EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Goldfinch

    Book Details:
  • Author : Donna Tartt
  • Publisher : Little, Brown
  • Release : 2013-10-22
  • ISBN : 0316248673
  • Pages : 780 pages

Download or read book The Goldfinch written by Donna Tartt and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young New Yorker grieving his mother's death is pulled into a gritty underworld of art and wealth in this "extraordinary" and beloved Pulitzer Prize winner from the author of The Secret History that "connects with the heart as well as the mind" (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review). Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community. As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love — and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

Book The Little Friend

    Book Details:
  • Author : Donna Tartt
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-10-19
  • ISBN : 030787348X
  • Pages : 642 pages

Download or read book The Little Friend written by Donna Tartt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

Book Ignoring Gravity

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sandra Danby
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2014-12-04
  • ISBN : 9780993113413
  • Pages : 442 pages

Download or read book Ignoring Gravity written by Sandra Danby and published by . This book was released on 2014-12-04 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rose is adopted and doesn't know it. 'Ignoring Gravity' connects two pairs of sisters separated by a generation of secrets. Finding her mother's lost diaries, Rose begins to understand why she has always seemed the outsider in her family, why she feels so different from her sister Lily. Then just when she thinks there can't be any more secrets... This is the first in a series of novels about Rose Haldane, identity detective. This is what some of the early reviewers said: "Drama? Check. Suspense? Check. Romance? Check. Will-they-won't-they? Check. Great twists? Check, check, check! I am pleased to say this story has them all and then some." "'Ignoring Gravity' is just the book to take with you to the beach this summer. It has everything you need: romance, family drama, humour - and some moments guaranteed to make you tearful." "There is a twist at the end which unexpectedly gave me the shivers as I contemplated history repeating itself. A well written book with a story which will keep you turning the pages. Thoroughly recommended." "This is the perfect summer read; I read this sprawled in the garden, under the sun. It really is the perfect mix of drama, family, love, discovery and friendship."

Book The Abominable

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dan Simmons
  • Publisher : Little, Brown
  • Release : 2013-10-22
  • ISBN : 0316198854
  • Pages : 709 pages

Download or read book The Abominable written by Dan Simmons and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling tale of high-altitude death and survival set on the snowy summits of Mount Everest, from the bestselling author of The Terror. It's 1924 and the race to summit the world's highest mountain has been brought to a terrified pause by the shocking disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine high on the shoulder of Mt. Everest. By the following year, three climbers -- a British poet and veteran of the Great War, a young French Chamonix guide, and an idealistic young American -- find a way to take their shot at the top. They arrange funding from the grieving Lady Bromley, whose son also disappeared on Mt. Everest in 1924. Young Bromley must be dead, but his mother refuses to believe it and pays the trio to bring him home. Deep in Tibet and high on Everest, the three climbers -- joined by the missing boy's female cousin -- find themselves being pursued through the night by someone . . . or something. This nightmare becomes a matter of life and death at 28,000 feet - but what is pursuing them? And what is the truth behind the 1924 disappearances on Everest? As they fight their way to the top of the world, the friends uncover a secret far more abominable than any mythical creature could ever be. A pulse-pounding story of adventure and suspense, The Abominable is Dan Simmons at his spine-chilling best.

Book The Illusion of Separateness

Download or read book The Illusion of Separateness written by Simon Van Booy and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The uncanny beauty of Van Booy’s prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character’s heart, fill a reader with wonder.” — San Francisco Chronicle Award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man’s act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection. The characters in Van Booy's The Illusion of Separateness discover at their darkest moments of fear and isolation that they are not alone, that they were never alone, that every human being is a link in a chain we cannot see. This gripping novel—inspired by true events—tells the interwoven stories of a deformed German infantryman; a lonely British film director; a young, blind museum curator; two Jewish American newlyweds separated by war; and a caretaker at a retirement home for actors in Santa Monica. They move through the same world but fail to perceive their connections until, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, a veil is lifted to reveal the vital parts they have played in one another's lives, and the illusion of their separateness.

Book American Dream Machine

    Book Details:
  • Author : Matthew Specktor
  • Publisher : Tin House Books
  • Release : 2014-04-15
  • ISBN : 1935639455
  • Pages : 345 pages

Download or read book American Dream Machine written by Matthew Specktor and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of two talent agents and their three troubled boys, heirs to Hollywood royalty; a sweeping narrative about fathers and sons, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood and, by extension, American life. American Dream Machine is the story of an iconic striver, a classic self-made man in the vein of Jay Gatsby or Augie March. It's the story of a talent agent and his troubled sons, two generations of Hollywood royalty. It's a sweeping narrative about parents and children, the movie business, and the sundry sea changes that have shaped Hollywood, and by extension, American life. Beau Rosenwald—overweight, not particularly handsome, and improbably charismatic—arrives in Los Angeles in 1962 with nothing but an ill-fitting suit and a pair of expensive brogues. By the late 1970s he has helped found the most successful agency in Hollywood. Through the eyes of his son, we watch Beau and his partner go to war, waging a seismic battle that redraws the lines of an entire industry. We watch Beau rise and fall and rise again, in accordance with the cultural transformations that dictate the fickle world of movies. We watch Beau's partner, the enigmatic and cerebral Williams Farquarsen, struggle to contain himself, to control his impulses and consolidate his power. And we watch two generations of men fumble and thrive across the LA landscape, learning for themselves the shadows and costs exacted by success and failure. Mammalian, funny, and filled with characters both vital and profound, American Dream Machine is a piercing interrogation of the role—nourishing, as well as destructive—that illusion plays in all our lives.

Book Think

    Book Details:
  • Author : Simon Blackburn
  • Publisher : OUP Oxford
  • Release : 1999-08-05
  • ISBN : 0199769842
  • Pages : 345 pages

Download or read book Think written by Simon Blackburn and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999-08-05 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the big questions in life: knowledge, consciousness, fate, God, truth, goodness, justice. It is for anyone who believes there are big questions out there, but does not know how to approach them. Think sets out to explain what they are and why they are important. Simon Blackburn begins by putting forward a convincing case for the study of philosophy and goes on to give the reader a sense of how the great historical figures such as Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein have approached its central themes. Each chapter explains a major issue, and gives the reader a self-contained guide through the problems that philosophers have studied. The large scope of topics covered range from scepticism, the self, mond and body, and freedom to ethics and the arguments surrounding the existence of God. Lively and approachable, this book is ideal for all those who want to learn how the basic techniques of thinking shape our existence.

Book How to be both

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ali Smith
  • Publisher : Anchor
  • Release : 2014-12-02
  • ISBN : 110187046X
  • Pages : 491 pages

Download or read book How to be both written by Ali Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • A novel all about art's versatility, borrowing from painting’s fresco technique to make an original literary double-take. "Cements Smith’s reputation as one of the finest and most innovative of our contemporary writers. By some divine alchemy, she is both funny and moving; she combines intellectual rigor with whimsy" —The Los Angeles Review of Books One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century How to be both is a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There’s a Renaissance artist of the 1460s. There’s the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real—and all life’s givens get given a second chance. Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith’s novels are like nothing else. A NOTE TO THE READER: Who says stories reach everybody in the same order? This novel can be read in two ways, and the eBook provides you with both. You can choose which way to read the novel by simply clicking on one of two icons—CAMERA or EYES. The text is exactly the same in both versions; the narratives are just in a different order. The ebook is produced this way so that readers can randomly have different experiences reading the same text. So, depending on which icon you select, the book will read: EYES, CAMERA, or CAMERA, EYES. (Your friend may be reading it the other way around.) Enjoy the adventure. (Having both versions in the same file is intentional.)

Book In the Company of the Courtesan

Download or read book In the Company of the Courtesan written by Sarah Dunant and published by Random House. This book was released on 2006-04-11 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting color into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman Emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment. Thus begins In the Company of the Courtesan, Sarah Dunant’s epic novel of life in Renaissance Italy. Escaping the sack of Rome in 1527, with their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her dwarf companion, Bucino, head for Venice, the shimmering city born out of water to become a miracle of east-west trade: rich and rancid, pious and profitable, beautiful and squalid. With a mix of courage and cunning they infiltrate Venetian society. Together they make the perfect partnership: the sharp-tongued, sharp-witted dwarf, and his vibrant mistress, trained from birth to charm, entertain, and satisfy men who have the money to support her. Yet as their fortunes rise, this perfect partnership comes under threat, from the searing passion of a lover who wants more than his allotted nights to the attentions of an admiring Turk in search of human novelties for his sultan’s court. But Fiammetta and Bucino’s greatest challenge comes from a young crippled woman, a blind healer who insinuates herself into their lives and hearts with devastating consequences for them all. A story of desire and deception, sin and religion, loyalty and friendship, In the Company of the Courtesan paints a portrait of one of the world’s greatest cities at its most potent moment in history: It is a picture that remains vivid long after the final page.

Book Black Spartacus

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sudhir Hazareesingh
  • Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
  • Release : 2020-09-01
  • ISBN : 0374722161
  • Pages : 327 pages

Download or read book Black Spartacus written by Sudhir Hazareesingh and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2021 Wolfson History Prize “Black Spartacus is a tour de force: by far the most complete, authoritative and persuasive biography of Toussaint that we are likely to have for a long time . . . An extraordinarily gripping read.” —David A. Bell, The Guardian A new interpretation of the life of the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture Among the defining figures of the Age of Revolution, Toussaint Louverture is the most enigmatic. Though the Haitian revolutionary’s image has multiplied across the globe—appearing on banknotes and in bronze, on T-shirts and in film—the only definitive portrait executed in his lifetime has been lost. Well versed in the work of everyone from Machiavelli to Rousseau, he was nonetheless dismissed by Thomas Jefferson as a “cannibal.” A Caribbean acolyte of the European Enlightenment, Toussaint nurtured a class of black Catholic clergymen who became one of the pillars of his rule, while his supporters also believed he communicated with vodou spirits. And for a leader who once summed up his modus operandi with the phrase “Say little but do as much as possible,” he was a prolific and indefatigable correspondent, famous for exhausting the five secretaries he maintained, simultaneously, at the height of his power in the 1790s. Employing groundbreaking archival research and a keen interpretive lens, Sudhir Hazareesingh restores Toussaint to his full complexity in Black Spartacus. At a time when his subject has, variously, been reduced to little more than a one-dimensional icon of liberation or criticized for his personal failings—his white mistresses, his early ownership of slaves, his authoritarianism —Hazareesingh proposes a new conception of Toussaint’s understanding of himself and his role in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century. Black Spartacus is a work of both biography and intellectual history, rich with insights into Toussaint’s fundamental hybridity—his ability to unite European, African, and Caribbean traditions in the service of his revolutionary aims. Hazareesingh offers a new and resonant interpretation of Toussaint’s racial politics, showing how he used Enlightenment ideas to argue for the equal dignity of all human beings while simultaneously insisting on his own world-historical importance and the universal pertinence of blackness—a message which chimed particularly powerfully among African Americans. Ultimately, Black Spartacus offers a vigorous argument in favor of “getting back to Toussaint”—a call to take Haiti’s founding father seriously on his own terms, and to honor his role in shaping the postcolonial world to come. Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize | Finalist for the PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named a best book of the year by the The Economist | Times Literary Supplement | New Statesman

Book The Empty Cell

    Book Details:
  • Author : Paulette Alden
  • Publisher : Radiator Press
  • Release : 2020-09-20
  • ISBN : 9780988518926
  • Pages : 422 pages

Download or read book The Empty Cell written by Paulette Alden and published by Radiator Press. This book was released on 2020-09-20 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the brutal lynching in 1947 of a young black man named Willie Earle by a mob of cab drivers in Greenville, South Carolina, four people on the periphery of Earle's life find their own lives unexpectedly upended. Against the backdrop of the social and racial strictures of the fifties, each of these characters struggles to find his or her own version of freedom. Each experiences loss, sorrow, and growth, as the South begins its own long march towards racial equality.

Book Imaginary Friend

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stephen Chbosky
  • Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
  • Release : 2019-10-01
  • ISBN : 1538731347
  • Pages : 830 pages

Download or read book Imaginary Friend written by Stephen Chbosky and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 830 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Instant New York Times Bestseller One of Fall 2019's Best Books (People, EW, Lithub, Vox, Washington Post, and more) A young boy is haunted by a voice in his head in this acclaimed epic of literary horror from the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Christopher is seven years old.Christopher is the new kid in town.Christopher has an imaginary friend. We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us. Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with her child. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It's as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out. At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six long days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again. Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with the lights on.

Book Healing Spiritual Wounds

    Book Details:
  • Author : Carol Howard Merritt
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2017-02-07
  • ISBN : 006239228X
  • Pages : 129 pages

Download or read book Healing Spiritual Wounds written by Carol Howard Merritt and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An effective plan to help those suffering from wounds inflicted by the church find spiritual healing and a renewed sense of faith. Raised as a conservative Christian, minister and author Carol Howard Merritt discovered that the traditional institutions she grew up in inflicted great pain and suffering on others. Though she loved the spirituality the church provided, she knew that, because of sexism, homophobia, and manipulative religious politics, established religious institutions weren’t always holy or safe. Instead of offering refuge, these institutions have betrayed people’s hearts and souls. “People have suffered religious abuse,” she writes, “which can be different from physical injury or psychological trauma.” Though participation and affiliation in traditional religious institutions is waning, many people still believe in God. Merritt contends that many leave the church because they have lost trust in the institution, not in God. Healing Spiritual Wounds addresses the church’s dichotomous image—as a safe space and as a dangerous place—and provides a way to restore personal faith and connection to God for those who have been hurt or betrayed by established institutions of faith. Merritt lays out a multistage plan for moving from pain to spiritual rebirth, from recovering theological and emotional shards to recovering communal wholeness. Merritt does not sugarcoat the wrongs institutions long seen as trustworthy have inflicted on many innocent victims. Sympathetic, understanding, and deeply positive, she offers hope and a way to help them heal and reclaim the spiritual joy that can make them whole again.

Book Where You Come From

    Book Details:
  • Author : Sasa Stanisic
  • Publisher : Tin House Books
  • Release : 2021-12-07
  • ISBN : 1951142837
  • Pages : 282 pages

Download or read book Where You Come From written by Sasa Stanisic and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month “Inventive, funny and moving.” —The New York Times Book Review Translated from the German by Damion Searls Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišic’s inventive and surprising novel asks: what makes us who we are? In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.

Book Zia Summer

    Book Details:
  • Author : Rudolfo Anaya
  • Publisher : Open Road Media
  • Release : 2015-06-02
  • ISBN : 1504011813
  • Pages : 353 pages

Download or read book Zia Summer written by Rudolfo Anaya and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Chicano PI hunts his cousin’s killer in “a compelling thriller [with] a deep-seated respect for the traditions of a people and a culture” (Booklist). The great-grandson of a legendary lawman and gunfighter, thirty-year-old Sonny Baca hopes he possesses even a tenth of El Bisabuelo’s courage. But instead of cleaning up New Mexico by hunting down dangerous desperadoes, the struggling PI looks for missing persons and deadbeat husbands. The game changes when his cousin Gloria—the first woman Sonny ever loved—is brutally slain. Her corpse is found drained of blood. A zia sun sign, the symbol on the New Mexican flag, is carved on her stomach. Gloria’s husband, Frank Dominic, a politician making a run for mayor of Albuquerque, has a powerful motive for murder. But Gloria wasn’t the first victim. A year earlier, another woman was slain in the exact same way. Is a serial killer on the loose? Or is this the handiwork of some satanic cult? Feeling his cousin’s spirit crying out for justice, Sonny and his girlfriend begin a search that takes them across New Mexico’s polluted South Valley to an environmental compound in the mountains. As Sonny moves closer to the truth, he uncovers a chilling connection between his past and a very real and present evil . . .

Book Alien Stories

    Book Details:
  • Author : E. C. Osondu
  • Publisher : American Reader
  • Release : 2021-05-11
  • ISBN : 9781950774319
  • Pages : 200 pages

Download or read book Alien Stories written by E. C. Osondu and published by American Reader. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short Fiction Prize-winning collection of short stories that use science fiction to explore immigration, diaspora, and the concept of otherness.

Book The Cabinet

    Book Details:
  • Author : Un-su Kim
  • Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
  • Release : 2021-10-12
  • ISBN : 0857669249
  • Pages : 276 pages

Download or read book The Cabinet written by Un-su Kim and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Munhakdongne Novel Award, South Korea's most prestigious literary prize. Cabinet 13 looks exactly like any normal filing cabinet…Except this cabinet is filled with files on the ‘symptomers’, humans whose strange abilities and bizarre experiences might just mark the emergence of a new species. But to Mr Kong, the harried office worker whose job it is to look after the cabinet, the symptomers are a headache; especially the one who won’t stop calling every day, asking to be turned into a cat. A richly funny and fantastical novel about the strangeness at the heart of even the most everyday lives, from one of South Korea's most acclaimed novelists. Translated by Sean Lin Halbert File Under: Fiction [ 12,000 Cans of Beer | Memory Mosaicers | Will Execution Inc. | Monkey of All Bombs ]