Download or read book Mary Ann Sate Imbecile written by Alice Jolly and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2019 Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2019 2019 Walter Scott Prize Academy recommendation If you tell a story oft enough So it become true As the nineteenth century draws towards a close, Mary Ann Sate, an elderly maidservant, sets out to write her truth. She writes of the Valleys that she loves, of the poisonous rivalry between her employer's two sons and of a terrible choice which tore her world apart. Her haunting and poignant story brings to life a period of strife and rapid social change, and evokes the struggles of those who lived in poverty and have been forgotten by history. In this fictional found memoir, novelist Alice Jolly uses the astonishing voice of Mary Ann to recreate history as seen from a woman's perspective and to give joyful, poetic voice to the silenced women of the past.
Download or read book What the Eye Doesn t See written by Alice Jolly and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disgraced Tory politician, Max, is unable to shake off the whiff of scandal following the suspicious death of his best friend's wife. His daughter, Maggie, believes she witnessed something which confirms Max's guilt – but she has told no one what she saw that terrible night. Max's mother, Nanda, living an unconventional life in a ramshackle cottage in Gloucestershire, observes it all with the detachment of one who is nearing her death. As these three characters move through a crucial few months, events unfold in their alternating voices, and so the truth behind the headlines gradually emerges. In this assured and acute observation of ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure, Alice Jolly explores the complex nature of the bond between mother and son, father and daughter, and examines what happens when that bond is stretched to breaking point and the most basic loyalties are called into question.
Download or read book Between the Regions of Kindness written by Alice Jolly and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2019-04-18 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coventry, 1941. The morning after one of the worst nights of the Blitz. Twenty-two-year-old Rose enters the remains of a bombed house to find her best friend dead. Shocked and confused, she makes a split-second decision that will reverberate for generations to come. More than fifty years later, in modern-day Brighton, Rose’s granddaughter Lara waits for the return of her eighteen-year-old son Jay. Reckless and idealistic, he has gone to Iraq to stand on a conflict line as an unarmed witness to peace. Lara holds her parents, Mollie and Rufus, partly responsible for Jay’s departure. But in her attempts to explain their thwarted passions, she finds all her assumptions about her own life are called into question. Then into this damaged family come two strangers – Oliver, a former faith healer, and Jemmy, a young woman devastated by the loss of a baby. Together they help to establish a partial peace – but at what cost?
Download or read book Miss Boston and Miss Hargreaves written by Rachel Malik and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2017-04-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE 2018** 'A surprisingly touching account of hidden lives forced out of the shadows' Sunday Times One day in 1940 Rene Hargreaves walks out on her family and the city to take a position as a Land Girl at the remote Starlight farm. There she will live with and help lonely farmer Elsie Boston. At first Elsie and Rene are unsure of one another - strangers from different worlds. But over time they each come to depend on the other. They become inseparable. Until the day a visitor from Rene's past arrives and their careful, secluded life is thrown into confusion. Suddenly, all they have built together is threatened. What will they do to protect themselves? And are they prepared for the consequences? 'So lovely, gentle yet enthralling' Claire Fuller 'Quietly beautiful and brilliant. This is no bucolic idyll but an unfolding of a plot that constantly twists and turns and surprises. A truly wonderful, memorable novel' Judges of the Walter Scott Prize 2018
Download or read book Dead Babies and Seaside Towns written by Alice Jolly and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-02 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Alice Jolly's second child was stillborn and all subsequent attempts to have another baby failed, she began to consider every possible option, no matter how unorthodox. Shot through with humour and full of hope, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns is an intensely personal account of the search for an alternative way to create a family. As she battles through miscarriage, IVF and failed adoption attempts, Alice finds comfort in the faded charm of Britain's crumbling seaside towns. The journey ultimately leads her and her husband to a small town in Minnesota, and to two remarkable women who offer to make the impossible possible. In this beautifully written book, Alice Jolly describes with a novelist's skill the events that many others have lived through – even if they may feel compelled to keep them hidden. Her decision not to hide but to share them, without a trace of self-pity, turns Dead Babies and Seaside Towns into a universal story: one that begins in tragedy but ends in joy.
Download or read book The Rising of Bella Casey written by Mary Morrissy and published by The O'Brien Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'a wonderful book from one of our finest writers' Colum McCann Bella is a bright, clever girl who trains as a school teacher, determined to escape the limitations of her genteel impoverishment and become a "mistress of her own life". However, the manager of her school, the Rev Archibald Leeper, a married clergyman, develops a morbid attachment to her, which is to colour the rest of her life. Leeper places Bella in an untenable position; her only escape is to seduce a young army corporal, Nicholas Beaver, to hide the fact that her reputation has been ruined by the clergyman. She marries Nicholas and they have five children. However, when Nicholas dies at the age of 40 from syphilis, Bella realizes belatedly that she is not the only one who has been keeping sexual secrets. Bella Casey was the sister of the playwright, Sean O'Casey. Tellingly, though, her brother chose to kill her off prematurely in his autobiography – at least 10 years before her actual demise.
Download or read book The Bird Skinner written by Alice Greenway and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a weather-beaten island in Maine, a birder and WWII vet confronts his past in this “atmospheric and engrossing” novel (People). After a recent leg amputation, ornithologist and World War II veteran Jim Kennoway retreats to an island in Penobscot Bay, off the coast of Maine. All he wants is to drink, smoke, and be left alone. From his perch, he listens for birdcalls and thinks back on his youth, his romance with his now deceased wife, his work for the American Museum of Natural History, and earlier, for Naval Intelligence in the South Pacific. Thirty years ago, while stationed in the Solomon Islands, Jim befriended Tosca, a young islander who worked with him as a scout. Now Tosca has sent his daughter to stay with Jim before she begins premedical studies at Yale. She arrives to Jim’s consternation, bringing with her a flood of troubling memories. Yet she will capture his heart and that of everyone she meets, irrevocably changing their lives. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction, Alice Greenway’s second novel is “a beautiful, ultimately painful story as haunting as its settings” (Publishers Weekly).
Download or read book The Swallowed Man written by Edward Carey and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE “A strange and tender parable . . . All of Edward Carey's work is profound and delightful.” —Max Porter, author of Lanny The ingenious storyteller Edward Carey returns to reimagine a time-honored fable: the story of an impatient father, a rebellious son, and a watery path to forgiveness for the young man known as Pinocchio In the small Tuscan town of Collodi, a lonely woodcarver longs for the companionship of a son. One day, “as if the wood commanded me,” Giuseppe—better known as Geppetto—carves for himself a pinewood boy, a marionette he hopes to take on tour worldwide. But when his handsome new creation comes magically to life, Geppetto screams . . . and the boy, Pinocchio, leaps from his arms and escapes into the night. Though he returns the next day, the wily boy torments his father, challenging his authority and making up stories—whereupon his nose, the very nose his father carved, grows before his eyes like an antler. When the boy disappears after one last fight, the father follows a rumor to the coast and out into the sea, where he is swallowed by a great fish—and consumed by guilt. He hunkers in the creature’s belly awaiting the day when he will reconcile with the son he drove away. With all the charm, atmosphere, and emotional depth for which Edward Carey is known—and featuring his trademark fantastical illustrations—The Swallowed Man is a parable of parenthood, loss, and letting go, from a creative mind on a par with Gregory Maguire, Neil Gaiman, and Tim Burton.
Download or read book A Saint in Swindon written by Alice Jolly and published by Fairlight Books. This book was released on 2020-04-15 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a stranger arrives in town, with a bulging blue bag and a whiff of adventure, the neighbourhood takes notice. When he asks for his meals to be sent to his room and peace and quiet for reading, curiosity turns to obsession. Each day he stays there, locked in his room, demanding books: Plath, Kafka, Orwell, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, James, Bronte (the eldest), Dickens, Dumas, Kesey – on and on, the stranger never leaving his room. Who exactly is he? What is he reading? And will it be able to save us from the terrible state of the world? Written by award-winning author Alice Jolly, and based on an idea by the book lovers of Swindon town, this funny and, ultimately, dystopian tale, reminds us of the importance of literature in an increasingly dark world.
Download or read book Stranger Baby written by Emily Berry and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2017-01-31 with total page 77 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emily Berry's Dear Boy was described as a 'blazing debut', winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humour for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often painful encounter with childhood loss. This is a book of mourning, recrimination, exhilaration and 'oceanic feeling': 'A meditation on a want that can never be answered.'
Download or read book White Chrysanthemum written by Mary Lynn Bracht and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Lisa Wingate’s Before We Were Yours and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, a deeply moving novel that follows two Korean sisters separated by World War II. Korea, 1943. Hana has lived her entire life under Japanese occupation. As a haenyeo, a female diver of the sea, she enjoys an independence that few other Koreans can still claim. Until the day Hana saves her younger sister from a Japanese soldier and is herself captured and transported to Manchuria. There she is forced to become a “comfort woman” in a Japanese military brothel. But haenyeo are women of power and strength. She will find her way home. South Korea, 2011. Emi has spent more than sixty years trying to forget the sacrifice her sister made, but she must confront the past to discover peace. Seeing the healing of her children and her country, can Emi move beyond the legacy of war to find forgiveness? Suspenseful, hopeful, and ultimately redemptive, White Chrysanthemum tells a story of two sisters whose love for each other is strong enough to triumph over the grim evils of war.
Download or read book The Ninth Hour written by Alice McDermott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A magnificent new novel from one of America’s finest writers—a powerfully affecting story spanning the twentieth century of a widow and her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn. On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens a gas tap in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his pregnant wife—that “the hours of his life . . . belonged to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Saviour, an aging nun, a Little Nursing Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, though never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations. Rendered with remarkable delicacy, heart, and intelligence, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour is a crowning achievement of one of the finest American writers at work today.
Download or read book Improvement written by Joan Silber and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them from one of America's most gifted writers of fiction, "our own country's Alice Munro" (The Washington Post). Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three–month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four–year–old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them. A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber: "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power." Improvement is Silber’s most shining achievement yet. "Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down–to–earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." —The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book The Infernal Riddle of Thomas Peach written by Jas Treadwell and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It is the year 1785, and a gentleman of modest means has left London for the countryside, to look after his ailing wife. Among his new neighbours, tongues begin to wag. Why does he keep a locked chest under the stairs? Is it really full of forbidden books? And what exactly is the matter with his wife? For the most part, though, the couple live in peace - until a letter arrives, threatening to cut off their livelihood and expel them from their home. Faced with the prospect of penury - and perhaps worse - the gentleman rides out in search of some means to save himself. But fate has other plans for Thomas Peach. A bizarre request brings an encounter with a mysterious young woman, raised from infancy as a rich man's ward, now condemned to the madhouse. As their paths become disturbingly entangled, Mr Peach begins to suspect that in her past lies a dreadful secret . . ."--Publisher.
Download or read book In My Grandfather s Shadow written by Angela Findlay and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Having wrestled for decades with an inexplicable sense of guilt, Angela Findlay eventually turned to her German roots in the hope of finding answers. There, she discovered three generations knotted together by events that took place in Nazi Germany- a grandfather who was a decorated general on the Eastern Front, his daughter and granddaughter - Angela herself. In a rare confluence of memoir, psychology and historical detective story, Findlay's unflinching quest for the truth about her grandfather breaks through the silence surrounding many the Second World War's perpetrators. In My Grandfather's Shadow explores the heritability of unresolved experiences, questions deeply held perceptions of good and bad, and uncovers the lesser-known history of the war's losers, a post-war culture of apology and atonement, and the lingering legacy of shame. Using her own family story to explore an episode in history that continues to appal and fascinate, Findlay reveals that it is possible not only for the scars of trauma to be handed down through generations, but also for them to be healed.
Download or read book Common People written by Kit de Waal and published by Unbound Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-01 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Working-class stories are not always tales of the underprivileged and dispossessed. Common People is a collection of essays, poems and memoir written in celebration, not apology: these are narratives rich in barbed humour, reflecting the depth and texture of working-class life, the joy and sorrow, the solidarity and the differences, the everyday wisdom and poetry of the woman at the bus stop, the waiter, the hairdresser. Here, Kit de Waal brings together thirty-three established and emerging writers who invite you to experience the world through their eyes, their voices loud and clear as they reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class. Features original pieces from Damian Barr, Malorie Blackman, Lisa Blower, Jill Dawson, Louise Doughty, Stuart Maconie, Chris McCrudden, Lisa McInerney, Paul McVeigh, Daljit Nagra, Dave O’Brien, Cathy Rentzenbrink, Anita Sethi, Tony Walsh, Alex Wheatle and more.
Download or read book Advanced Fiction written by Amy E. Weldon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-07-27 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confident with the basics of your craft? Looking to take your writing to the next level? Advanced Fiction gives you the tools to hone your skills by thinking more deeply and systematically about deploying them on the page. Friendly and down-to-earth, Amy Weldon guides you through the realities of craft and process, combining a broad anthology of landmark stories with instruction on the more advanced aspects of fiction writing. Featuring interactive prompts, exercises and suggestions for further reading, this book guides you from larger philosophical issues to subtler technical ones, from topics as diverse as the intricate principles of storytelling to navigating artistic and political landscapes conscientiously and building a writing career. Beginning with a brief recap of the basics, the text goes on to examine: - The psychology of writing and revising - Practical methods for drafting and notebook-keeping - Taking personal and technical risks with ideas, images, and forms - Making responsible decisions about representing identities, bodies, and histories on the page - Complex craft concepts such as world-building, structure, time, and moving from short forms to novels Placing students' own work in conversation with established stories, the accompanying anthology selections range widely in culture, technique and time period, including authors of dystopia, historical fiction, satire, and fiction in translation as well as literary realists tackling themes like economic inequality, climate change, and identity. Thoughtful and essential, this book provides excellent guidance for students and budding authors on the complexities of fiction writing from the beginning of a writing project – short story or novel – to the end.
