Лайонел Шрайвер4.3 У этой женщины есть все: любящий муж, успешный бизнес, жилье в престижном районе. Ева очень счастлива и благополучна; она не привыкла себе в чем-либо отказывать… да и зачем? Райская жизнь, и казалось, так будет всегда. Но Ева решает родить ребенка: для идеальной картинки добропорядочной американской семьи не хватает последнего штриха.
Какую цену заплатит эта женщина за любовь к сыну, не мог предположить никто.
Joyce Carol Oates0.0 It is 1950 and, after a disastrous honeymoon night, Ariah Erskine's young husband throws himself into the roaring waters of Niagara Falls. Ariah, "the Widow Bride of the Falls," begins a relentless seven-day vigil in the mist, waiting for his body to be found. At her side is confirmed bachelor and pillar of the community Dirk Burnaby, who is unexpectedly drawn to this plain, strange woman. What follows is a passionate love affair, marriage, and family--a seemingly perfect existence. But the tragedy by which they were thrown together begins to shadow them, damaging their idyll with distrust, greed, and even murder.
Set against the mythic-historic backdrop of Niagara Falls in the mid-twentieth century, this haunting exploration of the American family in crisis is a stunning achievement from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation).
Patricia Ferguson0.0 Betty Potts is determined to return the house in her care to its former grandeur. A buried secret links Valerie Elliott to Miss Potts, the scheming warden of Cabotin Court, an old people's home. And with Valerie in her power, Miss Potts can throw out the carpets and sort out the hole in her office wall that's been bothering her... But theirs is not the only secret hidden away in Cabotin Court. From Rosemary, Miss Potts' deputy, to the residents Alethea Troy and Annie Cameron, everyone has their own problems and mysteries.
Шери Холман0.0 Beautifully crafted and driven by warm, vibrant characters, The Mammoth Cheese follows the residents of rural Three Chimneys, Virginia, on their historic journey to re-create the making of the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound "Mammoth Cheese." As the book opens, the town is joyously celebrating the birth of the Frank Eleven (eleven babies simultaneously born to Manda and James Frank after fertility treatments) and enjoying the thrill of notoriety as reform-minded presidential hopeful Adams Brooke visits the newborns. But as autumn progresses and the babies start to die, the community seeks to redeem itself through the making and transporting of a symbolic Mammoth Cheese to Washington, as a gift for the newly elected President Brooke. The cheese is the brainchild of August Vaughn, a farmhand by day and a President Jefferson impersonator by night, and the creation of Margaret Prickett, a single mother and cheese maker trying to save her century-old family farm. As Margaret slips deeper into debt and desperation, her thirteen-year-old daughter, Polly, slides closer to an inappropriate relationship with her radical, attentive history teacher.
Maile Meloy0.0 With her first novel, Liars and Saints, award-winning author Maile Meloy more than delivers on the promise of her highly acclaimed debut story collection, Half in Love. This richly textured novel tells a story of sex and longing,
Marina Lewycka3.6 A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was bestselling author Marina Lewycka's bestselling debut novel which has sold over one million copies worldwide. Lewycka tells the side-splittingly funny story of two feuding sisters, Vera and Nadezhda, who join forces against their father's new, gold-digging girlfriend.
Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcée. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their émigré engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, she will stop at nothing in her pursuit of Western wealth.
But the sisters' campaign to oust Valentina unearths family secrets, uncovers fifty years of Europe's darkest history and sends them back to roots they'd much rather forget . . . .
Joolz Denby4.0 My name is Billie Morgan. And I am a murderer.? Billie is in her forties, running a little jewellery shop in Bradford, watching over her godson Natty, trying to live a quiet life, trying to forget the past. Because Billie has a lot of past to forget. She was a biker chick, one of the Devil's Own, real hardcore seventies Angels, speed and acid-fuelled road demons. She lived a life that was hurtling out of control and it ended in murder. Now, years later, she has to face the consequences. Beautifully written, dark but never despairing, Billie Morgan is a perfect fusion between social realism and classic noir; a powerful, passionate novel about an inability to wipe evil from the slate of our lives. Taut like a Greek tragedy, the book is a moving, empathetic account of a woman?s heroic attempt to escape her destiny.
Клэр Кларк0.0 Clare Clark’s critically acclaimed The Great Stink “reeks of talent” (The Washington Post Book World) as it vividly brings to life the dark and mysterious underworld of Victorian London. Set in 1855, it tells the story of William May, an engineer who has returned home to London from the horrors of the Crimean War. When he secures a job transforming the city’s sewer system, he believes that he will be able to find salvation in the subterranean world beneath the city. But the peace of the tunnels is shattered by a murder, and William is implicated as the killer. Could he truly have committed the crime? How will he bring the truth above-ground?
With richly atmospheric prose, The Great Stink combines fact and fiction to transport readers into London’s putrid past, and marks the debut of a remarkably talented writer in the tradition of the very best historical novelists
Нелл Лейшон0.0 Written in a lyrical yet spare style, Black Dirt explores the guilty silences that bind family members together - and sometimes keep them apart. It is the tale of a father and his family told, like the layering of the earth, in different tones and textures.
Michelle Lovric0.0 I was an unwilling nun, bundled into the convent by a family that had briefly lost its head . . .
The nuns caught me early by my sweet tooth, hanging sugared almonds, balsamic lozenges, and candied fruit in the humid swoop of the orchard branches whenever we went . . .
I married Christ in a delirium spun of sweetened wine. I was only bitter later, when I saw little girls dreambound in the smell of almonds and burnt sugar in the orchard. For by then of course I knew full well . . . that God did not make such trees.
So begins The Remedy, a lush and riveting new work of historical fiction by the author of the The Floating Book.
Set against the vivid, haunting backdrops of eighteenth-century Venice and London, The Remedy weaves together the stories of three mesmerizing characters: Venetian actress Mimosina Dolcezza -- snatched from a convent as a young woman, employed as an actress and agente provocatrice by powerful and shadowy European power brokers; the dark prince of London's medical underworld, the roguish Valentine Greatrakes; and the strange, peevish child-woman Pevenche, whose fate and identity are at the heart of the book's mystery. The love affair between Mimosina and Valentine begins in the wake of a murder and tumbles forward based on dangerous secrets and elaborate lies. As the lovers unravel the tangled truths of each other's pasts, The Remedy lures us along a path from the dank environs of London's Bankside to the vibrant streets of Venice, through playhouses and brothels, convents and crypts, with a sensual eye for detail that breathes heady, intoxicating life into the era.
Long-listed for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, The Remedy is scholarly, seductive, and teeming with Rabelaisian characters -- a gorgeous novel that will keep the reader aching with suspense and haunted long after the final page is turned.
Триша Вастведт0.0 Tricia Wastvedt's debut novel, met with critical acclaim in England, is a hypnotically readable portrait of a community scarred, but eventually reawakened, by its grief. Two children drown during the summer of 1958 in the English village of Cameldip. Their parents, Isabel and Robert, are bound together in guilt and anger, and as the years pass, the tragedy weaves itself into the invisible fabric of village life.
Robert, finding solace in labor, builds several tree houses that transform the look of the town, and as the years pass the structures grow entwined with other houses. It is thirty years after the tragedy when Anna, a young pregnant woman escaping her life in London, arrives in Cameldip and is taken in by Isabel. As Anna slowly uncovers the secrets of the town's past, she becomes inexorably drawn into the conflict in which Isabel and Robert have been locked for three decades. A story of families, old scars, and new beginnings, The River is a lyrical and haunting tale of betrayal, failure, love, and fortitude.
Кейт Аткинсон3.7 В романе ПРЕСТУПЛЕНИЯ ПРОШЛОГО частному детективу Джексону Броуди предстоит заняться делами, которые полиция давно списала в архив: о таинственном ночном исчезновении маленькой девочки из родительского сада; о немотивированном убийстве дочери известного адвоката, помогавшей ему в офисе; и о кровавом эпизоде домашнего насилия в молодой семье, живущей на ферме. Казалось бы, между всеми ними нет ничего общего, да и следы простыли давно, однако ниточки, переплетаясь, тянутся в настоящее и самым неожиданным образом сводят героев - каждый со своими скелетами в шкафах...
Сью Джи0.0 It's the winter of 1860 when Richard Allen, a young curate, travels to a small hamlet outside Hereford to take up his first position. It's in this quiet place of wind and trees, birds and water that Richard is to fall passionately in love - but he cannot find fulfilment, for his lover is Susannah Beddoes, the wife of the vicar of his new parish. As Richard's feelings challenge him to his core, he develops a strange relationship with another woman, the solitary and eccentric Edith Clare. Against the backdrop of immense social and industrial change, the consequences of Richard and Susannah's affair are dramatic as they - as well as Oliver Beddoes - grapple with doubt and what it means to lose faith when the great certainties are in question. And throughout it all, the crossing-keeper's daughter Alice Birley - an observer of incidents and events she does not fully understand - has her own part to play...
Миранда Хирн0.0 Alongside his brilliant naval career, Lady Hamilton was Nelson's other great obsession, and this intimate portrait of their love affair illustrates how England's most celebrated admiral was captivated by this vivacious, strong-minded and passionate woman, who began life in poverty yet rose to marry an aristocrat and to consort with kings. But it is the complex relationship between Horatia and the woman she believed was only her godmother that forms the heart of this poignant, absorbing novel. Shifting between the idyll of Horatia's childhood before Nelson's death at Trafalgar and the gloom of Emma's Calais rooms nine years later, Nelson's Daughter offers a vivid and beguiling vision of Nelson's most personal legacy.
Ингрид Хилл0.0 In Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a dangerous rescue effort draws the ears and eyes of the entire country. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl has fallen down a mine shaft--"the only sound is an astonished tiny intake of breath from Ursula as she goes down, like a penny into the slot of a bank, disappeared, gone." It is as if all hope for life on the planet is bound up in the rescue of this little girl, the first and only child of a young woman of Finnish extraction and her Chinese-American husband. One TV viewer following the action notes that the Wong family lives in a decrepit mobile home and wonders why all this time and money is being "wasted on that half-breed trailer-trash kid." In response, the novel takes a breathtaking leap back in time to visit Ursula's most remarkable ancestors: a third-century-B.C. Chinese alchemist; an orphaned playmate of a seventeenth-century Swedish queen; Professor Alabaster Wong, a Chautauqua troupe lecturer (on exotic Chinese topics) traveling the Midwest at the end of the nineteenth century; her great-great-grandfather Jake Maki, who died at twenty-nine in a Michigan iron mine cave-in; and others whose richness and history are contained in the induplicable DNA of just one person--little Ursula Wong.
Ursula's story echoes those of her ancestors, many of whom so narrowly escaped not being born that her very existence--like ours--comes to seem a miracle. Ambitious and accomplished, Ursula, Under is, most of all, wonderfully entertaining--a daring saga of culture, history, and heredity.
Кристина Дуайер Хикки4.5 Tragic, funny and utterly unsentimental, Christine Dwyer Hickey's "Tatty" is a devastating, affecting journey into the mind of a child. With the brutal clarity and touching honesty of a child, "Tatty" tells the story of her alcoholic family. The result is a stunning portrait of a disintegrating family and the child lost within it.
Кира Кокрейн0.0 Trapped on the tiny prison island where her father works as a correctional officer, 13-year-old Rita Mae Jones longs to escape. Rita Mae cannot understand why her alarmingly mismatched parents chose to come to this claustrophobic, brooding place ten years before. Even less can she understand why her emotionally repressed, socially ambitious mother and her fond but ineffectual father came to be married in the first place. But there are many things Rita Mae doesn't understand about her family. A prison riot is the catalyst which kickstarts a series of shocking revelations as the Jones family's disturbing secrets come tumbling into the open - with bizarre, alarming and wholly unexpected results.
Мег Розофф3.6 «Все изменилось тем летом, когда я приехала в гости к своим английским кузенам. Отчасти так получилось из-за войны, война вообще многое изменила, но я почти не помню жизни до войны, так что в этой книге — моей книге — довоенная жизнь не в счет.
Почти все изменилось из-за Эдмунда.
Вот как это случилось.»
Мег Розофф — автор книг для детей и подростков, член Королевского литературного общества, лауреат премии Астрид Линдгрен. Родилась в США, но живет в Англии.
«Как я теперь живу» — ее дебютный роман, который сразу стал бестселлером, был переведен на несколько языков, удостоен множества премий, по нему сняли фильм. Это антиутопия, в которой смешиваются мир подростка, головокружительная любовь и война — жестокая, не всегда явная, но от этого не менее страшная.
Нелл Фройденбергер0.0 Award-winning US writer Nell Freudenberger's stunning debut collection A collection of five stories, Lucky Girls is set in India and southern Asia. The characters -- rootless, often en route to someplace else -- find themselves variously attracted to or repelled by unfamiliar landscapes where every object seems strange and every emotion is heightened. Living according to alien rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unexpected ways: in the title story, a young woman who has been involved in an affair with an Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death; the protagonist of 'Outside the Eastern Gate' returns to her childhood home in Delhi to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother.
