Carol Shields0.0 The new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of ‘The Stone Diaries’.
Larry’s Party is about being a man in this part of the twentieth century, when so many supports have been removed, and covers the life of its protagonist, Larry, between the ages of 27 and 47, from 1977 to 1997, and illustrates how men have had to change; it looks at how you define masculinity in the post-feminist world. Two strands run through the book: work and goodness. The chapters are at once independent of each other and yet connected, with titles like: Larry’s Friends, Larry’s Look, Larry’s Kid, Larry’s Folks, Larry’s Love, Larry’s Penis, Larry’s Speech, Men called Larry, Larry’s Alternate, Larry’s Party, Larry’s Real Life Life, Larry So Far, Old Larry.
Полин Мелвилл5.0 The whole purpose of magic is the fulfilment and intensification of desire, claims the ventriloquist-narrator as he tells his stories of love and catastrophe. The novel is a parable of miscegenation and racial exclusiveness, of nature defying culture and of the rebellious nature of love.
Ann Patchett3.7 Third – and breakthrough – novel by an acclaimed American writer with an enchanting, quirky voice. ‘The Magician’s Assistant’ is at once a love story and a brilliant portrayal of reinvention about a magician who dies leaving his assistant/wife to discover he has lied about his past.
A magician (with one memorable appearance on the Johnny Carson Show to his credit) takes the name Parsifal. He is gay. He has a Vietnamese lover, Phan. When Phan dies of AIDS, Parsifal marries the woman who has always adored him and who has lived with them both, his assistant Sabine.
Then Parsifal himself dies in California, suddenly and shockingly, of an aneurysm. Parsifal always said that he had no living family and that he came from wealthy upscale Connecticut stock. The reality is very different, as Sabine learns from his lawyer. He came from a poor Nebraska family and they are very much alive. Indeed his mother and sister are on their way to California to meet Sabine, the daughter- and sister-in-law they know nothing about. It is bad that her husband has died. What Sabine must now cope with is coming to terms with his horrific past and the reason he divorced himself from his family and roots.
Cristina García0.0 Reina and Constancia Agüero are Cuban sisters who have been estranged for thirty years. Reina--tall, darkly beautiful, and magnetically sexual--still lives in her homeland. Once a devoted daughter of la revolución, she now basks in the glow of her many admiring suitors, believing only in what she can grasp with her five senses. The pale and very petite Constancia lives in the United States, a beauty expert who sees miracles and portents wherever she looks. After she and her husband retire to Miami, she becomes haunted by the memory of her parents and the unexplained death of her beloved mother so long ago.
Told in the stirring voices of their parents, their daughters, and themselves, The Agüero Sisters tells a mesmerizing story about the power of myth to mask, transform, and finally, reveal the truth--as two women move toward an uncertain, long awaited reunion.
Esther Freud0.0 Sarah is already in her late twenties with an acting career in London and a baby on the way when she learns from her father about Gaglow, his family's grand East German country estate that was seized before the war. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the estate will now come back to them.
Sarah attempts to solicit from her father all he knows about Gaglow: the three lucky sisters, Bina, Martha, and Eva; their masterly governess, Fraulein Schulze; their father, Wolf Belgard, a prosperous Jewish grain dealer; their mother, Marianna, a "vulgar woman" whose children privately mocked her; and their older brother, Emanuel, wretched from the family to serve his country.
Alternating between Sarah's life and her grandmother's childhood during the First World War, Summer at Gaglow unites four generations of an extraordinary family across the vast reaches of silence, place, loss, and time.
Nadine Gordimer0.0 A house gun, like a house cat: a fact of ordinary life, today. How else can you defend yourself against losing your hi-fi equipment, your TV set and computer? The respected Executive Director of an insurance company, Harald, and his doctor wife, Claudia, are faced with something that could never happen to them: their son, Duncan, has committed murder. What kind of loyalty do a mother and father owe a son who has committed the unimaginable horror? How could he have ignored the sanctity of human life? What have they done to influence his character; how have they failed him? Nadine Gordimer's new novel is a passionate narrative of the complex manifestations of that final test of human relations we call love - between lovers of all kinds, and parents and children. It moves with the restless pace of living itself; if it is a parable of present violence, it is also an affirmation of the will to reconciliation that starts where it must, between individual men and women.
Луиза Янг0.0 Evangeline is a single parent whose child is the daughter of her sister, who was killed in a motorbike accident. Evangeline, who was driving the bike, sustained injuries which put an end to her belly dancing career. She now leads an exemplary life, writing and looking after Lily. But when she gets into trouble with the police, she is drawn into the shadowy world of drug dealers, pornographers and bent coppers that seems to have bizarre connections with her sister’s past.
With a plot that makes you rush to the end, this is a thriller without violence, a romance without sentiment and a brilliantly exciting novel.
Jane Urquhart0.0 In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him--his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet, Ontario, who became Austin's model and mistress. Spanning more than seven decades, from the turn of the century to the mid-seventies, The Underpainter--in range, in the sheer power of its prose, and in its brilliant depiction of landscape and the geography of imagination--is Jane Urquhart's most accomplished novel to date, with one of the most powerful climaxes in contemporary fiction.
Michèle Roberts0.0 What does it take for a woman to be judged saintly? In this wily, wonderfully original novel, Michèle Roberts tells the story of the fictional Saint Josephine: her life and death, her childhood and evolution from woman to nun to abbess, her unlikely canonization. The more we discover, the more incredible her sainthood seems. Who was Saint Josephine? Craven nun or fearless miracle worker? Pious role model or seductress? Illuminating Saint Josephine's story are the equally fantastical stories of eleven actual female saints: mad one-armed girls, beauties locked in towers, mothers who encourage their daughters' fatal anorexia, ingenues who seduce and dismember their fathers. Together the stories expose the historical conflict between female sexuality and religion, the roots of female roles in the church, and the troubled love between fathers and daughters. In original exploration of love, faith, and desire, Impossible Saints is a funny, disturbing, and utterly compelling novel about modern women who came before their time.
Anna Quindlen0.0 For eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son’s face, Fran finally made a choice — and ran for both their lives.
Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. In this place she uses a name that isn’t hers, watches over her son, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up to her. Bobby always said he would never let her go, and despite the ingenuity of her escape, Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: It is only a matter of time.
Друзилла Моджеска0.0 The winner of the Australian Booksellers' Award, a novel in which notions and memories and fiction and reality float together as an octogenarian narrates the legend of the silver hands to a woman in her twenties, who in turn passes on a tale to a man who claims it as his own.
Кристина Конинг0.0 ‘A lovely book – sensuous, sad and often extremely funny... an intense, richly textured narrative. Koning deftly weaves multiple viewpoints...’ Patrick Gale, Daily Telegraph
Venezuela, 1953. The war is over and people are trying to rebuild their lives. For the privileged expat commu- nity around the Maracaibo oilfields life is still a hedonis- tic round of cocktail parties, salacious gossip, and illicit liaisons. At the centre of this glamorous, hard-drinking ‘set’ is Texan oilman, Jack Lindberg, and his beautiful English wife, Vivienne. But the war has changed every- thing. Observing the shifts and subterfuges of their world is Tony – Vivienne’s eleven year-old daughter. As the cracks begin to show in her parents’ marriage, and as the façade of colonial society starts to disintegrate, a tragic drama unfolds that will change her life forever.
‘A beautiful evocation of a tropical childhood. I wish I’d written this book.’ Barbara Trapido
‘Koning shows herself to be an expert observer... full of exquisite writing and considerable charm.’ Michael Arditti, Independent
‘Undiscovered Country launches with tremendous gusto into some irresistible stories; the traumas of adults, glimpsed by bewildered children, guilt, sex, pas- sion... and a lot of completely blissful Fifties colonial detail (the frocks, the food, the furniture – what a movie!), It whips along in the grand manner, putting the reader under its elegant spell.’ Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday
Liz Jensen3.7 Five years have passed since a mysterious millennial downpour spread infertility throughout the land. As the Fertility Crisis deepens, veterinarian Bobby Sullivan has other things on his mind - he's on the run after following a husband's orders to exterminate a monkey named Giselle, his wife's cherished baby-substitute. Sullivan finally stops running and opens his veterinary office in a small coastal town, only to learn he has not really escaped - the town is haunted by the Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, whose life is directly linked to the evolution of events confounding Sullivan in the modern world. As a century and a half of logic, religion, magic and science connect, two men, three women and Queen Victoria's entire bestiary are catapulted into a wild and explosively funny farce.
Мишель Хуневен0.0 In a small town among the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley, so the locals claim, nothing ever goes according to plan. "It's a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it's just like life, only different."
Certainly a number of Rito's inhabitants--fewer than a hundred in all--are surprised to be living here. Red Ray, for instance, a wildly alcoholic lawyer who bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an attempt to rehabilitate his marriage and regain the affections of his wife and young son. After destroying those hopes with a spectacular final binge, Red established a drunk farm, Round Rock, on the ruins. There, one day at a time, he follows his new, unexpected calling.
Many months after her husband decamped (almost immediately) for Los Angeles, Libby Daw still lives alone in their trailer, and finds herself even more rooted to the valley she dreams of escaping.
And there's Lewis Fletcher, a sometime graduate student whose keen intelligence is sorely tested by his erratic behavior and current predicament. Without exactly knowing why, and entirely against his wishes--or by default and sheer good luck--he finds himself placed in Ray's care at Round Rock.
As these people seek out or maintain their various niches in the valley, the peculiar history of the place asserts itself. An heiress descended from the original settlers, Billie Fitzgerald still acts as though she owns it all; devoted to her father and son, she obscures her mercurial emotions from even her closest friends. The past also returns with David Ibañez, whose family had harvested the groves for generations--and whose talents and secrets (and thus, he discovers, his future) are inextricably bound to the complex, close-knit town he thought he had left behind.
With insight matched with artistry, Michelle Huneven traces the emerging destinies of these characters as each of them struggles for peace and equilibrium, even happiness and love, against hapless, all-too-human frailty and circumstance.
A vivid evocation of landscape and community, Round Rock derives great power from psychological subtlety, and from affection for and profound understanding of lives strained or broken but on the mend. Fresh, remarkably mature, and constantly surprising, this astonishing debut wins both your trust and your heart.
Кэтрин Хейман0.0 Eleven-year-old Sarah is a watcher. She sees the way the smoke rises from the sulphide works to wreath the little Australian town of Boolaroo; she watches Dad, when he's not being a policeman, breaking horses in the back paddock behind the house. Sarah Sweet has learnt to observe, to be quiet, to avoid notice, filled with a rage so intense it threatens to overwhelm her. THE BREAKING is the story of a family tainted by its force, of a young life haunted by it, but also of the strength it gives to fight back. In its evocation of the parched landscape of rural Australia, the strange cadences of the language and the filmic vividness of its characters, THE BREAKING is a unique, lyrical testament to the power of the human spirit
Сандра Бенитес0.0 Spanning the years between 1932 and 1977, this beautifully told epic is set in the heart of El Salvador, where coffee plantations are the center of life for rich and poor alike. Following three generations of the Prieto Clan and the wealthy family they work for, this is the story of mothers and daughters who live, love, and die for their passions.
