Download or read book Piranesi written by Susanna Clarke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Piranesi lives in the House. Perhaps he always has. In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls. On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone. Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims? Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous

Download or read book Detransition Baby written by Torrey Peters and published by One World. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” (Time) “Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”—Vulture One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle PEN/Hemingway Award Winner • Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize • Longlisted for The Women’s Prize • Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • New York Times Editors’ Choice Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men. Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together? This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

Download or read book Bottled Goods written by Sophie Van Llewyn and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-07-28 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize, this poignant, lyrical novel is set in 1970s Romania during Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime—and depicts childhood, marriage, family, and identity in the face of extreme obstacles. Alina yearns for freedom. She and her husband Liviu are teachers in their twenties, living under the repressive regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania in the 1970s. But after her brother-in-law defects, Alina and Liviu fall under suspicion and surveillance, and their lives are suddenly turned upside down—just like the glasses in her superstitious Aunt Theresa's house that are used to ward off evil spirits. But Alina's evil spirits are more corporeal: a suffocating, manipulative mother; a student who accuses her; and a menacing Secret Services agent who makes one-too-many visits. As the couple continues to be harassed, their marriage soon deteriorates. With the government watching—and most likely listening— escape seems impossible . . . until Alina’s mystical aunt proposes a surprising solution to reduce her problems to a manageable size. Weaving elements of magic realism, Romanian folklore, and Kafkaesque paranoia into a gritty and moving depiction of one woman's struggle for personal and political freedom, Bottled Goods is written in short bursts of “flash fiction” and explores universal themes of empowerment, liberty, family, and loyalty.

Download or read book Dominicana written by Angie Cruz and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Shortlisted for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction “Through a novel with so much depth, beauty, and grace, we, like Ana, are forever changed.” —Jacqueline Woodson, Vanity Fair “Gorgeous writing, gorgeous story.” —Sandra Cisneros Fifteen-year-old Ana Cancion never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she has to say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day, 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk-up in Washington Heights. Lonely and miserable, Ana hatches a reckless plan to escape. But at the bus terminal, she is stopped by Cesar, Juan’s free-spirited younger brother, who convinces her to stay. As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family’s assets, leaving Cesar to take care of Ana. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, see a movie at Radio City Music Hall, go dancing with Cesar, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family. In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Angie Cruz's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.

Download or read book A Spell of Winter written by Helen Dunmore and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Catherine and her brother, Rob, don't know why they have been abandoned by their parents. Incarcerated in the enormous country house of their grandfather, they create a refuge against their family's dark secrets as the outside world moves towards the First World War. As time passes their sibling love deepens and crosses into forbidden territory.

Download or read book A Boy in Winter written by Rachel Seiffert and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early on a gray November morning in 1941, a small Ukrainian town is overrun by the SS. Penned in with his fellow Jews, a father anxiously awaits word of his two sons, while a young woman, come to fetch her sweetheart away from the invaders, must confront new and harsh truths about those closest to her. At the same time, a German engineer, here to avoid a war he considers criminal, is faced with an even greater crime unfolding behind the lines and no one but himself to turn to. And in the midst of it all, a boy determined to survive must throw in his lot with strangers. As their stories weave together, each of these characters comes to know the compromises demanded by survival, the oppressive power of fear, and the possibility of courage in the face of terror.

Download or read book Why Women Read Fiction written by Helen Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ian McEwan once said, 'When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.' This book explains how precious fiction is to contemporary women readers, and how they draw on it to tell the stories of their lives. Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers, and librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren, and female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. This book, written by an experienced teacher, scholar of women's writing, and literature festival director, draws on over 500 interviews with and questionnaires from women readers and writers. It describes how, where, and when British women read fiction, and examines why stories and writers influence the way female readers understand and shape their own life stories. Taylor explores why women are the main buyers and readers of fiction, members of book clubs, attendees at literary festivals, and organisers of days out to fictional sites and writers' homes. The book analyses the special appeal and changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica, and crime. It also illuminates the reasons for British women's abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. Taylor offers a cornucopia of witty and wise women's voices, of both readers themselves and also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde, and Sarah Dunant. The book helps us understand why—in Jackie Kay's words—'our lives are mapped by books.'

Download or read book The Gustav Sonata A Novel written by Rose Tremain and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction A poignant tale about the enduring friendship between two men under the shadow of the Second World War. Gustav Perle grows up in a small town in Switzerland, where the horrors of the Second World War seem only a distant echo. An only child, he lives alone with Emilie, the mother he adores but who treats him with bitter severity. He begins an intense friendship with a Jewish boy his age, talented and mercurial Anton Zweibel, a budding concert pianist. The novel follows Gustav’s family, tracing the roots of his mother’s anti-Semitism and its impact on her son and his beloved friend. Moving backward to the war years and the painful repercussions of an act of conscience, and forward through the lives and careers of the two men, one who becomes a hotel owner, the other a concert pianist, The Gustav Sonata explores the passionate love of childhood friendship as it is lost, transformed, and regained over a lifetime. It is a powerful and deeply moving addition to the beloved oeuvre of one of our greatest contemporary novelists.

Download or read book The Authority Gap written by Mary Ann Sieghart and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *A WATERSTONES 'BEST POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR'* *A TIMES 'BEST PHILOSOPHY AND IDEAS' BOOK OF 2021* *A GUARDIAN 'BEST POLITICS BOOKS OF THE YEAR'* 'A brilliant manifesto explaining why women are still so underestimated and overlooked in today's world, but how we can also be hopeful for change' - Philippa Perry 'An impassioned, meticulously argued and optimistic call to arms for anyone who cares about creating a fairer society' - Observer __________ Imagine living in a world in which you were routinely patronised by women. Imagine having your views ignored or your expertise frequently challenged by them. Imagine people always addressing the woman you are with before you. Now imagine a world in which the reverse of this is true. The Authority Gap provides a startling perspective on the unseen bias at work in our everyday lives, to reveal the scale of the gap that still persists between men and women. Would you believe that US Supreme Court Justices are interrupted four times more often than male ones... 96% of the time by men? Or that British parents, when asked to estimate their child's IQ will place their son at 115 and their daughter at 107? Marshalling a wealth of data with precision and insight, and including interviews with pioneering women such as Baroness Hale, Mary Beard and Bernadine Evaristo, Mary Ann exposes unconscious bias in this fresh feminist take on how to address and counteract systemic sexism in ways that benefit us all. Includes interviews with pioneering women such as: Baroness Hale Mary Beard Bernadine Evaristo Mary McAleese Julia Gillard Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes Cherie Blair Liz Truss Amber Rudd Frances Morris Laura Bates __________ 'Hugely exciting' - Emily Maitlis 'Deeply researched, profoundly thoughtful and a book very much for the here and now: Mary Ann Sieghart's The Authority Gap is the book she was probably born to write' - Andrew Marr 'At last here is a credible roadmap that is capable of taking women from the margins to the centre by bridging the authority gap that holds back even the best and most talented of women.' - Mary McAleese, Former President of Ireland

Download or read book The Glorious Heresies written by Lisa McInerney and published by John Murray. This book was released on 2015-04-09 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE BAILEYS' WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016 WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOT PRIZE 2016 We all do stupid things when we're kids. Ryan Cusack's grown up faster than most - being the oldest of six with a dead mum and an alcoholic dad will do that for you. And nobody says Ryan's stupid. Not even behind his back. It's the people around him who are the problem. The gangland boss using his dad as a 'cleaner'. The neighbour who says she's trying to help but maybe wants something more than that. The prostitute searching for the man she never knew she'd miss until he disappeared without trace one night . . . The only one on Ryan's side is his girlfriend Karine. If he blows that, he's all alone. But the truth is, you don't know your own strength till you need it.

Download or read book Miss Burma written by Charmaine Craig and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Craig wields powerful and vivid prose to illuminate a country and a family trapped not only by war and revolution, but also by desire and loss.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Miss Burma tells the story of modern-day Burma through the eyes of Benny and Khin, husband and wife, and their daughter Louisa. After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country’s history. Years later, Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma’s first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her newfound fame, she is forced to reckon with her family’s past, the West’s ongoing covert dealings in her country, and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people. Based on the story of the author’s mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom. “At once beautiful and heartbreaking . . . An incredible family saga.” —Refinery29 “Miss Burma charts both a political history and a deeply personal one—and of those incendiary moments when private and public motivations overlap.” —Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Chouette written by Claire Oshetsky and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION "Claire Oshetsky’s novel is a marvel: its language a joy, its imagination dizzying." —Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind An exhilarating, provocative novel of motherhood in extremis Tiny is pregnant. Her husband is delighted. “You think this baby is going to be like you, but it’s not like you at all,” she warns him. “This baby is an owl-baby.” When Chouette is born small and broken-winged, Tiny works around the clock to meet her daughter’s needs. Left on her own to care for a child who seems more predatory bird than baby, Tiny vows to raise Chouette to be her authentic self. Even in those times when Chouette’s behaviors grow violent and strange, Tiny’s loving commitment to her daughter is unwavering. When she discovers that her husband is on an obsessive and increasingly dangerous quest to find a “cure” for their daughter, Tiny must decide whether Chouette should be raised to fit in or to be herself—and learn what it truly means to be a mother. Arresting, darkly funny, and unsettling, Chouette is a brilliant exploration of ambition, sacrifice, perceptions of ability, and the ferocity of motherly love.

Download or read book The Tamer Tamed written by John Fletcher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tamer Tamed is the subtitle or alternative title to John Fletcher's The Woman's Prize, a comedic sequel and reply to The Taming of the Shrew. The plot switches the gender roles of Shakespeare's play: the women seek to tame the men. Katherine (the "shrew" of the original) has died, and Petruchio takes a second wife, Maria. Maria denounces her former mildness and vows not to sleep with Petruchio until she "turn him and bend him as [she] list, and mold him into a babe again." After many comedic exchanges and plot twists, Petruchio is finally "tamed" in the eyes of Maria, and the play ends with the two reconciled. The play is seen to reflect how society's views of women, femininity, and "domestic propriety" were beginning to change. It is said that Fletcher wrote this play to attract Shakespeare's attention - the two went on to collaborate on at least three plays together. This brand new New Mermaid edition offers unique and fresh insight into the critical interpretation of the play. It builds on current critical foundations (the relationship with Taming of the Shrew, gender relations etc) and suggests different areas of interest (popular associations of the shrew, the question of reputation, and a re-examination of the play's structure). as well as examining stage history and recent productions.

Download or read book Girl at War written by Sara Novic and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of The Tiger’s Wife and All the Light We Cannot See comes a powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is profoundly shaped by war. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE, BOOKLIST, AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE • ALEX AWARD WINNER • LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia’s capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana’s idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana’s sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world. New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she’s tried to move on from her past, she can’t escape her memories of war—secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country’s difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before. Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl—and its legacy on all of us. It’s a debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today. Praise for Girl at War “Outstanding . . . Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice) “[An] old-fashioned page-turner that will demand all of the reader’s attention, happily given. A debut novel that astonishes.”—Vanity Fair “Shattering . . . The book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified fence.”—USA Today

Download or read book Meatless Days written by Sara Suleri Goodyear and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with her own most intimate memories—of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z.A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and five siblings; and of her own passage to the West. "Nine autobiographical tales that move easily back and forth among Pakistan, Britain, and the United States. . . . She forays lightly into Pakistani history, and deeply into the history of her family and friends. . . . The Suleri women at home in Pakistan make this book sing."—Daniel Wolfe, New York Times Book Review "A jewel of insight and beauty. . . . Suleri's voice has the same authority when she speaks about Pakistani politics as it does in her literary interludes."—Rone Tempest, Los Angeles Times Book Review "The author has a gift for rendering her family with a few, deft strokes, turning them out as whole and complete as eggs."—Anita Desai, Washington Post Book World "Meatless Days takes the reader through a Third World that will surprise and confound him even as it records the author's similar perplexities while coming to terms with the West. Those voyages Suleri narrates in great strings of words and images so rich that they left this reader . . . hungering for more."—Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune "Dazzling. . . . Suleri is a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon."—Henry Louise Gates, Jr., Voice Literary Supplement

Download or read book The Book of Form and Emptiness written by Ruth Ozeki and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 573 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “No one writes like Ruth Ozeki—a triumph.” —Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library “Inventive, vivid, and propelled by a sense of wonder.” —TIME “If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home.” —David Mitchell, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud Atlas A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both—the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many. And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking.

Download or read book The Trick to Time written by Kit de Waal and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'There's a trick to time. You can make it expand or you can make it contract. Make it shorter or make it longer . . .' Some moments you want to last forever. Some moments shape a life. For Mona, it's the joy of playing on a Wexford beach as a young girl, next to her family's cottage overlooking the Irish sea. The thrill of moving to Birmingham with a new job and a room of her own in a busy boarding-house. Meeting the love of her life; a whirlwind marriage; a sudden, tragic loss. But now, decades later, Mona is determined to find happiness before it's too late. She knows that every moment is precious. But can we ever let go of the past that shaped us? 'Devastatingly emotional. De Waal's storytelling gives us the poetry and sorrow of life itself' Financial Times 'Weaving tragedy and joy, big themes and the minutiae of life, this is a love story to take on the classics' Emerald Street 'An emotionally sure-handed novel exploring harrowing terrain with deft sensitivity' Sunday Times