"A distinguished novelist of a rare kind." – Kingsley AmisA lay community of thoroughly mixed-up people is encamped outside Imber Abbey, home of an order of sequestered nuns. A new bell is being installed when suddenly the old bell, a legendary symbol of religion and magic, is rediscovered. And then things begin to change. Meanwhile the wise old Abbess watches and prays and exercises discreet authority. And everyone, or almost everyone, hopes to be saved, whatever that may mean. Originally published in 1958, this funny, sad, and moving novel is about religion, sex, and the fight between good and evil.
A hot summer's day, a crowded motorway, a split second that changed people's lives forever. Gripping, heartbreaking, exciting and unputdownable, this new novel will be one of 2009's biggest and most enjoyable novels – from the irresistible Penny Vincenzi.
Natalie Hargrove would kill to be her high school's Palmetto Princess. But her boyfriend Mike King doesn't share her dream and risks losing the honor of Palmetto Prince to Natalie's nemesis, Justin Balmer. So she convinces Mike to help play a prank on Justin. . one that goes terribly wrong. They tie him to the front of the church after a party — when they arrive the next morning, Justin is dead. From blackmail to buried desire, dark secrets to darker deeds, Natalie unravels. She never should've messed with fate. Fate is the one thing more twisted than Natalie Hargrove. Cruel IntentionsmeetsMacbethin this seductive, riveting tale of conscience and consequence.
Helen's brother is dying, and with two of his friends she waits for the end in her grandmother's crumbling old house. Her mother and grandmother, after years of strife have come to an uneasy peace. The six of them, from different generations and beliefs, are forced to come to terms with each other.
Winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year AwardA turn-of-the-century love story, set in Manila, between an American woman and Filipino-Spanish mestizo by the popular storyteller William Boyd. It's a memorable tale, richly detailed.
Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical ...
Amazon.com ReviewDon DeLillo's reputation rests on a series of large-canvas novels, in which he's proven to be the foremost diagnostician of our national psyche. In The Body Artist, however, he sacrifices breadth for depth, narrowing his focus to a single life, a single death. The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, who we see sharing breakfast with her husband, Rey, in the opening pages. This 18-page sequence is a tour de force (albeit a less showy one than the author's initial salvo in Underworld)-an intricate, funny notation of Lauren's consciousness as she pours cereal, peers out the ...
Three Women Who Share One Fate: The Boleyn Inheritance.Anne of Cleves: She runs from her tiny country, her hateful mother, and her abusive brother to a throne whose last three occupants are dead. King Henry VIII, her new husband, instantly dislikes her. Without friends, family, or even an understanding of the language being spoken around her, she must literally save her neck in a court ruled by a deadly game of politics and the terror of an unpredictable and vengeful king. Her Boleyn Inheritance: accusations and false witnesses.Katherine Howard: She catches the king's eye within ...
In memories that rise like wisps of ghosts, LuLing Young searches for the name of her mother, the daughter of the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain. Trying to hold on to the evaporating past, she begins to write all that she can remember of her life as a girl in China. Meanwhile, her daughter Ruth, a ghostwriter for authors of self-help books, is losing the ability to speak up for herself in front of the man she lives with and his two teen-aged daughters. None of her professional sound bites and pat homilies work for her ...
Many years ago Gerard Hernshaw and his friends 'commissioned' one of their number to write a political book. Time passes and opinions change. 'Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?' Rose Curtland asks. 'The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,' Jenkin Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that, since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at least deserves a reward.
A distinguished Shakespearean scholar found tortured to death…A lost manuscript and its secrets buried for centuries…An encrypted map that leads to incalculable wealth…The Washington Post called Michael Gruber's previous work "a miracle of intelligent fiction and among the essential novels of recent years." Now comes his most intellectually provocative and compulsively readable novel yet.Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. ...
The days between Christmas and New Year's Eve are dead days, when spirits roam and magic shifts restlessly just beneath the surface of our lives. A lot can happen in the dead days.There is a magician called Valerian who must save his own life, or pay the price for the pact he made with evil so many years ago. But alchemy and sorcery are no match against the demonic power pursuing him. Helping him is his servant Boy, a child with no name and no past, given to Valerian by Fate when he fell from his hiding ...
The Book of Evidence is a 1989 novel by the Irish author John Banville. The book is narrated by Freddie Montgomery, a 38 year old scientist, who murders a servant girl during an attempt to steal a painting from a neighbor. Freddie is an aimless drifter, and though he is a perceptive observer of himself and his surroundings, he is largely amoral. The end of the novel makes it unclear whether anything Freddie has said is true. When asked by the inspector how much of it is true, Freddie responds, "True, Inspector? All of it. None of it. Only the shame." The Book of Evidence won Ireland 's Guinness Peat Aviation Award in 1989, and was short-listed for Britain 's Booker Prize. In reviewing the book, Publishers Weekly compared Banville's writing to that of Albert Camus and Fyodor Dostoevsky. The writing style continues Banville's attempt to give his prose "the kind of denseness and thickness that poetry has".
Twelve men – running in direct line line from father to eldest son, who in turn becomes a father – are the heroes of this wonderful family saga which runs over 300 years' panorama of Hungarian life and history. Each man also passes to his son certain unusual gifts: the ability to see the past, and in some cases to see the future too. The fathers also pass on a book in which they have left a personal record ('The Book of Fathers'). The reader is swept along by the narrative brilliance of Vamos' story. Some of his heroes are lucky, live long and are good at their trade; some are unlucky failures and their lives are cut short. Some are happily married, some have unhappy marriages – and the ability to see into the future is often a poisoned chalice. An extraordinary and brilliant generational saga, THE BOOK OF FATHERS is set to become a European classic.
An omnibus of novels: The Notebook – The Proof – The Third LieThese three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by ...
An anthology of stories edited by Zadie SmithA stellar host of writers explore the cornerstone of fiction writing: characterThe Book of Other People is about character. Twenty-five or so outstanding writers have been asked by Zadie Smith to make up a fictional character. By any measure, creating character is at the heart of the fictional enterprise, and this book concentrates on writers who share a talent for making something recognizably human out of words (and, in the case of the graphic novelists, pictures). But the purpose of the book is variety: straight "realism"-if such a thing exists-is not the point. There are as many ways to create character as there are writers, and this anthology features a rich assortment of exceptional examples.The writers featured in The Book of Other People include:Aleksandar HemonNick HornbyHari KunzruToby LittDavid MitchellGeorge SaundersColm T?ib?nChris Ware, and more.
In a snowbound village in the German mountains, a young woman discovers an extraordinary secret. Before she can reveal it, she disappears. All that survives is a picture of a mysterious medieval playing card that has perplexed scholars for centuries. Nick Ash does research for the FBI in New York. Six months ago his girlfriend Gillian walked out and broke his heart. Now he's the only person who can save her – if it's not too late. Within hours of getting her message, Nick finds himself on the run, delving deep into the past before it catches up with him. Hunted across Europe, Nick follows Gillian's trail into the heart of a five-hundred-year-old mystery. But across the centuries, powerful forces are closing around him. There are men who have devoted their lives to keeping the secret, and they will stop at nothing to protect it.
Tamara Goodwin has always got everything she’s ever wanted. Born into a family of wealth, she grew up in a mansion with its own private beach, a wardrobe full of designer clothes, and a large four poster bed complete with a luxurious bathroom en suite. She’s always lived in the here and now, never giving a second thought to tomorrow.But then suddenly her dad is gone and life for Tamara and her mother changes forever. Left with a mountain of debt, they have no choice but to sell everything they own and move to the ...
