In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice.
How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976. Views: 388
A Twist of Fate pulled us effortlessly into the world of Lexi Reed - the feisty, smart, sexy and career driven PR manager whose world was turned upside down when she met and began representing her favourite rock band, Power Station. This opportunity of a lifetime not only capitulated Lexi into a new and exciting world but onto a hot and steamy path with Alex Stone, the band's lead guitarist. Their passion simmered as they tired to maintain their secret relationship, leaving both Alex and Lexi wanting more than the "no strings, sex only" agreement they had negotiated. Hearts and rules were broken as Lexi learned the hard way, you can't negotiate with emotions, least of all love.In this companion novella, we get to examine what has happened behind the scenes from different perspectives, told to us by the characters themselves. Through the eyes of Alex and others we get a clearer view of how Lexi's arrival affects not only dynamics of the band but their personal relationships with... Views: 387
Crowds make Fausto nervous. Or, to be more precise still, everything makes Fausto nervous. This presenter, for instance. He’d love to throw the radio out of the window the moment the guy goes, ‘News!’, and then proceeds to reel them off, all those boring, predictable Sunday news.Synopsis eBooks 1-6: in Book 1, readers are introduced to the four Great Dragons and all the problems they’ve had since they lost the Pearl.In the North, there’s Norbert, a frost-breathing dragon who isnow breathing fire and his Ice Crystal Palace is melting. In the East, Esma is crying and breathing out acid, her Grand Sand Castle and moat a dumping ground for waste. In the West, Wesley wanders his vast WallywoodHills Mansion despised and all alone, his people starving and jobless, their woodlands flattened to make way for Wesley’s factories. And in the South, Shawnee, a former beauty, is losing her looks and her Coral Reef Grotto is cracking and crumbling. What‘s going on, and what’s all this got to do with the lost Pearl? The travellers set off to find out.In turn, eBooks 2-6 take readers to the Four Corners of the World to meet the Great Dragons and learn a little more about each piece of the puzzle of the lost Pearl. With the aid of madcap friends they meet along the way, including a fierce but clumsy polar bear, eight rapping, dancing Fairy Dragons and a majestic komodo dragon, the travellers encounter the Great Dragons of the Four Corners of the World. As they witness their troubles and the poor state of the people, places and creatures around them, the travellers realise the missing Pearl has a lot to answer for. But it’s not until Grandmother Earth catches up with them, to set them a new challenge, that the final piece of the puzzle falls into place: they find the Pearl, but it it’s not what they thought it was. The Great Dragons have been careless with it, and that’s why they’re now suffering. Their problems can only be overcome once the Pearl is restored. Grandmother Earth now entrusts this job to her grandchildren and their team of extraordinary friends: to put right what she and the Grand Dragons got wrong. Views: 387
Their red-hot reunion
is off the charts!
They made passionate music together.
Has this heartbreaker changed his tune?
Songwriter Eden Voss had the perfect man—sexy, charming, talented and hers. Until record executive Blaine Woodson broke her heart to save his fledging label. Now music’s bad boy is back, begging for her songwriting skills in his studio...and her lovemaking skills after hours. Eden vows to keep things strictly business this time. But there is nothing professional about the heat still between them… Views: 387
The House of Sleep - Jonathan Coe's comic tale of love and obsession
Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events; Robert has his life changed for ever by the misunderstandings arising from her condition; Terry, the insomniac, spends his wakeful nights fuelling his obsession with movies; and the increasingly unstable Dr Gregory Dudden sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which must be eradicated. . .
A group of students sharing a house. They fall in and out of love, they drift apart. Yet a decade later they are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep - and each other. . .
Winner of the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger, The House of Sleep is an intensely moving and frequently hilarious novel about love, obsession and sleep.
'Moving, clever, pleasurable, smart...one of the best books of the year' Malcolm Bradbury, The Times
'There are bits that make you laugh out loud and others that make your heart ache' Guardian
'Fiercely clever, witty, wise, hopeful...a compellingly beautiful tale of love and loss' The Times Literary Supplement
Jonathan Coe's novels are filled with biting political satire, moving and astute observations of life and hilarious set pieces that have made him one of the most popular writers of his generation. His other titles, The Accidental Woman, The Rotters' Club (winner of the Everyman Wodehouse prize), The Closed Circle, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! (winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and The Rain Before it Falls, are all available as Penguin paperback. Views: 387
Smoldering flames are still deadly. Raina Sun is in San Francisco, preparing for her cousin's upcoming wedding...to her ex-boyfriend. Even though she is a reluctant bridesmaid, she understands duty to her family. When the bridegroom shows an unusual interest in her fiancé, and a dead body drops in during the rehearsal dinner, Raina is drawn into another murder investigation. She must prove the bridegroom's innocence, or he will reveal a secret that could change her beloved fiancé's life...and not for the better. As things heat up, she learns all families have skeletons, and some are more deadly than others. Among the hundreds of guests, could she find this heartless killer before she becomes the next victim? And will this secret stay hidden? Come join Raina in this next phase in her life—get your copy of Smoldering Flames and Secrets now! Views: 386
Published to tie in with the world premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
In Chekhov's tragi-comedy - perhaps his most popular play - the Gayev family is torn by powerful forces, forces rooted deep in history and in the society around them. Their estate is hopelessly in debt: urged to cut down their beautiful cherry orchard and sell the land for holiday cottages, they struggle to act decisively. Tom Murphy's fine vernacular version allows us to re-imagine the events of the play in the last days of Anglo-Irish colonialism. It gives this great play vivid new life within our own history and social consciousness. Views: 386
Different kinds of lives... A different kind of love. Anna Chapel believes everyone deserves to live their best life. She wants to help Colm Franklin realize that his differences are what makes him special. But his overprotective brother and guardian, Liam Franklin, is afraid Colm will be hurt. Anna's biggest challenge might not be her client, but his brother. Can she convince Liam that Colm deserves to live an independent life? More than that, can she convince Liam that together they can overcome anything and create a family that's truly special because of its differences? Fans of Jacobs' Crib Notes will love this story of a strong woman who recognizes our differences are what makes us special. Views: 386
Hilarious, Darkly Comedic Workplace NovelAttaining the American Dream one lie at a time.Labor Pains is the hysterical debut from C.A. Huggins. It tells the story of Kevin Taylor, a woefully mediocre man, who finds himself at a crossroads in his mid-30's. Everyday his alarm clock wakes him up for the cold realization that he has to go to a job that he downright loathes. His cubicle is his own private jail cell for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.For the past 10 years, all of his efforts to get a promotion or get another job have been thwarted by his indifference towards hard work and overall incompetence. He feels destined to be stuck in the glut of the lower middle-class, living from check to check, never having the ability to do the things he wants to do, and going to a passionless job he hates in order to maintain his mediocre fate.Kevin is then proposed a scenario where he would be guaranteed a promotion at his job by getting all of his rival co-workers fired from their respective... Views: 385
A new collection of short stories by Tommy Dakar. From humour to intrigue, from irony to philosophy, each piece has been carefully constructed to perform its task.An observant boy goes to the park, returns home, and has a conversation with his mother in a fabricated, unlikely, never-happened, plausible, impossible, invented, realistic coming-of-age story. What Never Happened: An Observation, a short story, was first published in Waccamaw, Issue 7.From What Never Happened, An Observation:I was a boy. (Dear reader, for the last time I say to you, please remember that this is only a story, meant to comfort friends, relations, and acquaintances, and as such it only exists in your head and those heads who have heard it.) As a boy, I was not especially different than other boys, though I was somewhat indifferent towards them. Of girls, I remember the existence of none save my mother and other assorted relatives: a passel of cousins, an aunt, and a grandmother. I was predominantly interested in myself, though not in a selfish way. I was simply not aroused by games of sport or make-believe or conversation. Allow me to make myself clear: sport, make-believe, and conversation were three of my most cherished pastimes, but they were activities I preferred to conduct with myself. With others these pastimes were diluted, somehow losing their piquancy.What I was most passionate about, though, was observing. I would sit for hours in the same spot, quietly taking mental note of my surroundings. I would not speak my observations, nor would I write them down. I would simply take mental note of the position of a fork on a table, of the number of tines it had, of the sharpness of those tines, of the curvature of the head, of how gracefully the head met the handle at the neck, of any ornamentation on the handle, of any fingerprints. I would note the construction of the table, how its disparate parts were joined, the lay of the grain of the wood, the pattern of the sunlight splashed on the tabletop, the angle of sunlight entering through the window, the shape of a leaf outside the window. When I could fit words to my observations, I did (silently), but I never forced the issue. I did not wish to force my surrounding reality to conform to words if no words were adequate. For example, if the pattern of light on the table was rhombic, I would say so silently to myself, and so too if I could say with reasonable probability that the light passing through the window (forgiving refraction) entered the kitchen at an angle of 30, 45, or 60 degrees while my mother spread peanut butter and jelly on bread for me, I would use just those words. But more often than not, the pattern of light was decidedly unrhombic and indeed indescribable, just as the angle of the sunlight’s penetration was generally immeasurable and inestimable. In such instances, I would wordlessly observe and make wordless mental note. The words, after all, were not what I was after. Words were merely tools. I was after the thing itself. Views: 385
Ina fails to seduce a snobby, bat-eared English pathologist at work. Romance meets Death includes an explanation of Ina's artwork.A short story from 2005 from Ina Disguise. The tale of a young artist, trying not to be. Ina gets into trouble at work in the course of failing to seduce an ugly pathologist. Ina makes a film and narrowly escapes losing her income. Views: 385
