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Book The Julian Barnes Booker Prize Finalist Collection  3 Book Bundle

Download or read book The Julian Barnes Booker Prize Finalist Collection 3 Book Bundle written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 1060 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Julian Barnes, recipient of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, is one of our most highly regarded novelists. In this collection of three novels spanning his career, we see the broad range of his imagination and literary skill. Barnes’s third published novel, brought him worldwide acclaim and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. “A high literary entertainment” (The New York Times) Flaubert’s Parrott is, among other things, a piercing glimpse at the nature of obsession and betrayal, both scholarly and romantic. Barnes’s second shortlisted novel, England, England, is a sly, a satiric invention, in which a visionary tycoon attempts to replicate a jolly old England that probably never really existed: Robin Hood’s men are genuinely merry and the royals all behave themselves impeccably, until, of course, everything begins to go horribly wrong. Finally, Arthur & George re-creates late-Victorian Britain, in which the fates of two vastly different men become entwined, one seeking vindication in a world that looks askance at his origins, the other creating the world’s most famous detective, while keeping his own secrets.

Book The Sense of an Ending

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-10-05
  • ISBN : 0307957330
  • Pages : 158 pages

Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Book Levels of Life

Download or read book Levels of Life written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes an elegant triptych of history, fiction, and memoir—a "wise, funny, and devastating ... discourse on love and sorrow" (The New York Times Book Review). In this “deeply stirring” book (The Boston Globe), Julian Barnes writes about ballooning and photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and tearing them apart; and enduring after the incomprehensible loss of a loved one. Powerfully rendered, exquisitely crafted in Barnes’s erudite style, this searing work confirms the author as an unparalleled magus of the heart.

Book Arthur   George

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Vintage Canada
  • Release : 2009-02-24
  • ISBN : 0307371417
  • Pages : 445 pages

Download or read book Arthur George written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 445 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliantly imagined and irresistibly readable, Arthur & George is a major new novel from Julian Barnes, a wonderful combination of playfulness, pathos and wisdom. Searching for clues, no one would ever guess that the lives of Arthur and George might intersect. Growing up in shabby-genteel nineteenth-century Edinburgh, Arthur is saddled with a dad who is a disgrace and a mum he wishes to protect, and is propelled into a life of action. To his astonishment, his career as a self-made man of letters brings him riches and fame and, in the world at large, he becomes the perfect picture of the honourable English gentlemen. George is irredeemably an outsider, and has no hope of becoming such a picture. Though he’s dogged and logical, a vicar’s son from rural Staffordshire, he is set apart, and he and his family are targeted in his boyhood by a poison-pen campaign. George finds safe harbour in the reliability of rules, and grows up to become a solicitor, putting his faith in the insulating value of British justice. Then crisis upsets the uneasy equilibrium of both men’s lives. Arthur is knocked for a loop by guilt and other dishonourable emotions. George is put to the sorest test, accused of a horrible crime. And from that point on their lives weave together in the most profound and surprising way, as each man becomes the other’s salvation. Arthur & George is a masterful novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all, it’s a profound and witty meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove. George and his father pray together, kneeling side by side on the scrubbed boards. Then George climbs into bed while his father locks the door and turns out the light. As he falls asleep, George sometimes thinks of the floor, and how his soul must be scrubbed just as the boards are scrubbed. Father is not an easy sleeper, and has a tendency to groan and wheeze. Sometimes, in the early morning, when dawn is beginning to show at the edges of the curtains, Father will catechize him. "George, where do you live?" "The Vicarage, Great Wyrley." "And where is that?" "Staffordshire, Father." "And where is that?" "The centre of England." "And what is England, George?" "England is the beating heart of the Empire, Father." "Good. And what is the blood that flows through the arteries and veins of the Empire to reach even its farthest shore?" "The Church of England." "Good, George." And after a while Father will begin to groan and wheeze again. George watches the outline of the curtain harden. He lies there thinking of arteries and veins making red lines on the map of the world, linking Britain to all the places coloured pink: Australia and India and Canada and islands dotted everywhere. He thinks of blood bubbling though these tubes and emerging in Sydney, Bombay, the St. Lawrence Waterway. Bloodlines, that is a word he has heard somewhere. With the pulse of blood in his ears, he begins to fall asleep again. —excerpt from Arthur & George

Book England  England

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Vintage Canada
  • Release : 2012-12-18
  • ISBN : 030736755X
  • Pages : 259 pages

Download or read book England England written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grotesque visionary Sir Jack Pitman has an idea. Since most people are too lazy to travel from landmark to landmark, why not simplify things and create a new England on the Isle of Wight? Unfortunately, his idea is a huge success, and the resulting theme park threatens to supersede the original. Called England, England, it has all the elements of "Old England" in one convenient location. Wander into the new Sherwood Forest and you may spot Robin Hood and his now sexually ambiguous Merrie Men. Or take a stroll to see Stonehenge and Anne Hathaway's Cottage, enjoy a ploughman's lunch atop the White Cliffs of Dover, then pop over to see the Royals, now on contract to Sir Jack, in their scaled-down version of Buckingham Palace. Every detail has been considered: even the postcards come pre-stamped! Julian Barnes' first novel in six years is a ferociously funny examination of the search for authenticity and truth in a fabricated world.

Book Hotel Du Lac

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anita Brookner
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2012-07-25
  • ISBN : 0307826228
  • Pages : 204 pages

Download or read book Hotel Du Lac written by Anita Brookner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-07-25 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?"

Book Flaubert s Parrot

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2011-06-15
  • ISBN : 0307797856
  • Pages : 214 pages

Download or read book Flaubert s Parrot written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-06-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE NOMINEE • From the internationally bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending comes a literary detective story of a retired doctor obsessed with the 19th century French author Flaubert—and with tracking down the stuffed parrot that once inspired him. • “A high literary entertainment carried off with great brio.” —The New York Times Book Review Julian Barnes playfully combines a detective story with a character study of its detective, embedded in a brilliant riff on literary genius. A compelling weave of fiction and imaginatively ordered fact, Flaubert's Parrot is by turns moving and entertaining, witty and scholarly, and a tour de force of seductive originality.

Book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction  3 Volume Set

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Fiction 3 Volume Set written by Brian W. Shaffer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 1581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Encyclopedia offers an indispensable reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English-language. With nearly 500 contributors and over one million words, it is the most comprehensive and authoritative reference guide to twentieth-century fiction in the English language. Contains over 500 entries of 1000-3000 words written in lucid, jargon-free prose, by an international cast of leading scholars Arranged in three volumes covering British and Irish Fiction, American Fiction, and World Fiction, with each volume edited by a leading scholar in the field Entries cover major writers (such as Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt, Samual Beckett, D.H. Lawrence, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Munro, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, and Ngûgî Wa Thiong’o) and their key works Examines the genres and sub-genres of fiction in English across the twentieth century (including crime fiction, Sci-Fi, chick lit, the noir novel, and the avant-garde novel) as well as the major movements, debates, and rubrics within the field, such as censorship, globalization, modernist fiction, fiction and the film industry, and the fiction of migration, diaspora, and exile

Book The Sea  The Sea

    Book Details:
  • Author : Iris Murdoch
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2001-03-01
  • ISBN : 1101495650
  • Pages : 528 pages

Download or read book The Sea The Sea written by Iris Murdoch and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2001-03-01 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize—a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a playwright as he composes his memoirs Charles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. 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.

Book Cross Channel

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Random House
  • Release : 2009-11-24
  • ISBN : 1409088839
  • Pages : 226 pages

Download or read book Cross Channel written by Julian Barnes and published by Random House. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction comes an enthralling set of short stories. No one has a better perspective on life on both sides of the channel than Julian Barnes. In these exquisitely crafted stories spanning several centuries, he takes as his universal theme the British in France; from the last days of a reclusive English composer, the beef consuming 'navvies' labouring on the Paris-Rouen railway to a lonely woman mourning the death of her brother on the battlefields of the Somme.

Book First Love  Last Rites

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ian McEwan
  • Publisher : Rosetta Books
  • Release : 2011-02-11
  • ISBN : 0795301898
  • Pages : 166 pages

Download or read book First Love Last Rites written by Ian McEwan and published by Rosetta Books. This book was released on 2011-02-11 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Somerset Maugham Award winner: Dark early fiction by the author of Nutshell—“A splendid magician of fear” (The Village Voice Literary Supplement). Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, the stories here show us how murder can arise out of boredom, perversity from adolescent curiosity—and how sheer evil can become the solution to unbearable loneliness. These short fiction pieces from the early career of the New York Times–bestselling and Man Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach are claustrophobic tales of childhood, twisted psychology, and disjointed family life as terrifying as anything by Stephen King—and finely crafted with a lyricism and an intensity that compels us to confront our secret kinship with what repels us. “A powerful talent that is both weird and wonderful.” —The Boston Sunday Globe “Ian McEwan’s fictional world combin[es] the bleak, dreamlike quality of de Chirico’s city-scapes with the strange eroticism of canvases by Balthus. Menace lies crouched between the lines of his neat, angular prose, and weird, grisly things occur in his books with nearly casual aplomb.” —The New York Times

Book The Luminaries

    Book Details:
  • Author : Eleanor Catton
  • Publisher : Little, Brown
  • Release : 2013-10-15
  • ISBN : 0316126950
  • Pages : 822 pages

Download or read book The Luminaries written by Eleanor Catton and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.

Book The Only Story

    Book Details:
  • Author : Julian Barnes
  • Publisher : Vintage
  • Release : 2018-04-17
  • ISBN : 0525521291
  • Pages : 213 pages

Download or read book The Only Story written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling, Booker Prize-winning author of The Sense of an Ending comes “a brilliant, rueful look at love—what we do for it, how we experience it and what makes it die” (People). One summer in the sixties, in a staid suburb south of London, nineteen-year-old Paul comes home from university and is urged by his mother to join the tennis club. There he’s partnered with Susan Macleod, a fine player who’s forty-eight, confident, witty, and married, with two nearly adult daughters. She is a warm companion, her bond with Paul immediate. And soon, inevitably, they are lovers. Basking in the glow of one another, they set up house together in London. Decades later, Paul looks back at how they fell in love and how—gradually, relentlessly—everything fell apart. As he turns over his only story in his mind, examining it from different vantage points, he finds himself confronted with the contradictions and slips of his own memory—and the ways in which our narratives and our lives shape one another. Poignant, vivid and profound, The Only Story is a searing novel of memory, devotion, and how first love fixes a life forever.

Book Nothing to be Frightened Of

Download or read book Nothing to be Frightened Of written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-05-28 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I don’t believe in God, but I miss him." So begins Julian Barnes’s brilliant new book that is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God and a homage to the writer Jules Renard. Barnes also draws poignant portraits of the last days of his parents, recalled with great detail, affection and exasperation. Other examples he takes up include writers, "most of them dead and quite a few of them French," as well as some composers, for good measure. The grace with which Barnes weaves together all of these threads makes the experience of reading the book nothing less than exhilarating. Although he cautions us that "this is not my autobiography," the book nonetheless reveals much about Barnes the man and the novelist: how he thinks and how he writes and how he lives. At once deadly serious and dazzlingly playful, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a wise, funny and constantly surprising tour of the human condition.

Book The Magician King

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lev Grossman
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2012-05-29
  • ISBN : 0452298016
  • Pages : 433 pages

Download or read book The Magician King written by Lev Grossman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-05-29 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lev Grossman’s new novel THE BRIGHT SWORD will be on sale July 2024 Return to Fillory in the riveting sequel to the New York Times bestseller and literary phenomenon, The Magicians, now an original series on SYFY, from the author of the #1 bestselling The Magician’s Land. Quentin Coldwater should be happy. He escaped a miserable Brooklyn childhood, matriculated at a secret college for magic, and graduated to discover that Fillory—a fictional utopia—was actually real. But even as a Fillorian king, Quentin finds little peace. His old restlessness returns, and he longs for the thrills a heroic quest can bring. Accompanied by his oldest friend, Julia, Quentin sets off—only to somehow wind up back in the real world and not in Fillory, as they’d hoped. As the pair struggle to find their way back to their lost kingdom, Quentin is forced to rely on Julia’s illicitly learned sorcery as they face a sinister threat in a world very far from the beloved fantasy novels of their youth.

Book The Ballad of Peckham Rye

    Book Details:
  • Author : Muriel Spark
  • Publisher : New Directions Publishing
  • Release : 2014-05-27
  • ISBN : 0811221334
  • Pages : 101 pages

Download or read book The Ballad of Peckham Rye written by Muriel Spark and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A slender satirical gem from the “master of malice and mayhem” (The New York Times) The Ballad of Peckham Rye is a wickedly farcical tale of an English factory town turned upside-down by a Scot who may or may not be in league with the Devil. Dougal Douglas is hired to do “human research” into the lives of the workers, Douglas stirs up mutiny and murder.

Book Hateship  Friendship  Courtship  Loveship  Marriage  A Story

Download or read book Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage A Story written by Alice Munro and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection With hardly any notice, foolish and plain housekeeper Johanna flees her employer and sets off to find the man she’s fallen in love with. Little does she know that her correspondence with him has been a complete fabrication, a cruel teenager’s idea of a practical joke. So, who will Johanna find when she steps off her train with the household furniture in tow? Alice Munro is the universally celebrated master of the contemporary short story, the Chekhov of our time. Nowhere are her powers better on display than in this exquisitely crafted story exploring the wonderful and unexpected places where love, or the illusion of it, can lead. This selection is the title story of Munro’s acclaimed collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and the basis of the 2013 film, Hateship Loveship. An ebook short.