Download or read book My Friend Muriel written by Jane Duncan and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janet Sandison made her bow in My Friends the Miss Boyds, Jane Duncan's sparkling first novel. Here she is again, now a determined young woman of twenty with a University degree. Taking a job with a cranky Pen-Friend organization, she meets Muriel. Muriel is uncompromisingly plain, but clings like ivy. As the lively narrative unfolds, Muriel's story and Janet's diverge and interlace again, aided by a blushing curate, an eccentric she-dragon and her severely repressed husband, by a shady confidence trickster and a suit of armour!

Download or read book The Very Fine Clock written by Muriel Spark and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because Ticky, the clock, is extremely wise, the professor and his friends vote to bestow upon him the title of Professor. But Ticky declines the honor.

Download or read book Essie s Roses written by Michelle Muriel and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 Bestseller! Readers' Favorite Silver Medal Winner Best Southern Fiction. A sweeping, moving historical novel set before the Civil War about secrets, freedom, and the power of love. "Impressively well written from beginning to end, Essie's Roses is an inherently absorbing and skillfully presented read, establishing author Michelle Muriel as an exceptionally talented novelist." -Midwest Book Review "...tremendously impressive debut novel ... A richly moving reading experience." -Historical Novel Society "Miss Muriel's novel is a thing of beauty. 5 Stars!" -Readers' Favorite "...all I can say is - wow, what an amazing read. ...I fully expect to see Essie's Roses on the silver screen someday, but until then I will simply look forward to reading future works by this author. 5 Stars (and then add some more)!" -Feathered Quill Book Reviews "...Ms. Muriel writes in four such distinct voices I felt like I was in the space with each one. ... exceptionally well written and it was very hard to put down. 5 Stars!" -Patty Woodland, Broken Teepee Growing up in the Deep South during the years leading to the Civil War, two young girls find freedom on a hillside overlooking Westland, an Alabama plantation. Essie Mae, an intuitive, intelligent slave girl, and Evie Winthrop, the sheltered, imaginative dreamer and planter's daughter, strike up a secret friendship that thrives amidst the shadows of abuse. Told from the viewpoint of four women: Katherine Winthrop, kind mistress and unexpected heiress to her father's small, cotton plantation; Delly, her sassy and beloved house slave; Essie Mae, her slave girl; and Evie Winthrop, Katherine's only child, Essie's Roses tells of forbidden relationships flourishing in secret behind Westland's protective trees and treasured roses. After scandal befalls Westland, Evie and Essie, aged nineteen, travel to Richmond, Virginia, to escape their abusive pasts. There, they face the gross indecencies and divisions leading to the War Between the States. Though the horrors of slavery and discrimination prompt action, Evie and Essie's struggles lie within. The secrets they hold and the pain of the past lead them away from one another and back home again. A story about a black slave who frees a white woman, Essie's Roses reveals the innocence of children's friendships, the diverse meanings of freedom, the significance of a dream, and the power of love. In their efforts to save each other, will the women of Westland find the true freedom they desire?

Download or read book Loitering with Intent written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

Download or read book Broken and Battered written by Muriel Canfield and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, this book will show you a way out. The life of an abused woman is one of fear, pain, and isolation. Not only is she victimized by the man she loves, she is often disbelieved and abandoned by friends and family. Broken emotionally and battered physically, she is left feeling as if there is no way out. But there is a way out, and this powerfully courageous book leads the way. Refusing to gloss over the terrible realities of abuse, this book shares the true stories of abused women while exploring the male rational behind abuse and the reasons women minimize or deny the extent of their abuse. The book goes on to discuss practical issues such as court procedures and child custody as well as offering a step-by-step safety and escape plan.

Download or read book The Comforters written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spark’s mind-bogglingly stunning 1957 debut With easy, sunny eeriness, Spark lights up the darkest things: blackmail, a drowning, nervous breakdowns, a ring of smugglers, a loathsome busybody, a diabolic bookseller, human evil.

Download or read book Westland written by Michelle Muriel and published by . This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author Michelle Muriel comes the sequel to the #1 bestseller Essie's Roses, set during the Reconstruction Era post Civil War, Westland is a moving, gripping historical novel about family secrets, forgiveness, and the meaning of home. Evil men wait a lifetime to get even. On an Alabama plantation before the Civil War, two little girls find freedom, Evie the planter's daughter and Essie Mae, a slave. Now, women, divided by the aftermath of war they must find their way back home. Alabama, 1866. The Civil War's aftermath tests family bonds as the women at Westland: Miss Katie, kind mistress and heiress, Evie, her daughter, Essie Mae, an intelligent freed slave, and Delly a former slave and Westland's sassy matriarch, confront the mysteries and secrets of Westland's past to hold on to freedom and each other. As Rebel fires and lawlessness rage in the South, Evie and Essie Mae return to the home of their troubled pasts: Westland, an unproductive plantation. With a new vision, renewed hope, and the tranquility of Miss Katie's secret garden, they learn to dream again, but a mysterious stranger from Westland's past threatens to tear them apart. Delly warns unearthing family secrets may do it for them. When Evie's stepfather James receives letters threatening Westland and Essie, he will move heaven and earth to keep Evie and Essie safe with a surprising twist he prays will usher in the true freedom they all deserve. Westland is an unforgettable, moving novel about the power of forgiveness, the families we create, and the consequences of the secrets we leave behind. One woman will pay the ultimate sacrifice as the women at Westland learn: freedom isn't free.

Download or read book Water Lily Dance written by Michelle Muriel and published by . This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the bestselling ESSIE'S ROSES comes an imaginative, emotional portrait of the secret side of grief and the deep bonds and secrets between mothers and daughters. Three women centuries apart set out to escape a colorless life, connected by one of the most controversial, beloved artists in the world: Claude Monet. But at what cost?

Download or read book Muriel Spark written by Martin Stannard and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2009-08-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday). Muriel Spark ended was one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Hers is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, The Comforters, and with Memento Mori, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Bachelors rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine.

Download or read book Crossing Stones written by Helen Frost and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maybe you won't rock a cradle, Muriel. Some women seem to prefer to rock the boat. Eighteen-year-old Muriel Jorgensen lives on one side of Crabapple Creek. Her family's closest friends, the Normans, live on the other. For as long as Muriel can remember, the families' lives have been intertwined, connected by the crossing stones that span the water. But now that Frank Norman—who Muriel is just beginning to think might be more than a friend—has enlisted to fight in World War I and her brother, Ollie, has lied about his age to join him, the future is uncertain. As Muriel tends to things at home with the help of Frank's sister, Emma, she becomes more and more fascinated by the women's suffrage movement, but she is surrounded by people who advise her to keep her opinions to herself. How can she find a way to care for those she loves while still remaining true to who she is? Written in beautifully structured verse, Crossing Stones captures nine months in the lives of two resilient families struggling to stay together and cross carefully, stone by stone, into a changing world.

Download or read book What the River Washed Away written by Muriel Mharie Macleod and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I ain’t know nothing except he’s a bad man Mambo.' Inspired by real-life events, this is the remarkable and uncompromising story of one young woman’s refusal to accept her fate in 1920s Louisiana Jobs and Jesus from the big town don't ever seem to make it out here. Not down through the hackberry woods to the shack where I live with my Mambo. Not now Pappy’s gone. No, here’s where the old ways squat, where devil’s work heals and some say harms. That don’t mean the big town don’t visit though – white folks with their shirt sleeves, liquor stink, and nasty ways. More dark in them than even Mambo can hold off. But I got me a friend now, fierce and vengeful, and we got a powerful secret that’s gonna change everything.

Download or read book All the Stories of Muriel Spark written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four brand new tales are now added to New Directions' original 1997 cloth edition of Open to the Public.

Download or read book Miss Muriel and Other Stories written by Ann Petry and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than seventy years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again: the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police, the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality, the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of African American experience since the 1940s.

Download or read book Appointment in Arezzo written by Alan Taylor and published by Birlinn Ltd. This book was released on 2017-11-02 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things. With sources ranging from notebooks kept from his very first encounter with Muriel and the hundreds of letters they exchanged over the years, this is an invaluable portrait of one of Edinburgh's premiere novelists. The book was published to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Muriel's birth in 2018.

Download or read book My Friend Annie written by Jane Duncan and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My Friend Annie takes the reader back into Janet Sandison's childhood. It opens as the death of her mother shatters the bliss of her Highland home. Janet migrates with her father to grimy, lowland Cairnton, where she meets the hateful and stupid Jean, soon, alas, to be her step-mother-and pretty Annie Black. Years of unhappiness are relieved by holidays among the unchanging loveliness of Reachfar. But while at school, Janet finds out about Annie's profession-a discovery that troubles her strong sense of right and wrong.

Download or read book My Friends George and Tom written by Jane Duncan and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Janet Sandison comes home to the small fishing village of Achcraggan in Scotland. Behind her are ten years of happiness with her husband Twice, whose death has brought to an end their life on the island of St Jago in the West Indies. Before her lies a new career as a novelist and a return to the countryside of her childhood-and above all to George and Tom who were her closest friends, mentors and allies, in those early days. But now, Reachfar, the family croft on the hill overlooking Poyntdale Bay, has been sold and George and Tom in their old age are living cheerfully if haphazardly in Jemima Cottage in the village. Janet, George and Tom quickly take up their lives together after nearly forty years apart; Janet buys and converts an old barn on the shore and the three of them set up house. Janet, who has not found it easy to face the loss of her beloved Twice nor to adjust to the strange new world of the professional writer, rediscovers with delight that the old Reachfar values still hold a firm grip on her family and neighbours, but the one thing she cannot face is the ruin of the Reachfar croft itself. Not even the urging of her young nephews and niece- the Hungry Generation-will persuade her to climb the hill. This psychological problem is only a small part of the dramas and happenings, some sad, some joyous, which fill the pages of this enchanting and wonderfully enjoyable book. Readers of any or all of Jane Duncan's 'Friends' novels will rejoice particularly in My Friends George and Tom, for the wise and funny characters of the title have played important supporting parts in many of the earlier books and finally have a book which is triumphantly their own.

Download or read book Dancing My Way Through Hell written by Gene Shirley Richey and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2014-02-17 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Her mother sternly said, “Gene! Stop that tap dancing right now! You’re going to dance your way to hell!” The first half of her life surely felt that way – three sexual assaults, two abusive husbands, three children for whom she was the sole provider. Nevertheless, during that same period of her life, Gene and her violin went on a summer tour with young Billy Graham. She was also given a TV contract with the original Hank Williams Band in Montgomery, Alabama, as twin fiddler. DANCING MY WAY THROUGH HELL! focuses on life struggles and a forgiving spirit which was the key to bringing Gene through those experiences in six states from coast to coast and leading her to an amazing future.