world in which Homer Wells' odyssey begins. As the oldest unadopted offspring at St Cloud's orphanage, he learns about the skills which, one way or another, help young and not-so-young women, from Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder, a man of rare compassion with an addiction to ether.Dr Larch loves all his orphans, especially Homer Wells. It is Homer's story we follow, from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage, to his adult life running a cider-making factory and his strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend.
At the awful dawn of a nuclear age-at the painful birth of the Cold War-the Citadel was constructed in secret beneath the Antarctic ice. Housing the most devastating weapon imaginable, it was a safeguard against an unseen threat far more potent than the growing Communist menace. Now, six decades later, America 's destruction seems all but assured-because the enemy has re-emerged from the shadows of time.And the Citadel has been breached.The commander of Section 8-a covert force of misfits assigned the impossible missions no one else will touch-Captain Jim Vaughn must now lead his unit into the unknown to diffuse a nightmare of astronomical proportions. The future hangs in the balance-and the ultimate survival of humankind is in the hands of men with nothing left to lose…
From world-renowed author Erich Segal comes a powerful and moving saga of five extraordinary members of the Harvard class of 1958 and the women with whom their lives are intertwined. Their explosive story begins in a time of innocence and spans a turbulent quarter century, culminating in their dramatic twenty-five reunion at which they confront their classmates-and the balance sheet of their own lives. Always at the center; amid the passion, laughter, and glory, stands Harvard-the symbol of who they are and who they will be. They were a generation who made the rules-then broke them-whose glittering successes, heartfelt tragedies, and unbridled ambitons would stun the world.
Cloud atlas is a cleverly written book consisting of six seperate, but connecting stories set across six different periods in time. Each story has been chopped in two and symmetrically placed in the book so you don’t discover the conclusion to the first tale until the very end of the book.This layout effectively creates a storytelling ripple where the sixth and final story is told, as a whole, at the books central core, before the reader then moves back out in the direction they came to discover each of the other characters destiny’s.
A hurricane sweeps off the Gulf of Mexico and in, the back-country of Alabama, assembles a passenger jet out of old bean-cans and junkyard waste. An eccentric mathematician – last heard of investigating the physics of free will and ranting about the devil – vanishes in the French Pyrenees. And the thuggish operatives of a multinational arms conglomerate are closing in on Alex Smart – a harmless Cambridge postgraduate who has set off with hope in his heart and a ring in his pocket to ask his American girlfriend to marry him. At the Directorate of the Extremely Improbable – an organisation so ...
Cipriano Algor, an elderly potter, lives with his daughter Marta and her husband Mar?al in a small village on the outskirts of The Center, an imposing complex of shops, apartments, and offices to which Cipriano delivers his pots and jugs every month. On one such trip, he is told not to make any more deliveries. Unwilling to give up his craft, Cipriano tries his hand at making ceramic dolls. Astonishingly, The Center places an order for hundreds, and Cipriano and Marta set to work-until the order is cancelled and the three have to move from the village into The Center. When mysterious sounds of digging emerge from beneath their apartment, Cipriano and Mar?al investigate, and what they find transforms the family's life. Filled with the depth, humor, and the extraordinary philosophical richness that marks each of Saramago's novels, The Cave is one of the essential books of our time.
This collection of Roald Dahl's adult short stories, from his world-famous books, includes many seen in the television series, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. With their vibrant characters, their subtle twists and turns, and bizarre and often macabre plots, these stories shock in a way that makes them utterly addictive. Roald Dahl can stand you on your head, twist you in knots, tie up your hands and leave you gasping for more.
This further collection of Roald Dahi's adult short stories, from his world-famous books, again includes many seen in the television series, TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED. Through the stories runs a vein of macabre malevolence, springing from slight, almost inconsequential everyday things. These bizarre plots—spiced with vibrant characters and subtle twists and turns—are utterly addictive.
The novel is about a lonely young man, Frederick Clegg, who works as a clerk in a city hall, and collects butterflies in his spare time. Clegg is obsessed with Miranda Grey, a middle-class art student at the Slade School of Fine Art. He admires her from a distance, but is unable to make any contact with her because of his nonexistent social skills.There have been numerous presentations and adaptations of The Collector, including film and theatre. The Collector also appears in various songs, television episodes, and books.
Night on an island. A well-behaved demon will come from the woods and ask you your name. Answer, and you are left nameless. But can anybody live without a name, even through one single night?
An epic journey of love and discovery from the national bestselling author of The Russian Concubine and The Red Scarf.China, 1929. For years Lydia Ivanova believed her father was killed by the Bolsheviks. But when she learns he is imprisoned in Stalin-controlled Russia, the fiery girl is willing to leave everything behind – even her Chinese lover, Chang An Lo.Lydia begins a dangerous search, journeying to Moscow with her half-brother Alexei. But when Alexei abruptly disappears, Lydia is left alone, penniless in Soviet Russia.All seems lost, but Chang An Lo has not forgotten Lydia. He knows things about her father that she does not. And while he races to protect her, she is prepared to risk treacherous consequences to discover the truth.
Olga Arbyelina is a princess who fled Russia during the revolution; now she lives in a town near Paris tending to her hemophiliac son, keeping ghosts at bay-an existence hollowed out by history. The town gossips obsess over her, making her into the prime character in their "game of a thousand voices." They "had a fleeting dream of figuring in a poignant melodrama called The Exiled Princess." When she is found lying next to a dead man on the local riverbank, her fame only increases. The Crime of Olga Arbyelina begins with this grim discovery and moves backward, trying ...
