Download or read book The Little Stranger written by Sarah Waters and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules. Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds. But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses’ lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely. Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.

Download or read book Fingersmith written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review The Handmaiden, a film adaptation of Fingersmith, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Tae-Ri, is now available. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.

Download or read book The Paying Guests written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling novel that has been called “a tour de force” (Wall Street Journal), “unputdownable” (The Washington Post), “a delicious hothouse of a novel” (USA Today), “effortless” (The Economist), “seductive” (Vanity Fair) and “pitch perfect” (Salon) “Superb, bewitching…Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a "G" rating” – NPR “One of the year’s most engrossing and suspenseful novels…a love affair, a shocking murder, and a flawless ending … Will keep you sleepless for three nights straight and leave you grasping for another book that can sustain that high.” — Entertainment Weekly (A rating) “Volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible." —USA Today (4 stars) It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters’s finest achievement yet.

Download or read book The Night Watch written by Sarah Waters and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.

Download or read book Affinity written by Sarah Waters and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eerily brilliant and spooky tale of spiritualism and deception 'Now you know why you are drawn to me - why your flesh comes creeping to mine, and what it comes for. Let it creep.' From the dark heart of a Victorian prison, disgraced spiritualist Selina Dawes weaves an enigmatic spell. Is she a fraud, or a prodigy? By the time it all begins to matter, you'll find yourself desperately wanting to believe in magic. 'Refined, repressed and simmering... a delicious tale of Victorian spiritualism' Independent on Sunday 'Spooky, spellbinding, exquisitely written' Val Hennessy 'Beautifully, atmospherically written, this is a tale to thrill your very soul' Metro 'Sexy, spooky, stylish... a wonderful book' Guardian

Download or read book Tipping The Velvet written by Sarah Waters and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-02-03 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the oyster huts of Whitstable to the music halls of Victorian London, Tipping the Velvet is the glorious first novel from this much-loved author 'Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.' A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'. 'Erotic and absorbing... Written with startling power' New York Times Book Review 'An unstoppable read, a sexy and picaresque romp through the lesbian and queer demi-monde of the roaries Nineties' Independent on Sunday 'Waters is an extremely confident writer, combining precise, sensuous descriptions with irony and wit' Observer

Download or read book What Shines from It written by Sara Rauch and published by Alternating Current. This book was released on 2020-02-08 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eleven stories in Sara Rauch's What Shines from It are rife with the physical and psychic wounds of everyday life. In "Beholden," girl meets boy meets the unsettled spirits of post-9/11 New York City, but her future can't hold them all. In "Kitten," a struggling veteran and his wife argue over adopting an abandoned kitten, deepening their financial and emotional rifts. In "Abandon," a ghost-baby ravages a woman's body following a late-term miscarriage, marring her chances for new love. And in "Kintsukuroi," a married potter falls for a married geologist and discovers the luminosity of being broken.What Shines from It is populated by women on the verge of transcendence-brimming with anger and love-and working-class artists haunted by the ghosts of their desires. Abiding by a distinctly guarded New England sensibility, these stories inhabit the borderlands of long-established cities, where humans are still learning to embrace the natural world. Subtly exploring sexualities, relationships, birth and rebirth, identity, ghosts, and longing, Rauch searches for the places where our protective shells are cracked and, in spare, poetic language, limns those edges of loneliness and loss with light.

Download or read book Proxy written by Alex London and published by Philomel Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Privileged Knox and and his proxy, Syd, are thrown together to overthrow the system"--

Download or read book Through Waters Deep Waves of Freedom Book 1 written by Sarah Sundin and published by Revell. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is 1941 and America teeters on the brink of war. Outgoing naval officer Ensign Jim Avery escorts British convoys across the North Atlantic in a brand-new destroyer, the USS Atwood. Back on shore, Boston Navy Yard secretary Mary Stirling does her work quietly and efficiently, happy to be out of the limelight. Yet, despite her reserved nature, she never could back down from a challenge. When evidence of sabotage on the Atwood is found, Jim and Mary must work together to uncover the culprit. A bewildering maze of suspects emerges, and Mary is dismayed to find that even someone close to her is under suspicion. With the increasing pressure, Jim and Mary find that many new challenges--and dangers--await them. Sarah Sundin takes readers to the tense months before the US entered WWII. Readers will encounter German U-boats and torpedoes, along with the explosive power of true love, in this hopeful and romantic story.

Download or read book Jazz Moon written by Joe Okonkwo and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A passionate, alive, and original novel about love, race, and jazz in 1920s Harlem and Paris—a moving story of traveling far to find oneself” (David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife). On a sweltering summer night in 1925, beauties in beaded dresses mingle with hepcats in dapper suits on the streets of Harlem. The air is thick with reefer smoke, and jazz pours out of speakeasy doorways. Ben Charles and his devoted wife are among the locals crammed into a basement club to hear music and drink bootleg liquor. For aspiring poet Ben, the heady rhythms are a revelation. So is Baby Back Johnston, an ambitious trumpet player who flashes a devilish grin and blasts dynamite from his horn. Ben finds himself drawn to the trumpeter—and to Paris, where Baby Back says everything is happening. In Paris, black people are welcomed as exotic celebrities, especially those from Harlem. It’s an easy life, but it quickly leaves Ben adrift and alone, craving solace through anonymous dalliances in the city’s decadent underground scene. From chic Parisian cafés to seedy opium dens, his odyssey will bring new love, trials, and heartache, even as echoes from the past urge him to decide where true fulfillment and inspiration lie. Jazz Moon is an evocative story of emotional and artistic awakening set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age–Paris—a winner of the Edmund White Award and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. “Jazz Moon mashes up essences of Hurston and Hughes and Fitzgerald into a heady mixtape of a romance: driving and rhythmic as an Armstrong Hot Five record, sensuous as the small of a Cotton Club chorus girl’s back. I enjoyed it immensely.” —Larry Duplechan, author of Blackbird and Got ’til It’s Gone

Download or read book Sarah Waters Gender and Sexual Politics written by Claire O’Callaghan and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Waters: Gender and Sexual Politics uniquely brings together feminist and queer theoretical perspectives on gender and sexuality through close analysis of works by Sarah Waters. This timely study examines topics ranging from heterosexuality, homosexuality, masculinities, femininities, sex, pornography, and the cultural effects of othering and domination across her work. The book covers each of Waters's published novels to date including Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Paying Guests and also considers her non-fiction and academic writing as well as the television adaptations of her texts. O'Callaghan situates Water's writing as an important textual space for the examination of contemporary gender and sexuality studies and locates her as an astute commentator and contributor to twenty-first century gender and sexual politics.

Download or read book Wideacre written by Philippa Gregory and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 688 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 18th century England, "Wideacre" introduces Beatrice Lacey, a heroine who makes Scarlett O'Hara look like a simpering weakling. Readers will fall in love with Philippa Gregory's mesmerizing trilogy.

Download or read book Sarah Waters written by Kaye Mitchell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multiple award-winning author, Sarah Waters is one of the most critically and commercially successful novelists writing today. In such novels as Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and The Night Watch, her writing has played compellingly with popular and generic forms and narrative techniques and covered a number of important contemporary themes. This critical guide is the first book to offer a wide range of current critical perspectives on Waters' work. With chapters written by leading established and emerging scholars the book explores issues such as gender, sexuality, class, time and space in Waters' fiction, as well as her appropriation of a range of genres from the historical and neo-victorian novel to the gothic. The book also includes a new interview with Waters herself, a timeline of her life, chapter summaries and guides to further reading, making this an essential guide to the work of one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

Download or read book Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories written by M. R. James and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-10-04 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only annotated edition of M. R. James’s writings currently available Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James’s ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as “Count Magnus,” set in the wilds of Sweden; “Number 13,” a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; “Casting the Runes,” a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including “A Night in King’s College Chapel,” James’s first known ghost story. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Download or read book All Men Want to Know written by Nina Bouraoui and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Intense, gorgeous, troubling, seductive - a novel that has to be surrendered to rather than read' Sarah Waters AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER WINNER OF AN ENGLISH PEN TRANSLATES AWARD All Men Want to Know traces Nina Bouraoui's blissful childhood in Algeria, a wild, sun-soaked paradise, with hazy summer afternoons spent swimming, diving, and driving across the desert. Her mother is French, her father Algerian; when racial tensions begin to surface in their neighbourhood, her mother suffers an unspeakable act of violence that forces the family to flee the country. In Paris, eighteen-year-old Nina lives alone. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she makes her way to The Kat, a legendary gay nightclub, where she watches women from the sidelines, afraid of her own desires, her sudden and intoxicating freedom. In her solitude, she starts to write - and finds herself writing about her mother. All Men Want to Know is a haunting, lyrical international bestseller about mothers and daughters, about shame and sexuality, about existing between two cultures and belonging to neither. A phenomenon in France, this is a defining portrait of womanhood from one of Europe's greatest living writers. 'Blown away by the power and lyricism of All Men Want to Know. What a book. Read it' Niven Govinden, author of THIS BRUTAL HOUSE 'Magnificent... a captivating autobiographical novel' Elle 'A tour de force' Le Figaro 'Haunting, spell-binding, luminous' Lire

Download or read book Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms written by Adele Jones and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-08-08 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms presents ten readings of Sarah Waters’s fictions published to date in relation to feminism and contemporary feminist theory. The analysis offered in the collection investigates how Waters engages with recent debates on women and gender and how her writings reflect the different concerns of contemporary feminist theories. In particular, the collection includes new and innovative readings of how Waters’s novels address issues of patriarchy, female confinement, madness and misogyny, exploitation and oppression, repression and subordination, abortion, marriage and spinsterhood alongside passionate portrayals of female agency, desire, aesthetics, female sexual expression, and, of course, lesbianism.

Download or read book Waters of the World written by Sarah Dry and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The compelling and adventurous stories of seven pioneering scientists who were at the forefront of what we now call climate science. From the glaciers of the Alps to the towering cumulonimbus clouds of the Caribbean and the unexpectedly chaotic flows of the North Atlantic, Waters of the World is a tour through 150 years of the history of a significant but underappreciated idea: that the Earth has a global climate system made up of interconnected parts, constantly changing on all scales of both time and space. A prerequisite for the discovery of global warming and climate change, this idea was forged by scientists studying water in its myriad forms. This is their story. Linking the history of the planet with the lives of those who studied it, Sarah Dry follows the remarkable scientists who summited volcanic peaks to peer through an atmosphere’s worth of water vapor, cored mile-thick ice sheets to uncover the Earth’s ancient climate history, and flew inside storm clouds to understand how small changes in energy can produce both massive storms and the general circulation of the Earth’s atmosphere. Each toiled on his or her own corner of the planetary puzzle. Gradually, their cumulative discoveries coalesced into a unified working theory of our planet’s climate. We now call this field climate science, and in recent years it has provoked great passions, anxieties, and warnings. But no less than the object of its study, the science of water and climate is—and always has been—evolving. By revealing the complexity of this history, Waters of the World delivers a better understanding of our planet’s climate at a time when we need it the most.