Download or read book The Table Of Less Valued Knights written by Marie Phillips and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction Sir Humphrey du Val of the Table of Less Valued Knights – Camelot's least prestigious table, with one leg shorter than the others so that it has to be propped up with a folded napkin – doesn't do quests ... until he meets Elaine, a damsel in distress with a secret to hide. Meanwhile, Queen Martha of Puddock is on the run from an arranged marriage to the odious Prince Edwin of Tuft. But an encounter with the Locum of the Lake (standing in for the full-time Lady) leaves her with a quest of her own: to find her missing brother, long believed dead. The two quests collide, introducing a host of Arthurian misfits, including a freakishly short giant, a twelve-year-old crone, an amorous unicorn, and a magic sword with a mind of her own. With Gods Behaving Badly Marie Phillips showed that she has a rare gift for comedy, giving the Greek Gods an ingenious contemporary twist. In The Table of Less Valued Knights it's Camelot's turn, and you'll never see a knight in shining armour in the same way again.
Download or read book Sir Thomas the Hesitant and the Table of Less Valued Knights written by Liam Perrin and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whimsical and poignant, Sir Thomas the Hesitant and the Table of Less Valued Knights tells the story of Thomas Farmer who dreams of becoming a knight, sets out to save his brother from the hands of an evil Baron, and uncovers a plot that threatens Camelot itself. Along the way, he befriends a series of misfits including an allegedly reformed evil wizard, a shrinking giantess with a latent gift, a veteran knight with a dark secret, and his best friend Philip the Exceptionally Unlucky. In the end, his friends must all join forces and Thomas must come to grips with what it means to be a true hero if they are to outwit the evil Baron. At its heart, Sir Thomas's tale is the story of a young man growing up and learning what it means to be a hero in a world that doesn't always make sense.
Download or read book The Table of Less Valued Knights written by Marie Phillips and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2015-08-04 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Marie Phillips, author of the #1 national and international bestseller Gods Behaving Badly, comes a charming, funny story about a down-on-his-luck knight of Camelot, his eccentric band of misfits and their madcap quest to restore order to their lives, and the realm. Sir Humphrey du Val has had enough. Relegated to the Table of Less Valued Knights--Camelot's least prestigious spot, boringly rectangular in shape and with one leg shorter than the other so that it has to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking--he has been banned by King Arthur from going on quests, and hasn't left the castle in 15 years. After a chance meeting with Elaine, a young maiden in search of her kidnapped fiancé, Sir Humphrey, along with his squire Conrad (an undersized giant) and Jemima (Conrad's elephant), sets off on a journey to find the distressed damsel's betrothed, hoping to restore himself to a place of honour at the Round Table. Meanwhile, Martha, an errant queen on the run from her new power-hungry husband, is in disguise and on a quest of her own to find her long-lost brother, the true ruler of her realm. Martha soon runs--literally--into Humphrey's eccentric group, who take the incognito queen captive, believing her to be a boy. As they journey through countryside, castles and villages, they gather unlikely friends and enemies along the way. While each member of the party secretly harbours their own ambitions for the quest, their collective success, and the fate of the realm, rests on their grudging cooperation and unexpectedly interconnected lives. The Princess Bride meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this funny, charming, and delightful tale about lesser-known heroes in Arthurian England.
Download or read book Gods Behaving Badly written by Marie Phillips and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A highly entertaining novel set in North London, where the Greek gods have been living in obscurity since the seventeenth century. Being immortal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Life’s hard for a Greek god in the twenty-first century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn’t respect you, and you’re stuck in a dilapidated hovel in North London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there’s no way out... until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives and turn the world upside down. Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original novel that satisfies the head and the heart.
Download or read book King Arthur s Round Table written by David Perkins and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2003-01-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Your organization functions and grows through conversations face-to-face and electronic, from the mailroom to the boardroom. The quality of those conversations determines how smart your organization is. This revelatory book shows you how the Round Table of Arthurian legend can help foster collaboration and transform today s world of business, nonprofits, and government. "When I want a group to work effectively, I turn immediately to my colleague of thirty-five years, David Perkins. This book is a distillation of his knowledge and wisdom." Howard Gardner author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Intelligence Reframed "David Perkins applies his wit and inventive mind to create a fresh perspective on the world of collaboration in organizations. His archetypes and toolboxes offer valuable insights to anyone facing the challenges of collaborative problem solving." David Straus author of How to Make Collaboration Work
Download or read book Ecclesiastical Knights written by Sam Zeno Conedera and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Warrior monks”—the misnomer for the Iberian military orders that emerged on the frontiers of Europe in the twelfth century—have long fascinated general readers and professional historians alike. Proposing “ecclesiastical knights” as a more accurate name and conceptual model—warriors animated by ideals and spiritual currents endorsed by the church hierarchy—author Sam Zeno Conedera presents a groundbreaking study of how these orders brought the seemingly incongruous combination of monastic devotion and the practice of warfare into a single way of life. Providing a detailed study of the military-religious vocation as it was lived out in the Orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara in Leon-Castile during the first century, Ecclesiastical Knights provides a valuable window into medieval Iberia. Filling a gap in the historiography of the medieval military orders, Conedera defines, categorizes, and explains these orders, from their foundations until their spiritual decline in the early fourteenth century, arguing that that the best way to understand their spirituality is as a particular kind of consecrated knighthood. Because these Iberian military orders were belligerents in the Reconquest, Ecclesiastical Knights informs important discussions about the relations between Western Christianity and Islam in the Middle Ages. Conedera examines how the military orders fit into the religious landscape of medieval Europe through the prism of knighthood, and how their unique conceptual character informed the orders and spiritual self-perception. The religious observances of all three orders were remarkably alike, except that the Cistercian-affiliated orders were more demanding and their members could not marry. Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara shared the same essential mission and purpose: the defense and expansion of Christendom understood as an act of charity, expressed primarily through fighting and secondarily through the care of the sick and the ransoming of captives. Their prayers were simple and their penances were aimed at knightly vices and the preservation of military discipline. Above all, the orders valued obedience. They never drank from the deep wellsprings of monasticism, nor were they ever meant to. Offering an entirely fresh perspective on two difficult and closely related problems concerning the military orders—namely, definition and spirituality—author Sam Zeno Conedera illuminates the religious life of the orders, previously eclipsed by their military activities.
Download or read book Blue Ticket written by Sophie Mackintosh and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the Booker Prize longlisted novel The Water Cure comes another mesmerizing, refracted vision of our society: What if the life you're given is the wrong one? "Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale." —New York Times Book Review Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you marriage and children. A blue ticket grants you a career and freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. But what if the life you're given is the wrong one? When Calla, a blue-ticket woman, begins to question her fate, she must go on the run. Pregnant and desperate, Calla must contend with whether or not the lottery knows her better than she knows herself—and what that might mean for her child. With Blue Ticket, Sophie Mackintosh has created another mesmerizing, refracted vision of our world that explores the impossible decisions women have to make when society restricts their choices.
Download or read book Sir Gawain and the Green Knight written by R. A. Waldron and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1970 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chrysanthemum loves her name, until she starts going to school and the other children make fun of it.
Download or read book Sputnik s Guide to Life on Earth written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2017 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An out-of-this-world funny book from master storyteller Frank Cottrell Boyce, with illustrations throughout by Steven Lenton.Light-hearted and profound' Sunday Times Book of the Week'Wholly original and exceptionally funny' Bookseller Book of the MonthThe Blythes are a big, warm, rambunctious family who live on a small farm and sometimes foster children. Now Prez has come to live with them. But, though he seems cheerful and helpful, he never says a word.Then one day Prez answers the door to someone claiming to be his relative. This small, loud stranger carries a backpack, walks with a swagger and goes by the name of Sputnik.As Prez dithers on the doorstep, Sputnik strolls right past him and introduces himself to everyone in the household. Prez is amazed at the response. The family pat Sputnik on the head, call him a good boy and drop food into his mouth. It seems they all think Sputnik is a dog. It's only Prez who thinks otherwise.But Prez soon finds himself having to defend the family from the chaos and danger unleashed by Sputnik, as household items come to life - like a TV remote that fast-forwards people: 'Anyone can do it, it's just that people don't read the instructions properly'; and a toy lightsaber that entertains guests at a children's party, until one of them is nearly decapitated by it - and Prez is going to have to use his voice to explain himself.It turns out that Sputnik is writing a guidebook to Earth called Ten Things Worth Doing on Earth, and he takes Prez on a journey to discover just those ten things. Each adventure seems to take Prez nearer to the heart of the family he is being fostered by. But they also take him closer to the day that he is due to leave them forever...
Download or read book Three Strong Women written by Marie NDiaye and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-07 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new novel, the first by a black woman ever to win the coveted Prix Goncourt, Marie NDiaye creates a luminous narrative triptych as harrowing as it is beautiful. This is the story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged, tyrannical father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a modest but contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her white boyfriend back to France, where his delusional depression and sense of failure poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin (the aforementioned Fanta) who lives in France, a place Khady can scarcely conceive of but toward which she must now take desperate flight. With lyrical intensity, Marie NDiaye masterfully evokes the relentless denial of dignity, to say nothing of happiness, in these lives caught between Africa and Europe. We see with stunning emotional exactitude how ordinary women discover unimagined reserves of strength, even as their humanity is chipped away. Three Strong Women admits us to an immigrant experience rarely if ever examined in fiction, but even more into the depths of the suffering heart.
Download or read book Sophie s World written by Jostein Gaarder and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
Download or read book Knights Lords and Ladies written by John W. Baldwin and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-11-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the twelfth century, the region around Paris had a reputation for being the land of unruly aristocrats. Entrenched within their castles, the nobles were viewed as quarrelling among themselves, terrorizing the countryside, harassing churchmen and peasants, pillaging, and committing unspeakable atrocities. By the end of the century, during the reign of Philip Augustus, the situation was dramatically different. The king had created the principal governmental organs of the Capetian monarchy and replaced the feudal magnates at the royal court with loyal men of lesser rank. The major castles had been subdued and peace reigned throughout the countryside. The aristocratic families remain the same, but no longer brigands, they had now been recruited for royal service. In his final book, the distinguished historian John Baldwin turned to church charters, royal inventories of fiefs and vassals, aristocratic seals and documents, vernacular texts, and archaeological evidence to create a detailed picture of the transformation of aristocratic life in the areas around Paris during the four decades of Philip Augustus's reign. Working outward from the reconstructed biographies of seventy-five individuals from thirty-three noble families, Baldwin offers a rich description of their domestic lives, their horses and war gear, their tourneys and crusades, their romantic fantasies, and their penances and apprehensions about final judgment. Knights, Lords, and Ladies argues that the aristocrats who inhabited the region of Paris over the turn of the twelfth century were important not only because they contributed to Philip Augustus's increase of royal power and to the wealth of churches and monasteries, but also for their own establishment as an elite and powerful social class.
Download or read book King Arthur and His Knights written by Maude L. Radford and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-04-22 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: King Arthur was a legendary British leader who, according to medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and his historical existence is debated and disputed by modern historians.[2] The sparse historical background of Arthur is gleaned from various sources, including the Annales Cambriae, the Historia Brittonum, and the writings of Gildas. Arthur's name also occurs in early poetic sources such as Y Gododdin.[3] Arthur is a central figure in the legends making up the Matter of Britain. The legendary Arthur developed as a figure of international interest largely through the popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth's fanciful and imaginative 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain).[4] In some Welsh and Breton tales and poems that date from before this work, Arthur appears either as a great warrior defending Britain from human and supernatural enemies or as a magical figure of folklore, sometimes associated with the Welsh otherworld Annwn.[5] How much of Geoffrey's Historia (completed in 1138) was adapted from such earlier sources, rather than invented by Geoffrey himself, is unknown.
Download or read book The Book of Unknown Americans written by Cristina Henríquez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning novel of hopes and dreams, guilt and love—a book that offers a resonant new definition of what it means to be American and "illuminates the lives behind the current debates about Latino immigration" (The New York Times Book Review). When fifteen-year-old Maribel Rivera sustains a terrible injury, the Riveras leave behind a comfortable life in Mexico and risk everything to come to the United States so that Maribel can have the care she needs. Once they arrive, it’s not long before Maribel attracts the attention of Mayor Toro, the son of one of their new neighbors, who sees a kindred spirit in this beautiful, damaged outsider. Their love story sets in motion events that will have profound repercussions for everyone involved. Here Henríquez seamlessly interweaves the story of these star-crossed lovers, and of the Rivera and Toro families, with the testimonials of men and women who have come to the United States from all over Latin America.
Download or read book A Little History of the World written by E. H. Gombrich and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: E. H. Gombrich's Little History of the World, though written in 1935, has become one of the treasures of historical writing since its first publication in English in 2005. The Yale edition alone has now sold over half a million copies, and the book is available worldwide in almost thirty languages. Gombrich was of course the best-known art historian of his time, and his text suggests illustrations on every page. This illustrated edition of the Little History brings together the pellucid humanity of his narrative with the images that may well have been in his mind's eye as he wrote the book. The two hundred illustrations—most of them in full color—are not simple embellishments, though they are beautiful. They emerge from the text, enrich the author's intention, and deepen the pleasure of reading this remarkable work. For this edition the text is reset in a spacious format, flowing around illustrations that range from paintings to line drawings, emblems, motifs, and symbols. The book incorporates freshly drawn maps, a revised preface, and a new index. Blending high-grade design, fine paper, and classic binding, this is both a sumptuous gift book and an enhanced edition of a timeless account of human history.
Download or read book The Night Circus written by Erin Morgenstern and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two starcrossed magicians engage in a deadly game of cunning in the spellbinding novel that captured the world's imagination. • "Part love story, part fable ... defies both genres and expectations." —The Boston Globe The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.
Download or read book A Book of Golden Deeds written by Charlotte Mary Yonge and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 1927 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
