'Listen. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers on Shotover Scarp is named after a damned lie for there is no redemption that goes on there and less sanctuary'. The Sanctuary of the Redeemers is a vast and desolate place – a place without joy or hope. Most of its occupants were taken there as boys and for years have endured the brutal regime of the Lord Redeemers whose cruelty and violence have one singular purpose – to serve in the name of the One True Faith. In one of the Sanctuary's vast and twisting maze of corridors stands a boy. He is ...
A New York Times BestsellerA Los Angeles Times BestsellerA Book Sense National BestsellerA Northern California BestsellerA Sunday Times BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of the YearAnd chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by:Entertainment Weekly • Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday • Seattle Times • Salon.com • Boston Globe • New York Sun • Miami Herald • Dallas Morning News • San Jose Mercury News • Publishers Weekly"In this saga about the Thatcher years Alan Hollinghurst writes harsh but deeply informed social satire from within, just as Proust ...
De Kretser (The Hamilton Case) presents an intimate and subtle look at Tom Loxley, a well-intentioned but solipsistic Henry James scholar and childless divorc?, as he searches for his missing dog in the Australian bush. While the overarching story follows Tom's search during a little over a week in November 2001, flashbacks reveal Tom's infatuation with Nelly Zhang, an artist tainted by scandal-from her controversial paintings to the disappearance and presumed murder of her husband, Felix, a bond trader who got into some shady dealings. As Tom puts the finishing touches on his book about James and the uncanny and ...
Expanding on his Sports Illustrated cover story, Gorant (Fanatic) offers a chilling investigation into Michael Vick' s dog-fighting operation and the men and women who brought him to justice and rehabilitated the rescued dogs. Gorant outlines the rise of Bad Newz Kennels, describing in sometimes painful detail the abuse, torture, and execution of the animals-particularly disturbing is an episode in which Vick and a friend swing a failed fighting dog over their heads like a jump rope and kill it by repeatedly slamming it into the ground-and tracing the rescue of dozens of pit bulls seized from Vick' s ...
Tatjana Soli’s haunting debut novel begins where it ought to end. In this quietly mesmerizing book about journalists covering the war in Vietnam, the first glimpses of the place are the most familiar. The year is 1975. Americans are in a state of panic as North Vietnamese forces prepare to occupy Saigon. The looters, the desperate efforts to escape this war zone, the mobs surrounding the United States Embassy, the overcrowded helicopters struggling to rise above the chaos: these images seem to introduce Ms. Soli’s readers to a story they already know."[A] splendid first novel…Helen’...
The Bram Stoker AwardsMy name was Salmon, like the fish, first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973. My murderer was a man from our neighborhood. My mother liked his border flowers, and my father talked to him once about fertilizer'This is Susie Salmon, speaking to us from heaven. It looks a lot like her school playground, with the good kind of swing sets. There are counsellors to help newcomers to adjust, and friends to room with. Everything she wants appears as soon as she thinks of it – except the thing ...
Autumn in the sleepy California town of Pine Cove is turned upside down by the arrival of a Mississippi Delta blues musician, a huge sea serpent drawn to the sound of the steel guitar, the explosion of a tanker truck at a gas station, and a mysterious trailer that shows up in the local trailer park.
This is a brilliant and moving debut novel about one woman’s struggle to preserve an artistic heritage from the horrors and destruction of World War II. In this extraordinary first novel by Debra Dean, the siege of Leningrad by German troops in World War Two is echoed by the destructive siege against the mind and memory of an elderly Russian woman. Marina, the woman in question, was a guide at Leningrad ’s famous Hermitage Museum. In the late autumn of 1941, the Luftwaffe roared over and around Leningrad, she and her colleagues were set the task of taking the ...
Another deliciously seasonal and heart-warming tale from the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Twelve Days of Christmas and Chocolate Wishes.In the pretty Lancashire village of Middlemoss, Lizzy is on the verge of leaving her cheating husband, Tom, when tragedy strikes. Luckily she has welcome distraction in the Christmas Pudding Circle, a group of friends swapping seasonal recipes — as well as a rivalry with local cookery writer Nick over who will win Best Mince Pie at the village show…Meanwhile, the whole village is gearing up for the annual Boxing Day Mystery Play. But who will play Adam to Lizzy’s Eve? Could it be the handsome and charismatic soap actor Ritch, or could someone closer to home win her heart? Whatever happens, it promises to be a Christmas to remember!Previously published as , Trisha has extensively reworked the original novel with fabulous new extra material.
The Magus (1966) is the first novel written (but second published) by British author John Fowles. It tells the story of Nicholas Urfe, a teacher on a small Greek island. Urfe finds himself embroiled in psychological illusions of a master trickster that become increasingly dark and serious.The novel was a bestseller, partly because it tapped successfully into—and then arguably helped to promote—the 1960s popular interest in psychoanalysis and mystical philosophy.
National Book Award for FictionSeven Stories Press is proud to release the first critical edition of Nelson Algren's masterpiece on the 50th anniversary of its publication in November 1949. Considered Algren's finest work, The Man with the Golden Arm recounts one man's self-destruction in Chicago's Polish ghetto. The novel's protagonist, Frankie Machine, remains a tragic American hero half a century after Algren created this gritty and relentlessly dark tale of modern urban society.***‘Powerful, grisly, antic, horrifying, poetic, compassionate… [there is] virtually nothing more that one could ask.’ – New York Times Book Review‘A thriller ...
From the acclaimed author of A Breath of Fresh Air, this beautiful novel takes us to modern India during the height of the summer's mango season. Heat, passion, and controversy explode as a woman is forced to decide between romance and tradition.Every young Indian leaving the homeland for the United States is given the following orders by their parents: Don't eat any cow (It's still sacred!), don't go out too much, save (and save, and save) your money, and most important, do not marry a foreigner. Priya Rao left India when she was twenty to study in ...
Когда ее возраст перевалил за третий десяток, Миранда Романек, преуспевающая владелица антикварной лавки, понимает, что недовольна своей жизнью. Узнав на встрече выпускников новости о гибели своей первой любви, Миранда старается что-то поменять в своей судьбе. И вот – встречает Мужчину Своей Мечты, Хью Оукли, готового ради нее бросить собственную жену и детей. Счастье есть? Не все так просто. В то время как цепочка необъяснимых событий и встреч пускает под откос привычный жизненный уклад Миранды, она не оставляет попыток разобраться, что же на самом деле происходит вокруг нее. Но иногда для того, чтобы постичь причину наших бед, необходимо понять, кто же такие на самом деле мы сами. Вторая книга из трилогии "Крейнс-Вью" – наибольшее приближение к "вампирскому роману" в творчестве Кэррола.
It's a bold writer indeed who dares to put himself inside the mind of novelist Henry James, but that is what T?ib?n, highly talented Irish author of The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, has ventured here, with a remarkable degree of success. The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde. Thereafter the book ...
From Publishers WeeklySouth African novelist Coetzee takes Fyodor Dostoyevski as his protagonist in a novel set amidst the political ferment of 19th-century Russia.From Library JournalSt. Petersburg is poised for revolution as Fyodor Dostoevsky returns from Germany to claim his deceased stepson's papers. Although the police rule Pavel's death a suicide, the famous writer is drawn into a group of shady characters, including the anarchist Nechaev, who is possibly Pavel's killer. Plagued by seizures and tormented by a torrid affair with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky struggles to ascertain once and for all a writer's ...
The author of The Clearing now surpasses himself with a story whose range and cast of characters is broader still, with the fate of a stolen child looming throughout.After World War I, Sam Simoneaux returns to New Orleans determined to leave mayhem and destruction behind, and to start anew with his wife years after losing a son to illness. But when a little girl disappears from the department store where he works, he has no recourse but to join her musician parents on a Mississippi excursion steamboat, hoping to unearth clues somewhere along the river. Though ill-prepared ...
The story of Kemal, the half-hearted industrialist who is the hero of The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk's first novel since he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a deeply private one, built around an often inexplicable obsession that he attempts to justify to the reader. In honor of F?sun, the poor, beautiful cousin he had a short affair with when he was 30 and engaged to another, he has hoarded a museum of relics, both of their time together and of the much longer time when, like Gatsby drawn by the green light on Daisy's dock, he ...
Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and ...
JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE -- who won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling comic masterpiece wrote for a literary contest at the age of sixteen. The manuscript languished in a drawer and became the subject of a legal battle among Toole's heirs. It was only in 1989, thirty-five years after it was written and twenty years after Toole's suicide at thirty-one, that this amazingly accomplished and evocative novel was freed for publication.The Neon Bible tells the story of David, a young boy growing up in a small Southern town in the 1940s. David's voice is perfectly calibrated, disarmingly ...
Sarah Waters’ fourth novel, The Night Watch, is set in 1940s London, during and after the Second World War, and is an innovative departure from her previous three lesbian Victorian historical fictions. Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002) depend on melodramatic scenes of excess and chicanery, with occasional references to postmodern thinking. In comparison, The Night Watch is more constrained in its telling of love stories and secrets. Its tone echoes the view we have, in the 21st century, of rationed wartime Britain and the use of the more distant third-person, rather than the confiding first-person, signals a further ...
