Download or read book The Man in the Wooden Hat written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2009-10-27 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Second in the Old Filth trilogy. “An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful” (The Washington Post). Acclaimed as Jane Gardam’s masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself. They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s. As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying. “Funny and affecting . . . It’s remarkable.” —The New York Times Book Review “The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR “Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam’s prose is witty and precise.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “It’s magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Last Friends written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The satisfying conclusion to Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy offers exquisite prose, wry humor, and keen insights into aging and death” (The New Yorker). While Old Filth introduced readers to Sir Edward Feathers, his dreadful childhood, and his decades-long marriage, The Man in the Wooden Hat was his wife Betty’s story. Last Friends is Terence Veneering’s turn. His beginnings were not those of the usual establishment grandee. Filth’s hated rival in court and in love is the son of a Russian acrobat marooned in the English midlands and a local girl. He escapes the war and later emerges in the Far East as a man of panache and fame. The Bar treats his success with suspicion: Where did this handsome, brilliant Slav come from? This exquisite story of Veneering, Filth, and their circle tells a bittersweet tale of friendship and grace and of the disappointments and consolations of age. They are all, finally, each other’s last friend as this magnificent series ends with the deep and abiding satisfaction that only great literature provides. “[Gardam’s] prose sparkles with wit, compassion and humor. She keeps us entertained, and she keeps us guessing. Be thankful for her books. Be thankful for this trilogy, which is ultimately an elegy, created with deep affection.” —The Washington Post “Restores us to an era rich in spectacle and bristling with insinuation and intrigue. Vivid, spacious, superbly witty, and refreshingly brisk . . . the story (and the author) will endure.” —The Boston Globe “All three Gardam books are beautifully written but it’s a pleasure to note that Last Friends is the most enjoyable, the funniest and the most touching.” —National Post
Download or read book Old Filth written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2006-06-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. “Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (The New York Times Book Review). Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away. Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written a literary masterpiece reminiscent of Rudyard Kipling’s “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” that retraces much of the twentieth century’s torrid and momentous history. SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE “Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and—a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture—adult.” —The Washington Post “Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting.” —The Seattle Times “A masterpiece of storytelling.” —The Dallas Morning News
Download or read book The People on Privilege Hill written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2008-07-29 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Engrossing stories of hilarity and heartbreak” from the Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy (The Seattle Times). A collection of stories from a writer at the height of her powers—a celebrated stylist admired for her caustic humor, freewheeling imagination, love of humanity, and wicked powers of observation. This is a delightful grouping of stories, witty and wise, that includes the return of Sir Edward Feathers, “Old Filth” himself. “[Gardam’s] stories, like delicate tapestries, are alight with colors.” —The Times (London) “When Gardam hits her mark, like other exemplary short-story writers such as William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Taylor, she can be dazzling.” —The Guardian “Gardam’s brisk narration and fearless temperament make for serious fun.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Wry, economical and perpetually surprising, these 14 stories from English novelist Gardam follow the last of the intrepid, stiff upper lip WWII generation of British ladies and gentlemen. . . . Gardam vividly evokes an age of iron wills.” —Publishers Weekly “Gardam displays the consummate skill of the short-story-teller, which is that of the caricaturist, the ability to capture a personality in a few brief strokes. . . . Privilege Hill is a collection of gentle stories that you could read to your grandmother, with the kind of sharp wit that would no doubt give her a secret smile. But they’re deeper than they look . . . so don’t read them all at once.” —The Bookbag
Download or read book The Flight of the Maidens written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Whitbread Award–winning author of the Old Filth trilogy captures a moment in time for three young women on the cusp of adulthood. Yorkshire, 1946. The end of the war has changed the world again, and, emboldened by this new dawning, Hetty Fallows, Una Vane, and Lieselotte Klein seize the opportunities with enthusiasm. Hetty, desperate to escape the grasp of her critical mother, books a solo holiday to the Lake District under the pretext of completing her Oxford summer coursework. Una, the daughter of a disconcertingly cheery hairdresser, entertains a romantically inclined young man from the wrong side of the tracks and the left-side of politics. Meanwhile, Lieselotte, the mysterious Jewish refugee from Germany, leaves the Quaker family who had rescued her, to test herself in London. Although strikingly different from one another, these young women share the common goal of adventure and release from their middle-class surroundings through romance and education. “Gardam’s lean, fast-paced prose is at turns hugely funny and deeply moving. . . . [Her] characters are acutely and compassionately observed.” —Atlantic Monthly “Quirky, enchanting . . . with lively, laugh-out loud elan.” —The Baltimore Sun “Splendid . . . Gardam’s style is perfect.” —The New York Times Book Review “With winning charm and wit . . . Gardam frames her story in dozens of crisp, brief scenes featuring deliciously dizzy conversation.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ebullient, humorous, and wise, this is a novel to savor.” —Booklist “The portrait of postwar England as conventions crumble and the country is rebuilt is terrific.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Queen of the Tambourine written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2007-09-01 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel of the Year: “Gardam’s portrait of an insanely imaginative woman in an elusive midlife crisis is impeccably drawn” (The Seattle Times). With prose that is vibrant and witty, The Queen of the Tambourine traces the emotional breakdown—and eventual restoration—of Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood. The letters Eliza writes to her neighbor, a woman whom she hardly knows, reveal her self-propelled descent into madness. Eliza must reach the depths of her downward spiral before she can once again find health and serenity. This story of a woman’s confrontation with the realities of sanity will delight readers who enjoy the works of Anita Brookner, Sybille Bedford, Muriel Spark, and Sylvia Plath. “Excellently done . . . Manic delusions have never been so persuasive . . . Very moving when it is not being exceedingly funny.” —Anita Brookner, award-winning author of The Debut “British author Gardam, who won the Whitbread Award for this jigsaw puzzle of a novel, keeps up the suspense to the end, writing like a sorceress in the meantime.” —The Seattle Times “Brilliant.” —The Sunday Times “An ingenious, funny, satirical, sad story . . . Vivid and poignant.” —The Independent on Sunday “Wickedly comic . . . masterly and hugely enjoyable.” —Daily Mail “Marvelously subtle and moving.” —The Times (London)
Download or read book A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True written by Brigid Pasulka and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From an original new voice in fiction comes this warm-hearted debut. Pasulka reimagines half a century of Polish history through the legacy of one couple's profound love affair.
Download or read book Daughter of the Forest written by Juliet Marillier and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daughter of the Forest is a testimony to an incredible author's talent, a first novel and the beginning of a trilogy like no other: a mixture of history and fantasy, myth and magic, legend and love. Lord Colum of Sevenwaters is blessed with six sons: Liam, a natural leader; Diarmid, with his passion for adventure; twins Cormack and Conor, each with a different calling; rebellious Finbar, grown old before his time by his gift of the Sight; and the young, compassionate Padriac. But it is Sorcha, the seventh child and only daughter, who alone is destined to defend her family and protect her land from the Britons and the clan known as Northwoods. For her father has been bewitched, and her brothers bound by a spell that only Sorcha can lift. To reclaim the lives of her brothers, Sorcha leaves the only safe place she has ever known, and embarks on a journey filled with pain, loss, and terror. When she is kidnapped by enemy forces and taken to a foreign land, it seems that there will be no way for her to break the spell that condemns all that she loves. But magic knows no boundaries, and Sorcha will have to choose between the life she has always known and a love that comes only once. Juliet Marillier is a rare talent, a writer who can imbue her characters and her story with such warmth, such heart, that no reader can come away from her work untouched. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book The Old Filth Trilogy written by Jane Gardam and published by Europa Editions. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete “wonderfully entertaining trilogy” about three British friends approaching their twilight years with bittersweet humor (The Washington Post). Jane Gardam’s beloved Old Filth Trilogy—including her masterpiece, Old Filth, voted one of the 100 greatest British novels in a BBC survey; The Man in the Wooden Hat; and Last Friends—are here presented in one volume. Emotionally distant but highly successful Edward Feathers, aka Old Filth, a man who “belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters” (TheNew York Times Book Review), his beautiful wife Betty, and his devilishly handsome professional rival (and Betty’s onetime lover) Edward Veneering are the anchors of this series, with each novel focusing on a different character. Feathers was a “raj orphan”—children born in Far East British colonies and raised in England—while Veneering managed to get out of his fishing village-turned-industrial-town just before the German bombs dropped (and his luck has held up pretty well ever since). The three tells a bittersweet tale of enduring friendship while contending with the disappointments and consolations of age, while a once-insurmountable empire declines around them. It forms a deeply humane and often comic portrait of aging, and a reminder that the experiences we choose to take with us in our twilight years are as unpredictable as life itself. “Her prose is so perceptive and fluid that it feels mentally healthful, exiling the noise and clutter of your mind as efficiently as a Schubert sonata. She could make actuarial tables pleasurable.”—The New York Times Book Review “Gardam is the best British writer you’ve never heard of.”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Download or read book A Long Way From Verona written by Jane Gardam and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal having had a violent experience at the age of nine' Jessica Vye's 'violent experience' colours her schooldays and her reaction to the world around her- a confining world of Order Marks, wartime restrictions, viyella dresses, nicely-restrained essays and dusty tea shops. For Jessica she has been told that she is 'beyond all possible doubt', a born writer. With her inability to conform, her absolute compulsion to tell the truth and her dedication to accurately noting her experiences, she knows this anyway. But what she doesn't know is that the experiences that sustain and enrich her burgeoning talent will one day lead to a new- and entirely unexpected- reality.
Download or read book Bad Blood written by Colm Tóibín and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2001 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer after the Anglo-Irish Agreement [1985], when tension was high in Northern ireland, Colm Toíbín walked along the Irish border from Derry to Newry. Bad Blood is a stark and evocative account of this journey through fear and hatred, and a report on the ordinary life and legacy of history in a bleak and desolate landscape. -- Provided by publisher.
Download or read book The Hollow Land written by Jane Gardam and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The barren, beautiful Cumbrian fells provide the bewitching setting for the adventures of Bill and Harry , two children who find wonder at every turn as they experience the Hollow Land. Everyday challenges give a daring edge to this rural work and play. There are mysteries to explore and uncover , like the case of the Egg Witch , and everyone is curious about the Household Name, a visitor from London , moving into the jewel of the territory, Light Farm. Gardam is at her best with this novel, which won the Whitbread award in 1981
Download or read book Filth written by Irvine Welsh and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998-09-17 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the Christmas season upon him, Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson of Edinburgh's finest is gearing up socially—kicking things off with a week of sex and drugs in Amsterdam. There are some sizable flies in the ointment, though: a missing wife and child, a nagging cocaine habit, some painful below-the-belt eczema, and a string of demanding extramarital affairs. The last thing Robertson needs is a messy, racially fraught murder, even if it means overtime—and the opportunity to clinch the promotion he craves. Then there's that nutritionally demanding (and psychologically acute) intestinal parasite in his gut. Yes, things are going badly for this utterly corrupt tribune of the law, but in an Irvine Welsh novel nothing is ever so bad that it can't get a whole lot worse. . . .In Bruce Robertson Welsh has created one of the most compellingly misanthropic characters in contemporary fiction, in a dark and disturbing and often scabrously funny novel about the abuse of everything and everybody. "Welsh writes with a skill, wit and compassion that amounts to genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British writing in decades."—Sunday Times [London] "[O]ne of the most significant writers in Britain. He writes with style, imagination, wit, and force, and in a voice which those alienated by much current fiction clearly want to hear."—Times Literary Supplement "Welsh writes with such vile, relentless intensity that he makes Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French master of defilement, look like Little Miss Muffet. "—Courtney Weaver, The New York Times Book Review "The corrupt Edinburgh cop-antihero of Irvine Welsh's best novel since Trainspotting is an addictive personality in another sense: so appallingly powerful is his character that it's hard to put the book down....[T]he rapid-fire rhythm and pungent dialect of the dialogue carry the reader relentlessly toward the literally filthy denouement. "—Village Voice Literary Supplement, "Our 25 Favorite Books of 1998" "Welsh excels at making his trash-spewing bluecoat peculiarly funny and vulnerable—and you will never think of the words 'Dame Judi Dench' in the same way ever again. [Grade:] A-. "—Charles Winecoff, Entertainment Weekly
Download or read book Bilgewater written by Jane Gardam and published by Abacus. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter. Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence
Download or read book Heap House Iremonger 1 written by Edward Carey and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part one of an unusual and astonishing new fantasy trilogy that blends fine literary fare with a terrific romp through the reimagined outskirts of Victorian-era London In the imaginary borough of Filching, the extensive Iremonger family (“kings of mildew, moguls of mould”) have made a fortune from junk, building a dark and sprawling mansion from salvage scrap. Heap House is surrounded by the dangerous, noxious, shifting Heaps that stretch beyond its bounds. And within its walls, certain objects begin to display strange signs of life. Young Clod Iremonger is about to be "trousered" and betrothed (unwillingly) to his cousin Pinalippy when he meets the plucky orphan servant Lucy Pennant, with whose help he begins to uncover the dark secrets of his family’s empire. Mystery, romance and the perils of the Heaps await! Gorgeously (and ghoulishly) illustrated by the author, Heap House is peopled with unforgettable characters with delightfully skewed names--anxious, animal-loving Tummis with his pet seagull; menacing cousin Moorcus; dreadful Aunt Rosamud and more. As Carey writes, “Every life is thick with rubbish, but the Iremongers did it with a difference.”
Download or read book American Pastoral written by Philip Roth and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ordinary man finds that his life has been made extraordinary by the catastrophic intrusion of history when, in 1968 his adored daughter plants a bomb that kills a stranger, hurling her father out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk.
Download or read book The Bear and The Nightingale written by Katherine Arden and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-01-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: _____________________________ Beware the evil in the woods... In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church. But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . . Atmospheric and enchanting, with an engrossing adventure at its core, The Bear and the Nightingale is perfect for readers of Naomi Novik's Uprooted, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. _____________________________ Now with over 100 5* reviews, readers are spellbound by this magical story: 'This book stayed with me, I didn't want it to end' 'A beautifully written story' 'An entrancing story, which swept me up from the very first chapter' 'Full of magic' _____________________________ Make sure you've read all the books in the acclaimed Winternight Trilogy 1. The Bear and the Nightingale 2. The Girl in the Tower 3. The Winter of the Witch
