Download or read book Joss and Gold written by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2011-04-15 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The novel is set in 1969 Kuala Lumpur, against a backdrop of political turmoil and social changes. Married to wealthy, conservative Henry, English literature graduate Li An is torn between the comforting lull of a secure world and the seductive erotism of the unknown, foreign spaces. When tragedy strikes on the personal and societal levels, Li An and her young friends find their lives turned upside down, and each must make decisions that will have far-reaching repercussions. Masterfully evoking the passions and struggles across three nations and decades, this book weaves a poignant fabric from the complex threads of human identity, friendships, and gender relations, all of which are utterly inextricable from the others.

Download or read book Unscripted Joss Byrd written by Lygia Day Peñaflor and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2016-08-23 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood critics agree. Joss Byrd is "fiercely emotional," a young actress with "complete conviction," and a "powerhouse." Joss Byrd is America's most celebrated young actress, and but on the set of her latest project, a gritty indie film called The Locals, Joss's life is far from glamorous. While struggling with her mother's expectations, a crush on her movie brother, and a secret that could end her career, Joss must pull off a performance worthy of a star. When her renowned, charismatic director demands more than she is ready to deliver, Joss must go off-script to stay true to herself.

Download or read book What We Keep written by Bill Shapiro and published by Running Press Adult. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from Cheryl Strayed, Mark Cuban, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Melinda Gates, Joss Whedon, James Patterson, and many more--this fascinating collection gives us a peek into 150 personal treasures and the secret histories behind them. All of us have that one object that holds deep meaning--something that speaks to our past, that carries a remarkable story. Bestselling author Bill Shapiro collected this sweeping range of stories--he talked to everyone from renowned writers to Shark Tank hosts, from blackjack dealers to teachers, truckers, and nuns, even a reformed counterfeiter--to reveal the often hidden, always surprising lives of objects.

Download or read book Master of Shadows written by Joss Walker and published by Two Tales Press. This book was released on 2022-07-31 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a world on the brink of chaos, CIA agent Jayne Thorne faces her deadliest mission yet. A ruthless cabal of dark sorcerers, hell-bent on unleashing chaos and destruction upon the world, seeks a long-lost grimoire to unleash a catastrophic magical weapon. With her mentor missing and time running out, Jayne must navigate a treacherous web of secrets and lies to uncover the truth before it's too late. As Jayne races against the clock, she finds herself in the heart of Paris, battling a terrifying poison that renders even the most powerful magicians helpless. Haunted by shocking revelations about her family's hidden past and strained by her increasingly volatile relationship with Cillian, whose Rogue magic clashes with her own otherworldly powers, Jayne is pushed to her limits. But the stakes have never been higher. Jayne's enemies demand she locate the ancient necromantic grimoire, threatening to execute her mentor if she fails. Desperate and running out of options, Jayne must unlock a forbidden power that could resurrect the Master of Shadows—a long-dead sorcerer wielding devastating dark magic. With the fate of the world hanging in the balance, Jayne must confront unimaginable threats, protect her team from the deadliest magical forces she's ever encountered, and make an impossible choice that will determine the destiny of humanity itself. In this thrilling tale of sacrifice, secrets, and the ultimate battle between light and darkness, Jayne Thorne must risk everything to save the world from plunging into eternal shadow. This award winning romantic fantasy set in a unique magical world is perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo, Linsey Hall, McKenzie Hunter, and Patricia Briggs!

Download or read book Beat the Turtle Drum written by Constance C. Greene and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-01-27 with total page 85 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ALA Notable Book and an IRA-CBC Children’s Choice: Losing your sister can mean losing your best friend too Thirteen-year-old Kate is thrilled for her sister, Joss, when Joss finds out she gets to keep a horse for a week as a birthday present. Then in one tragic moment, all of the happiness is gone, and numbness and grief overwhelm the family. Kate cannot imagine how she’ll survive but knows somehow she must come to terms with her loss. In this heart-wrenching story, Kate strives to find a place where joyful memories and painful loss can coexist.

Download or read book Future Feeling written by Joss Lake and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel An embittered dog walker obsessed with a social media influencer inadvertently puts a curse on a young man—and must adventure into mysterious dimension in order to save him—in this wildly inventive, delightfully subversive, genre-nonconforming debut novel about illusion, magic, technology, kinship, and the emergent future. The year is 20__, and Penfield R. Henderson is in a rut. When he's not walking dogs for cash or responding to booty calls from his B-list celebrity hookup, he's holed up in his dingy Bushwick apartment obsessing over holograms of Aiden Chase, a fellow trans man and influencer documenting his much smoother transition into picture-perfect masculinity on the Gram. After an IRL encounter with Aiden leaves Pen feeling especially resentful, Pen enlists his roommates, the Witch and the Stoner-Hacker, to put their respective talents to use in hexing Aiden. Together, they gain access to Aiden's social media account and post a picture of Pen's aloe plant, Alice, tied to a curse: Whosoever beholds the aloe will be pushed into the Shadowlands. When the hex accidentally bypasses Aiden, sending another young trans man named Blithe to the Shadowlands (the dreaded emotional landscape through which every trans person must journey to achieve true self-actualization), the Rhiz (the quasi-benevolent big brother agency overseeing all trans matters) orders Pen and Aiden to team up and retrieve him. The two trace Blithe to a dilapidated motel in California and bring him back to New York, where they try to coax Blithe to stop speaking only in code and awkwardly try to pass on what little trans wisdom they possess. As the trio makes its way in a world that includes pitless avocados and subway cars that change color based on occupants' collective moods but still casts judgment on anyone not perfectly straight, Pen starts to learn that sometimes a family isn't just the people who birthed you. Magnificently imagined, linguistically dazzling, and riotously fun, Future Feeling presents an alternate future in which advanced technology still can't replace human connection but may give the trans community new ways to care for its own.

Download or read book Among The White Moonfaces written by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first woman and Asian to win the Commonwealth Prize, Among the White Moon Faces is an autobiography that chronicles the confusion of personal identity—linguistically, culturally, and sexually. The English-educated child of a Chinese father and a Peranakan mother, Lim grew up in post-colonial Malaysia with a tangle of names, languages and roles. The deep-seated, cross-cultural ironies of this fragmented identity also echo throughout this memoir; from the love-hate relationship she shares with a neglectful father and an estranged mother, the pain of hunger suffered during childhood, to her Anglophile education and the loneliness of cultural displacement. Lim eventually finds reconciliation in her perpetual exile, using the solace of writing to create a sense of place and to counter the pull of ancient ghosts.

Download or read book On Gold Mountain written by Lisa See and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When she was a girl, Lisa See spent summers in the cool, dark recesses of her family`s antiques store in Los Angeles' Chinatown. There, her grandmother and great-aunt told her intriguing, colourful stories about their family`s past - stories of missionaries, concubines, tong wars, glamorous nightclubs, and the determined struggle to triumph over racist laws and discrimination. They spoke of how Lisa`s great-great-grandfather emigrated from his Chinese village to the United States, and how his son followed him. As an adult, See spent fives years collecting the details of her family`s remarkable history. She interviewd nearly one hundred relatives and pored over documents at the National Archives, the immigration office, and in countless attics, basements, and closets for the initmate nuances of her ancestors` lives. The result is a vivid, sweeping family portriat that is att once particular and universal, telling the story not only of one family, but of the Chinese people in America - and of America itself, a country that both welcomes and reviles its immigrants like no other culture in the world.

Download or read book Mariah Mundi written by G.P. Taylor and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh out of school, young Mariah faces a new chapter of his life, living in the Prince Regent hotel built into the face of a cliff. His job is to assist the magician in the stage shows held for the guests. Above ground, the guests are offered every form of luxury. Below ground, in the green, slime-dripping walls of the basements, is where the magic show equipment is kept - and lurking in an Egyptian sarcophagus amongst scuttling sea-creatures is a secret that draws Mariah into the path of villainy, plots and possible death.

Download or read book Gold Fame Citrus written by Claire Vaye Watkins and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, Vanity Fair, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, Refinery 29, Men's Journal, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Book Riot, Los Angeles Magazine, Powells, BookPage and Kirkus Reviews The much-anticipated first novel from a Story Prize-winning “5 Under 35” fiction writer. In 2012, Claire Vaye Watkins’s story collection, Battleborn, swept nearly every award for short fiction. Now this young writer, widely heralded as a once-in-a-generation talent, returns with a first novel that harnesses the sweeping vision and deep heart that made her debut so arresting to a love story set in a devastatingly imagined near future: Unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. With the Central Valley barren, underground aquifer drained, and Sierra snowpack entirely depleted, most “Mojavs,” prevented by both armed vigilantes and an indifferent bureaucracy from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to internment camps. In Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, two young Mojavs—Luz, once a poster child for the Bureau of Conservation and its enemies, and Ray, a veteran of the “forever war” turned surfer—squat in a starlet’s abandoned mansion. Holdouts, they subsist on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise. The couple’s fragile love somehow blooms in this arid place, and for the moment, it seems enough. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, the thirst for a better future begins. They head east, a route strewn with danger: sinkholes and patrolling authorities, bandits and the brutal, omnipresent sun. Ghosting after them are rumors of a visionary dowser—a diviner for water—and his followers, who whispers say have formed a colony at the edge of a mysterious sea of dunes. Immensely moving, profoundly disquieting, and mind-blowingly original, Watkins’s novel explores the myths we believe about others and tell about ourselves, the double-edged power of our most cherished relationships, and the shape of hope in a precarious future that may be our own.

Download or read book Echoes and Empires written by Morgan Rhodes and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-01-04 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of the Falling Kingdoms series comes the first book in a brand-new duology about forbidden magic and dangerous secrets, for readers of Victoria Aveyard and Margaret Rogerson. Josslyn Drake knows only three things about magic: it’s rare, illegal, and always deadly. So when she’s caught up in a robbery gone wrong at the Queen’s Gala and infected by a dangerous piece of magic—one that allows her to step into the memories of an infamously evil warlock—she finds herself living her worst nightmare. Joss needs the magic removed before it corrupts her soul and kills her. But in Ironport, the cost of doing magic is death, and seeking help might mean scheduling her own execution. There’s nobody she can trust. Nobody, that is, except wanted criminal Jericho Nox, who offers her a deal: his help extracting the magic in exchange for the magic itself. And though she’s not thrilled to be working with a thief, especially one as infuriating (and infuriatingly handsome) as Jericho, Joss is desperate enough to accept. But Jericho is nothing like Joss expects. The closer she grows to Jericho and the more she sees of the world outside her pampered life in the city, the more Joss begins to question the beliefs she’s always taken for granted—beliefs about right and wrong, about power and magic, and even about herself. In an empire built on lies, the truth may be her greatest weapon.

Download or read book Gold written by Chris Cleave and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on the tradition of Little Bee, Chris Cleave again writes with elegance, humor, and passion about friendship, marriage, parenthood, tragedy, and redemption. What would you sacrifice for the people you love? KATE AND ZOE met at nineteen when they both made the cut for the national training program in track cycling—a sport that demands intense focus, blinding exertion, and unwavering commitment. They are built to exploit the barest physical and psychological edge over equally skilled rivals, all of whom are fighting for the last one tenth of a second that separates triumph from despair. Now at thirty-two, the women are facing their last and biggest race: the 2012 Olympics. Each wants desperately to win gold, and each has more than a medal to lose. Kate is the more naturally gifted, but the demands of her life have a tendency to slow her down. Her eight-year-old daughter Sophie dreams of the Death Star and of battling alongside the Rebels as evil white blood cells ravage her personal galaxy—she is fighting a recurrence of the leukemia that nearly killed her three years ago. Sophie doesn’t want to stand in the way of her mum’s Olympic dreams, but each day the dark forces of the universe seem to be massing against her. Devoted and self-sacrificing Kate knows her daughter is fragile, but at the height of her last frenzied months of training, might she be blind to the most terrible prognosis? Intense, aloof Zoe has always hovered on the periphery of real human companionship, and her compulsive need to win at any cost has more than once threatened her friendship with Kate—and her own sanity. Will she allow her obsession, and the advantage she has over a harried, anguished mother, to sever the bond they have shared for more than a decade? Echoing the adrenaline-fueled rush of a race around the Velodrome track, Gold is a triumph of superbly paced, heart-in-throat storytelling. With great humanity and glorious prose, Chris Cleave examines the values that lie at the heart of our most intimate relationships, and the choices we make when lives are at stake and everything is on the line.

Download or read book Our Picnics in the Sun written by Morag Joss and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2013-11-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SACRAMENTO BEE Award-winning author Morag Joss has penned a beautifully rendered, meticulously crafted, and terrifyingly gripping novel of suspense—ideal for the fans of Eowyn Ivey, Ruth Rendell, and Barbara Vine. One night, two strangers. A damage that cannot be undone. For thirty years, Howard and Deborah Morgan have poured all their energy and modest savings into Stoneyridge, a smallholding deep in the English moors. Howard putters with pottery, Deborah dabbles in weaving, and both struggle to tend sheep and chickens and live off the land. But what began with simple dreams of solitude and sunlit picnics in the hills has given way to a harsher reality. To help with finances, they decide to turn Stoneyridge into a bed-and-breakfast. But a sudden stroke leaves Howard incapacitated and Deborah overwhelmed. Howard’s world, once so limitless, has shrunk to the confines of their crumbling house; Deborah’s main joy now comes in the form of a brief weekly email from their successful son, who lives abroad. Then, late one evening, two men arrive needing a room for the night—and set off a chain of events that uncovers the relics of old tragedies. New wounds are cut deep, betrayals and cruelties intermix with tenderness and love. And through it all, Stoneyridge quietly hides the bitter and transformative truth. Evocative, intimately claustrophobic, and psychologically complex, Our Picnics in the Sun is a novel of stunning prose and knife-sharp insight. Morag Joss crafts a modern masterpiece of rising tension that binds and releases like a beating heart, propelling readers to a final page that resonates and haunts. Praise for Our Picnics in the Sun “The British writer’s latest is a psychological dazzler.”—Entertainment Weekly Praise for Morag Joss’s Among the Missing “This remarkable novel has an abundance of suspense at its core, put forth in beautiful prose that all but glows on the page. . . . [Joss] keeps a jittery tension going as the novel spins toward its violent, grand-scaled finale.”—Booklist (starred review) “A haunting, harrowing punch to the heart, Among the Missing is flat-out brilliant. About the secrets we keep, the lives we are desperate to live, and the chances we miss, it’s a psychological dazzler. Truly, one of my favorite books of this year—or any year.”—Caroline Leavitt, author of Is This Tomorrow “Morag Joss is a writer who knows the old truth that genuine suspense comes not from car chases or gunplay but from the clash of conflicting hearts. Among the Missing is evidence not of a rising talent but of one already fully formed.”—Thomas H. Cook, author of Sandrine’s Case “A spectacular psychological thriller . . . Joss’s beautiful, evocative novel is filled with tension and suspense.”—RT Book Reviews

Download or read book Firefly The Magnificent Nine written by James Lovegrove and published by Titan Books (US, CA). This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second original novel tying into the critically acclaimed and much-missed Firefly series from creator Joss Whedon. An old flame of Jayne Cobb's, Temperance McCloud, sends a message to Serenity, begging him for help. She lives on the arid, far-flung world of Tethys, and bandits are trying to overrun her town to gain control of their water supply: the only thing standing between its people and dustbowl ruin. Jayne tries to persuade the Serenity crew to join the fight, but it is only when he offers Vera, his favourite gun, as collateral that Mal realises he's serious. When the Serenity crew land at a hardscrabble desert outpost called Coogan's Bluff, they discover two things: an outlaw gang with an almost fanatical devotion to their leader who will stop at nothing to get what they want, and that Temperance is singlehandedly raising a teenage daughter, born less than a year after Temperance and Jayne broke up. A daughter by the name of Jane McCloud...

Download or read book The Book Of Gold Leaves written by Mirza Waheed and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-10-30 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016* Mirza Waheed's extraordinary new novel The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking love story set in war-torn Kashmir. In an ancient house in the city of Srinagar, Faiz paints exquisite Papier Mache pencil boxes for tourists. Evening is beginning to slip into night when he sets off for the shrine. There he finds the woman with the long black hair. Roohi is prostrate before her God. She begs for the boy of her dreams to come and take her away. Roohi wants a love story. An age-old tale of love, war, temptation, duty and choice, The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking tale of a what might have been, what could have been, if only. 'I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet it is tinged with melancholy and grief, as is the story it tells' Nadeem Aslam (on The Collaborator) 'Waheed's prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris' Metro (on The Collaborator) Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir. His debut novel The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also book of the year for The Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard and Telegraph India, among others. Waheed has written for the BBC, The Guardian, Granta, Al Jazeera English and the New York Times. He lives in London.

Download or read book Rivers of Gold written by Hugh Thomas and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-11-20 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the greatest historians of the Spanish world, here is a fresh and fascinating account of Spain’s early conquests in the Americas. Hugh Thomas’s magisterial narrative of Spain in the New World has all the characteristics of great historical literature: amazing discoveries, ambition, greed, religious fanaticism, court intrigue, and a battle for the soul of humankind. Hugh Thomas shows Spain at the dawn of the sixteenth century as a world power on the brink of greatness. Her monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, had retaken Granada from Islam, thereby completing restoration of the entire Iberian peninsula to Catholic rule. Flush with success, they agreed to sponsor an obscure Genoese sailor’s plan to sail west to the Indies, where, legend purported, gold and spices flowed as if they were rivers. For Spain and for the world, this decision to send Christopher Columbus west was epochal—the dividing line between the medieval and the modern. Spain’s colonial adventures began inauspiciously: Columbus’s meagerly funded expedition cost less than a Spanish princess’s recent wedding. In spite of its small scale, it was a mission of astounding scope: to claim for Spain all the wealth of the Indies. The gold alone, thought Columbus, would fund a grand Crusade to reunite Christendom with its holy city, Jerusalem. The lofty aspirations of the first explorers died hard, as the pursuit of wealth and glory competed with the pursuit of pious impulses. The adventurers from Spain were also, of course, curious about geographical mysteries, and they had a remarkable loyalty to their country. But rather than bridging earth and heaven, Spain’s many conquests bore a bitter fruit. In their search for gold, Spaniards enslaved “Indians” from the Bahamas and the South American mainland. The eloquent protests of Bartolomé de las Casas, here much discussed, began almost immediately. Columbus and other Spanish explorers—Cortés, Ponce de León, and Magellan among them—created an empire for Spain of unsurpassed size and scope. But the door was soon open for other powers, enemies of Spain, to stake their claims. Great men and women dominate these pages: cardinals and bishops, priors and sailors, landowners and warriors, princes and priests, noblemen and their determined wives. Rivers of Gold is a great story brilliantly told. More significant, it is an engrossing history with many profound—often disturbing—echoes in the present.

Download or read book Heart of Gold written by Sharon Shinn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a planet torn apart by class and economic divisions and feuding factions, a scientist and a rebel are drawn together in a forbidden love that could change their world forever.... Nolan uses his rational powers of observation to examine more closely the privileges he was born to enjoy—and the people he was raised to despise. Katrini follows her fiercest passions in the struggle to overthrow a legacy of hate—one that has poisoned her family for generations. Between rich and poor, strong and weak, intellect and feeling, only one thing could bring these two opposites together: a passion that is strictly forbidden.