Such wonderful children. Such a beautiful mother. Such a lovely house. Such endless terror!
It wasn't that she didn't love her children. She did. But there was a fortune at stake—a fortune that would assure their later happiness if she could keep the children a secret from her dying father.
So she and her mother hid her darlings away in an unused attic.
Just for a little while.
But the brutal days swelled into agonizing years. Now Cathy, Chris, and the twins wait in their cramped and helpless world, stirred by adult dreams, adult desires, served a meager sustenance by an angry, superstitious grandmother who knows that the Devil works in dark and devious ways. Sometimes he sends children to do his work—children who—one by one—must be destroyed....
'Way upstairs there are four secrets hidden. Blond, beautiful, innocent struggling to stay alive.... Views: 8 847
“Styron’s most impressive performance. . . . Belongs on that small shelf reserved for American masterpieces.” —*Washington Post Book World*
Winner of the 1980 National Book Award, Sophie’s Choice is William Styron’s classic novel of love, survival, and regret, set in Brooklyn in the wake of the Second World War. The novel centers on three characters: Stingo, a sexually frustrated aspiring novelist; Nathan, his charismatic but violent Jewish neighbor; and Sophie, an Auschwitz survivor who is Nathan’s lover. Their entanglement in one another’s lives will build to a stirring revelation of agonizing secrets that will change them forever.
Poetic in its execution, and epic in its emotional sweep, Sophie’s Choice explores the good and evil of humanity through Stingo’s burgeoning worldliness, Nathan’s volatile personality, and Sophie’s tragic past. Mixing elements from Styron’s own experience with themes of the Holocaust and the history of slavery in the American South, the novel is a profound and haunting human drama. The result is Styron at the pinnacle of his literary brilliance.
This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives. Views: 3 717
As the nuclear arms race escalates in the Middle East, the Mossad, KGB, Egyptians, and Fedayeen terrorists will play out the final violent moves in a devastating game where the price of failure is nuclear holocaust... Views: 1 250
Millie, a ghost for 800 years wants only one man--Jonathan, and he's a zombie. To prove himself, Magician Dor volunteers to get the potion that can restore Jonathan to full life. But he has to go back through time to do it, to a peril-haunted, ancient Xanth, where danger lurks at every turn.... Views: 1 208
Never previously published in this country, A Book of Voyages presents writings by various travelers, annotated and introduced by Patrick O’Brian. Most are taken from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; O’Brian felt that, unlike Elizabethan or Victorian accounts, these writings were relatively unknown in our time.
On her journey through the Crimea, Lady Craven witnesses barbaric entertainments in the court of the Tartar Khan. John Bell tells us of his day’s hunting with the Manchu emperor in 1721 outside Peking. An English woman in Madras gives us a detailed description of the extraordinary costume and body decoration of a high-born Indian woman, wife of a nabob.
These and other selections are glimpses of a world, now gone forever, that few readers would ever see for themselves. They are also quite possibly the inspiration for the travels and adventures of O’Brian’s own fictional heroes Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Views: 1 181
This Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel is reissued in this trade paperback edition. Vannemar Morgan's dream of linking Earth with the stars requires a 24,000-mile-high space elevator. But first he must solve a million technical, political, and economic problems while allaying the wrath of God. Includes a new introduction by the author. Views: 1 156
Blair Maynard decides to investigate the mystery of why so many boats disappear in the Bermuda Triangle of the Caribbean. He takes his son with him to the area on "vacation" and, while fishing, both are attacked by an unkempt man and forcibly brought to an uncharted island. On the island, Blair discovers the terrible truth: the inhabitants are a savage group of pirates, made up of outcasts, thieves, and murderers, who have hidden from the outside world, raiding boats to sustain themselves, since the 1700s. Views: 1 134
A powerful novel of America’s Civil War told through the voices of Confederate soldiers, turncoats, and Stonewall Jackson in the weeks leading up to the great slaughter at Antietam
In the summer of 1862, as the Civil War rages on, a ragtag Confederate army consisting of young boys and old men, storekeepers, farmers, and teachers, gathers in Virginia under the leadership of Tom “Stonewall” Jackson, ready to follow their sainted commander to glory—or hell. One of these men, Usaph Bumpass left his wife, Ephie, behind to join the Shenandoah Volunteers, only to discover Ephie’s lover, Decatur Cate, among his comrades. Still, Usaph remains steadfast in his devotion to a cause he does not fully understand, even as troubling memories of home invade his mind on the march north. But a dark destiny awaits brilliant military strategist Jackson and his Southern boys, as hard truths about war, loyalty, love, life, and death are revealed in the fires and bloodshed at Antietam.
A breathtaking work of historical fiction that captures the human face of war as few novels have done before, Confederates has been compared to Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace as an artful, honest, and profoundly moving depiction of the lot of the soldier. Shortlisted for Great Britain’s prestigious Man Booker Prize, this masterful tale of love, duty, and conflict from author of Schindler’s List Thomas Keneally is an enduring and unforgettable classic of Civil War literature. Views: 1 129
Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. "The Right Stuff," he explains, "became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero."
Wolfe's roots in New Journalism were intertwined with the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote had pioneered with In Cold Blood. As Capote did, Wolfe tells his story from a limited omniscient perspective, dropping into the lives of his "characters" as each in turn becomes a major player in the space program. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot's wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne. Chuck Yeager was certainly among the fastest, and his determination to push through Mach 1--a feat that some had predicted would cause the destruction of any aircraft--makes him the book's guiding spirit.
Yet soon the focus shifts to the seven initial astronauts. Wolfe traces Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). The author also produces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism and selfless dedication. By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeager and his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literary merits are secure. Certainly The Right Stuff is the best, the funniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America's manned space program. --Patrick O'Kelley Views: 1 126
The story of the mythical land of Dalemark, and the four young people enlisted by the Undying, the mysterious gods of Dalemark, are continued in this third volume of The Dalemark Quartet. Views: 1 114
?J.P. Donleavy at his wildest, wackiest, sexiest best!OCO ? Chicago Sun Times Schultz ? Sigmund Franz ?IsadorableOCO Schultz ? descended from a long line of Prague Rabbis, born in the New England boondocks, fleeing an obscure furture in ladiesOCO lingerie and determined to make it as a knock-their-socks-off theatrical impresario in LondonOCOs West End. Long before the official premiere, he will host a slew of opening nights featuring the likes of Agnes, Greta and Lady Lulu ? ladies all too eager to impress their talents on Schultz and his aristocratic English ?angelsOCO ? and find himself veering wildly from misfortune to disaster in his exuberant pursuit of erotic adventure, fabulous box-office riches and ? do you believe it? ? true love! ?No contemporary writer is better than J.P. Donleavy at his bestOCO ? The New Yorker " Views: 1 092
Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin tales are widely acknowledged to be the greatest series of historical novels ever written.
Captain Jack Aubrey, RN, arrives in the Dutch East Indies to find himself appointed to the command of the fastest and best-armed frigate in the Navy. He and his friend Stephen Maturin take passage for England in a despatch vessel. But the war of 1812 breaks out while they are en route. Bloody actions precipitate them both into new and unexpected scenes where Stephen’s past activities as a secret agent return on him with a vengeance. Views: 1 088
Henry Wilt is no longer the victim of his own uncontrolled fantasies. As Head of a reconstituted Liberal Studies Department he has assumed power without authority at the Fenland College of Arts & Technology and the fantasies he now confronts are those of political bigots and reactionary bureaucrats - in addition to his wife's enthusiasm for every Organic Alternative under the compost heap and the insistence of his quadruplets on looking at every problem with an unflinching lack of sentimentality.
It is only when Wilt becomes the unintentional participant in a terrorist siege that he is forced to find an answer to the problems of power, which have corrupted greater men than he. With a mental ingenuity born of his innate cowardice, Wilt fights for those liberal values which are threatened both by international terrorism and by the sophisticated methods of police anti-terrorist agents. In the confusion that follows, Wilt resumes his dialogue with the unflagging Inspector Flint and is himself subjected to the indignity of a psycho-political profile.
Bitingly funny and brilliantly written, The Wilt Alternative exposes the farcical anomalies, which have become the social norms of our time. Views: 1 081
By the author of **Blood Meridian** and **All the Pretty Horses**, **Suttree** is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity. Views: 1 079
