New to Knopf--and now coming into her prime--this acclaimed writer combines noir and the gothic in a novel about two families entwined in their own unhappiness with, at the center, a gruesome and unsolved murder.Late one winter afternoon in upstate New York, George Clare comes home to find his wife murdered and their three-year-old daughter alone--for how many hours?--in her room down the hall. He had recently, begrudgingly, taken a position at the private college nearby teaching art history, and moved his family into this tight-knit, impoverished town. And he is the immediate suspect--the question of his guilt echoing in a story shot through with secrets both personal and professional. While his parents rescue him from suspicion, a persistent cop is stymied at every turn in proving Clare a heartless murderer. The pall of death is ongoing, and relentless; behind one crime are others, and more than twenty years will pass before a hard kind of justice is finally... Views: 145
It begins with a free and joyful act--but from then on, Michael finds it impossible even to remember what it felt like to be free and joyful. When he fires his new rifle into the air on his seventeenth birthday, he never imagines that the bullet will end up killing someone. But a mile away, a man is killed by that bullet as he innocently repairs his roof. And Michael keeps desperately silent while he watches his world crumble.Meanwhile Jenna, the dead man's daughter, copes with desperation of her own. Through her grief, she tries to understand why she no longer feels comfortable with her boyfriend and why a near stranger named Michael keeps appearing in her dreams.Suspenseful and powerfully moving, this is the unforgettable story of an accidental crime and its haunting web of repercussions. Views: 145
Perfect for fans of Maeve Binchy' - Candis. LONELY FARMER SEEKS A WIFE. MUST LIKE COUNTRY LIFE. Dave Stafford wants a wife, and he isn't in a position to be choosy. Living in Buffalo Valley means there aren't a whole lot of women to choose from! So he places an ad and waits for the flood of replies. Only Emma Fowler from Seattle responds. Her little boy needs a father, so she needs to find a husband – and quick! This could be a match made for convenience...but could it also be a match made in heaven? Views: 145
An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence , featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica - and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind - happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where "The Sixteen Pleasures" - now called "The Italian Lover," - is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other... Views: 145
A voyage across the ocean becomes the odyssey of a lifetime for a young Irish woman. . . .Ireland, 1912 . . .Fourteen members of a small village set sail on RMS Titanic, hoping to find a better life in America. For seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy, the journey is bittersweet. Though her future lies in an unknown new place, her heart remains in Ireland with Séamus, the sweetheart she left behind. When disaster strikes, Maggie is one of the few passengers in steerage to survive. Waking up alone in a New York hospital, she vows never to speak of the terror and panic of that fateful night again.Chicago, 1982 . . . Adrift after the death of her father, Grace Butler struggles to decide what comes next. When her great-grandmother Maggie shares the painful secret about Titanic that she's harbored for almost a lifetime, the revelation gives Grace new direction--and leads both her and Maggie to unexpected reunions with those they thought... Views: 145
Inspired by true events surrounding a group of Irish emigrants who sailed on the maiden voyage of R.M.S Titanic, The Girl Who Came Home is a story of enduring love and forgiveness, spanning seventy years. It is also the story of the world’s most famous ship, whose tragic legacy continues to captivate our hearts and imaginations one hundred years after she sank to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean with such a devastating loss of life. In a rural Irish village in April 1912, seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy is anxious about the trip to America. While the thirteen others she will travel with from her Parish anticipate a life of prosperity and opportunity - including her strict Aunt Kathleen who will be her chaperon for the journey - Maggie is distraught to be leaving Séamus, the man she loves with all her heart. As the carts rumble out of the village, she clutches a packet of love letters in her coat pocket and hopes that Séamus will be able to join her in America soon. In Southampton, England, Harry Walsh boards Titanic as a Third Class Steward, excited to be working on this magnificent ship. After the final embarkation stop in Ireland, Titanic steams across the Atlantic Ocean. Harry befriends Maggie and her friends from the Irish group; their spirits are high and life on board is much grander than any of them could have ever imagined. Being friendly with Harold Bride, one of the Marconi radio operators, Harry offers to help Maggie send a telegram home to Séamus. But on the evening of April 14th, when Titanic hits an iceberg, Maggie’s message is only partly transmitted, leaving Séamus confused by what he reads. As the full scale of the disaster unfolds, luck and love will decide the fate of the Irish emigrants and those whose lives they have touched on board the ship. In unimaginable circumstances, Maggie survives, arriving three days later in New York on the rescue ship Carpathia. She has only the nightdress she is wearing, a small case and a borrowed coat, to her name. She doesn’t speak of Titanic again for seventy years. In Chicago, 1982, twenty-one year old Grace Butler is stunned to learn that her Great Nana Maggie sailed on Titanic and sets out to write Maggie's story as a way to resurrect her journalism career. When it is published, Grace receives a surprising phone call, starting a chain of events which will reveal the whereabouts of Maggie’s missing love letters and the fate of those she sailed with seventy years ago. But it isn't until a final journey back to Ireland that the full extent of Titanic’s secrets are revealed and Maggie is able to finally make peace with her past. Views: 145
"You\'re too darned charming." That\'s what the "Old Man" told Jock McChesney, and that\'s why Jock went home and forgot to turn on the lights. "Personality Plus," by Edna Ferber, was the first of a new series of Business Stories by Edna Ferber. Jock McChesney, son of Emma McChesney - one woman in a million, according to "Old Man" Bartholomew Berg - is the hero. With something of his mother\'s splendid courage in his heart, but with nothing of her canny knowledge in his head, Jock fares forth to do battle with the merciless god, Business. The battle ground is the Advertising Profession. There is electricity in the telling of it and wisdom too, and lots of fun. "An intensely interesting story of a young man\'s experience in an advertising agency. Gives many sidelights on real advertising experience and is worthy of careful reading." -Business: The Magazine for Office Store and Factory "Technically the hero is a young American named Jock, but in reality Emma McChesney, \'secretary to the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company,\' is again the principal figure. Those who receive slight intellectual thrills from Miss Ferber\'s humorous observation of American life and those who enjoy reading it as they would enjoy talking over old times with a friend whose turn for epithet and comment pleased them, admire these stories." -The Dial "\'Personality Plus,\' it seems, is the possession in a salesman of such excessive charm that his prospective customers enjoy his society so much that they can\'t do business with him. At first this hindered the activities of Jock McChesney, the wide-awake, sometimes bumptious son of Emma McChesney, once the best saleswoman on the road, a good and clever lady much liked by readers of Miss Ferber\'s former stories. Soon Jock finds himself and makes his hit. The story is intensely modern, humorous, and shrewdly observant of business and of men and women." -The Outlook Views: 145
New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley presents a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers—a housewife and a battle-hardened veteran—fight to protect those they love in The Mere Wife. From the perspective of those who live in Herot Hall, the suburb is a paradise. Picket fences divide buildings—high and gabled—and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and outside—in lawns and on playgrounds—wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall's periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights. For Willa, the wife of Roger Herot (heir of Herot Hall), life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between... Views: 145
The definitive collection of works on a subject that inspired and haunted Charles Bukowski for his entire life: alcohol Charles Bukowski turns to the bottle in this revelatory collection of poetry and prose that includes some of the writer's best and most lasting work. A self-proclaimed "dirty old man," Bukowski used alcohol as muse and as fuel, a conflicted relationship responsible for some of his darkest moments as well as some of his most joyful and inspired. In On Drinking, Bukowski expert Abel Debritto has collected the writer's most profound, funny, and memorable work on his ups and downs with the hard stuff—a topic that allowed Bukowski to explore some of life's most pressing questions. Through drink, Bukowski is able to be alone, to be with people, to be a poet, a lover, and a friend—though often at great cost. As Bukowski writes in a poem simply titled "Drinking,": "for me/it was or/is/a manner of/dying/with boots on/and... Views: 144
The canoe slid up to the pile-bound bank, and the two white men who got out strode towards the residency, which was characteristic, since on a day of that kind an Iberian would certainly have sauntered. The first of them was tall, and thinner even than most white men are who have had the flesh melted from them in tropical Africa. His face was hollow, though he was apparently only some thirty years of age, but it was the face of a strong-willed man, and there was a certain suggestion of optimism in it and his eyes, which was singularly unusual in the case of a man who had spent several years in that country. Even nature is malignant there, and man is steeped in lust and avarice and cruelty, but in spite of this Watson Nares was an optimist as well as an American medical missionary. Views: 144
Review“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, *The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail*“The Street Sweeper is an impressive literary achievement, complex in its organization, meticulous in its plotting and deeply satisfying in its emotional payoffs.” —The Wall Street Journal “Humane, compelling and convincing . . . artfully structured and well written.” —The Sunday Times“Street Sweeper . . . demonstrates how history and fiction can converge to tell stories that cry out to be remembered.” —The Telegraph (UK)“Perlman offers an affecting meditation on memory itself, on storytelling as an act of healing.” —The Guardian (UK)“An extraordinary tale powerfully told, The Street Sweeper reveals how individual people matter in history, how unexpected connections can change lives, and how the stories we hear affect how we see the world. It’s a tremendously moving work that deserves to be read and remembered.” —The Globe and Mail“An expertly told novel of life in immigrant America—and of the terrible events left behind in the old country.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Brilliantly makes personal both the Holocaust and the civil rights movement.... A moving and literate page-turner.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Perlman’s compulsively readable wrestle-with-evil saga is intimate and monumental, wrenching and cathartic.” —Booklist (starred review)“In the best kind of books, there is always that moment when the words on the page swallow the world outside — subway stations fly by, errands go un-run, rational bedtimes are abandoned — and the only goal is to gobble up the next paragraph, and the next, and the next…. [The Street Sweeper is] a towering achievement: a strikingly modern literary novel that brings the ugliest moments of 20th-century history to life, and finds real beauty there.” —Entertainment Weekly “A sprawling work, generous in its spirit and in breadth of imagination, unabashed in its liberal humanism.” —The Age“A rich, engaging story of New York. [Perlman is] an author of rare erudition and compassion. The Street Sweeper is his boldest work yet and, quite probably, the one that will win him a greater following.” —The Washington Post“[An] ambitious yet thoughtful novel.” —The Independent (UK) Product DescriptionFrom the civil rights struggle in the United States to the crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, there are momentous stories everywhere. But only some survive to become history.Lamont Williams is a black man from the Bronx trying to return to a normal life after serving a six-year prison term for a crime for which he was wrongly convicted. Historian Adam Zignelik is an untenured Columbia professor whose career and long-term relationship are falling apart. When Lamont Williams strikes up an unlikely friendship with a patient at the hospital where he works as a janitor, he learns about the Sonderkommando--prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of the Nazi extermination camps. Meanwhile, Adam pursues a promising research topic suggested by a World War II veteran, a topic that might just save him professionally and even personally. When the lives of these two men intersect, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen.The Street Sweeper is an astonishing feat of storytelling that addresses the personal and the political as it sweeps across the globe, through the seminal events of the twentieth century to the present. Honest, hypnotic and redemptive, this is a novel that explores the responsibility of the historian, the weight of history on all of us, and the crucial role that bearing witness plays in breaking the cycle of human cataclysm.From the Hardcover edition. Views: 144
