Download or read book An Unlasting Home written by Mai Al-Nakib and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2023-04-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sara is a philosophy professor at Kuwait University. Her relationship with Kuwait is complicated; it is a country she recognises less and less. Yet since her return from California after her mother's death, a certain inertia has kept her there. When she is accused of blasphemy – which carries with it the threat of execution – Sara realises she must reconcile her feelings and her place in the world once and for all. Awaiting trial, Sara retraces the past, intent on examining the lives of the women who made her. Interspersed with her narratives are the stories of her grandmothers: beautiful and stubborn Yasmine, who marries the son of the Pasha of Basra and lives to regret it, and Lulwa, born poor in old Kuwait and swept off to India by her wealthy merchant husband; and her two mothers: Noura, who dreams of building a life in America, and her ayah Maria, who leaves her own children behind in Pune to help raise Sara and her brother Karim. Spanning Kuwait, Lebanon, Iraq, India and the United States, An Unlasting Home brings to life the triumphs and failures of three generations of Arab women. At once intimate and sweeping, personal and political, it is an unforgettable family portrait and a spellbinding epic tale.
Download or read book The Hidden Light of Objects written by Mai Al-Nakib and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-06-05 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For fans of Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. A young girl, renamed Amerika in honour of the US role in the liberation of Kuwait, finds her name has become a barometer of her country's growing hostility towards the West. A middle-aged man dying from cancer looks back on his extramarital affairs and the abiding forgiveness of his wife. The headlines tell of war, unrest and religious clashes. But if you look beyond them you will see life in the Middle East as it is really lived – adolescent love, the fragility of marriage, pain of the most quotidian kind. Mai Al-Nakib's luminous stories unveil the lives of ordinary people – and the power of objects to hold extraordinary memories.
Download or read book A Home for Us written by Sharon Jennings and published by . This book was released on 2022-03-21 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the fictionalized story of "Yula", a character inspired by a real girl Sharon Jennings met in her visits to the Hope Development Centre in Kenya. When four--year--old Yula is discovered by the orphanage director?"Mum"?and introduced to a caring home and school, her abilities develop as do her understandings of how to care for others. When a new child enters the orphanage, at first Yula is angry and jealous, but soon she warmly welcomes Mutuku just as she had been welcomed when she first arrived. Eva Campbell's evocative illustrations glow with light and colour, rendered in gouache, acrylic and ink on canvas. Sharon Jennings is a greatly appreciated return visitor to this centre in Kikima, Kenya. The children and staff enjoy her visits and consider her a member of their Hope family. The story has been shared with the children and the Centre has given Sharon permission and thanks for telling this story; a portion of the author's royalties is going to support the orphaned and impoverished children of Hope.
Download or read book Apollo s Angels written by Jennifer Homans and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, LOS ANGELES TIMES, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY For more than four hundred years, the art of ballet has stood at the center of Western civilization. Its traditions serve as a record of our past. Lavishly illustrated and beautifully told, Apollo’s Angels—the first cultural history of ballet ever written—is a groundbreaking work. From ballet’s origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France’s Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. In the twentieth century, émigré dancers taught their art to a generation in the United States and in Western Europe, setting off a new and radical transformation of dance. Jennifer Homans, a historian, critic, and former professional ballerina, wields a knowledge of dance born of dedicated practice. Her admiration and love for the ballet, as Entertainment Weekly notes, brings “a dancer’s grace and sure-footed agility to the page.”
Download or read book Lookaway Lookaway written by Wilton Barnhardt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presiding over her family and its legacy of masterpiece Civil War art, North Carolina society maven Jerene Jarvis Johnston takes increasingly haphazard steps to protect her grown children from their own heedlessness.
Download or read book A Boy Called Dickens written by Deborah Hopkinson and published by Schwartz & Wade. This book was released on 2012-01-10 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years Dickens kept the story of his own childhood a secret. Yet it is a story worth telling. For it helps us remember how much we all might lose when a child's dreams don't come true . . . As a child, Dickens was forced to live on his own and work long hours in a rat-infested blacking factory. Readers will be drawn into the winding streets of London, where they will learn how Dickens got the inspiration for many of his characters. The 200th anniversary of Dickens's birth was February 7, 2012, and this tale of his little-known boyhood is the perfect way to introduce kids to the great author. This Booklist Best Children's Book of the Year is historical fiction at its ingenious best.
Download or read book Body Surfing written by Anita Shreve and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2007-04-24 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the age of 29, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to regain her footing once again, she has answered an ad to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do couple as they spend a sultry summer in their oceanfront New Hampshire cottage. But when the Edwards' two grown sons, Ben and Jeff, arrive at the beach house, Sydney finds herself caught up in a destructive web of old tensions and bitter divisions. As the brothers vie for her affections, the fragile existence Sydney has rebuilt for herself is threatened. With the subtle wit, lyrical language, and brilliant insight into the human heart that has led her to be called "an author at one with her métier (Miami Herald), Shreve weaves a novel about marriage, family, and the supreme courage that it takes to love.
Download or read book The Earthquake written by Tahir Wattar and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One afternoon, Sheikh Abdelmajid Boularwah embarks upon a journey in search of distant relatives. His immediate family are ruthless, rich and collaborate with colonial authorities. He hopes his long-lost relatives, who are unknown to the new Communist government, might be better placed to help him defraud it. Through a labyrinth of back alleys and memories, Boularwah makes his way from Algiers across the seven bridges of Constantine, battling the forces of a rapidly changing society while confronting the demons of his own past. The Earthquake offers a surrealist vision of post-colonial Algeria — a society in chaos, a world turned upside down. Written in the early 1970s, this classic work by pioneering novelist Tahir Wattar presciently foretells the dreadful events which would later besiege his country.
Download or read book Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress written by Christine Baldacchino and published by Groundwood Books Ltd. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Morris is a little boy who loves using his imagination. But most of all, Morris loves his classroom’s dress-up center and its tangerine dress. Morris is a little boy who loves using his imagination. He dreams about having space adventures, paints beautiful pictures and sings the loudest during circle time. But most of all, Morris loves his classroom’s dress-up center — he loves wearing the tangerine dress. But the children in Morris’s class don’t understand. Dresses, they say, are for girls. And Morris certainly isn’t welcome in the spaceship some of his classmates are building. Astronauts, they say, don’t wear dresses. One day when Morris feels all alone, and sick from the taunts of his classmates, his mother lets him stay home from school. Morris reads about elephants, and puts together a puzzle, and dreams of a fantastic space adventure with his cat, Moo. Inspired by his dream, Morris paints the incredible scene he saw, and brings it with him to school. He builds his own spaceship, hangs his painting on the front of it and takes two of his classmates on an outer space adventure. With warm, dreamy illustrations Isabelle Malenfant perfectly captures Morris’s vulnerability and the vibrancy of his imagination. This is a sweetly told story about the courage and creativity it takes to be different. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.3 Describe characters, settings, and major events in a story, using key details. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.1.4 Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.
Download or read book The Old Woman and the River written by Ismail Fahad Ismail and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the ceasefire in 1988, the devastation to the landscape of Iraq wrought by the longest war of the twentieth century—the Iran-Iraq War—becomes visible. Eight years of fighting have turned nature upside down, with vast wastelands being left behind. In southeastern Iraq, along the shores of the Shatt al-Arab River, the groves of date palm trees have withered. No longer bearing fruit, their leaves have turned a bright yellow. There, Iraqi forces had blocked the entry points of the river’s tributaries and streams, preventing water from flowing to the trees and vegetation. Yet, surveying this destruction from the sky, a strip of land bursting with green can be seen. Beginning from the Shatt al-Arab River and reaching to the fringes of the western desert, several kilometers wide, it appears as a lush oasis of some kind. The secret of this fertility, sustaining villages and remaining soldiers, is unclear. But it is said that one old woman is responsible for this lifeline.
Download or read book Egyptian Earth written by Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi and published by Saqi Books. This book was released on 2024-02-20 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A twelve-year old boy returns from school in Cairo to find his village torn by feuding and fear. A corrupt official has decreed that the peasants must irrigate their fields in five days instead of the customary ten – a demand that threatens to severely disrupt the life of this small community. It will take something extraordinary for the villagers to overcome the greedy ruling-class. The schoolmaster Sheikh Hassouna urges the villagers to stand together if they want to keep custody of the land they have lived on for generations. But it takes many attempts, some disastrous, others comical and touching, before they join forces against their oppressors. Egyptian Earth was first published in 1954, two years after the Egyptian revolution. An epic drama of great power, it is a masterpiece of modern Arabic literature.
Download or read book The Last of the Southern Girls written by Willie Morris and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1994-08-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Carol Hollywell is beautiful, smart, elegant, and charming. A debutante from De Soto Point, Arkansas, and a recent graduate of Ole Miss, she is heir to a good southern name and a small southern fortune. She knows what she wants and, more important, knows how to get it. She is, in other words, the prototypical southern belle, a Scarlett O’Hara for the 1950s, and when she moves to Washington, D.C., in 1957, she sets the town on its ear. Willie Morris’ cleverly conceived and brilliantly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) follows this headstrong woman from her arrival at the Capital and traces the ups and downs of her life in the political and social whirl of the city over the next decade and a half. Eventually, she becomes romantically involved with a prominent congressman—an idealist, a reformer, a man perhaps headed for the very pinnacle of political life. It is at first a dazzling alliance, yet the genuine satisfactions they find in their relationship cannot long withstand the pressures of the ambitions both of them harbor. The very drives that initially brought them together in the end propel their love affair into jeopardy. Morris paints a devastatingly accurate portrait not only of a power-hungry woman but also of the society that feeds such hunger. His descriptions of Washington and its denizens—the politicos, the journalists, the socialites, and the hangers-on—are nothing short of breathtaking.
Download or read book Other Voices Other Rooms written by Truman Capote and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
Download or read book The Lost Daughter written by Lucy Ferriss and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brooke O’Connor—elegant, self-possessed, and kind—has a happy marriage and a deeply loved young daughter. So her adamant refusal to have a second child confounds her husband, Sean. When Brooke’s high school boyfriend Alex—now divorced and mourning the death of his young son—unexpectedly resurfaces, Sean begins to suspect an affair. For fifteen years Brooke has kept a shameful secret from everyone she loves. Only Alex knows the truth that drove them apart. His reappearance now threatens the life she has so carefully constructed and fortified by denial. With her marriage—and her emotional equilibrium—at stake, Brooke must confront what she has been unwilling to face for so long. But the truth is not what Brooke believes it to be. Lucy Ferriss’s haunting novel reveals the profound ways in which remorse over the past can not only derail lives but also—sometimes—redeem them.
Download or read book We Are Animals written by Tim Ewins and published by Lightning Books. This book was released on 2021-07-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cow looks out to sea, dreaming of a life that involves grass. Jan is also looking out to sea. He's in Goa, dreaming of the passport-thief who stole his heart (and his passport) forty-six years ago. Back then, fate kept bringing them together, but lately it seems to have given up. Jan has not. In his long search he has accidentally held a whole town at imaginary gunpoint in Soviet Russia, stalked the proprietors of an international illegal lamp-trafficking scam and done his very best to avoid any kind of work involving the packing of fish. Now he thinks if he just waits, if he just does nothing at all, maybe fate will find it easier to reunite them. His story spans fifty-four years, ten countries, two imperfect criminals (and one rather perfect one), twenty-two different animals and an annoying teenager who just... Will... Not... Leave. But maybe an annoying teenager is exactly what Jan needs to help him find the missing thief? Featuring a menagerie of creatures, each with its own story to tell, We Are Animals is a quirky, heart-warming tale of lost love, unlikely friendships and the certainty of fate (or lack thereof). For the first time in her life the cow noticed the sun setting, and it was glorious.
Download or read book The Earthspinner written by Anuradha Roy and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-09-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A horse was in flames. It roamed beneath the ocean breathing fire . . .' When he wakes up, Elango knows his life has changed. His dream will consume him until he gives it shape. The potter must create a terracotta horse whose beauty will be reason enough for its existence. Yet he cannot pin down from where it has galloped into his mind - the Mahabharata, or Trojan legend, or his anonymous potter-ancestors. Nor can he say where it belongs - in a temple compound, within a hotel lobby, or with Zohra, whom he despairs of ever marrying. The astral, indefinable force driving Elango towards forbidden love and creation has unleashed other currents. A neighbourhood girl begins her bewildering journey into adulthood, developing a complicated relationship with him. A lost dog adopts him, taking over his heart. Meanwhile, his community is driven by inflammatory passions of a different kind. Here, people, animals, and even the gods live on a knife's edge and the consequences of daring to dream against the tide are cataclysmic. Moving between India and England, The Earthspinner reflects the many ways in which the East encounters the West. It breathes new life into ancient myths, giving allegorical shape to the war of fanaticism against reason and the imagination. It is an intricate, wrenching novel about the changed ways of loving and living in the modern world.
Download or read book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man written by James Joyce and published by Viking Adult. This book was released on 1916 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is one of the twentieth century's great coming-of-age novels. This Norton Critical Edition is based on Hans Walter Gabler's acclaimed text and is accompanied by his introduction and textual notes. John Paul Riquelme provides explanatory notes to deepen the reader's appreciation for Joyce's masterpiece." ""Backgrounds and Contexts" is topically organized: "Political Nationalism: Irish History, 1798-1916," "The Irish Literary and Cultural Revival," "Religion," and "Aesthetic Backgrounds." Fourteen illustrations accompany the documents." ""Criticism" begins with John Paul Riquelme's overview of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man's structure. Twelve diverse interpretations of his work follow, by Kenneth Burke, Umberto Eco, Hugh Kenner, Helene Cixous, John Paul Riquelme, Karen Lawrence, Maud Ellmann, Bonnie Kime Scott, Joseph Valente, Marian Eide, Pericles Lewis, adn Jonathan Mulrooney. A Selected Bibliography is also included."--BOOK JACKET.
