Download or read book The Flight of Gemma Hardy written by Margot Livesey and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller “An exceptionally well-plotted, well-crafted, innovatively interpreted modern twist on a timeless classic, one that’s sure to delight the multitudes of Brontë fans, and the multitudes of fans that Livesey deserves.” —The Boston Globe “A suspenseful, curl-up-by-the-fire romance with a willfully determined protagonist who’s worthy of her literary role model.” — People The resonant story of a young woman’s struggle to take charge of her own future, The Flight of Gemma Hardy is a modern take on a classic story—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—that will fascinate readers of the Gothic original and fans of modern literary fiction alike, with its lyrical prose, robust characters, and abundant compassion. Set in early 1960s Scotland, this breakout novel from award-winning author Margot Livesey is a tale of determination and spirit that, like The Three Weissmanns of Westport and A Thousand Acres, spins an unforgettable new story from threads of our shared, still-living literary past.
Download or read book Banishing Verona written by Margot Livesey and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A couple begins an intense affair, only to be separated abruptly-and perhaps irrevocably-in this surprising, suspenseful love story Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona leaves abruptly, without explanation, for Boston. Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives, though not of a romantic kind. Verona's involve her brother, Henry, who is tied up in shady financial dealings. Zeke's father has had a heart attack and his mother is threatening to run away with her lover, all of which puts pressure on Zeke to take over the family grocery business. And yet he finds himself following Verona to Boston. As he pursues her, and she pursues Henry, both are forced to ask the perplexing question: Can we ever know another person? Deftly plotted and filled with unexpected twists, Livesey's Banishing Verona marks the arrival of another lyrical and wise novel from a writer whose work "radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery" (Alice Sebold).
Download or read book The Boy in the Field written by Margot Livesey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of the Year | An O Magazine Best Book of the Year The New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy delivers another “luminous, unforgettable, and perfectly rendered” (Dennis Lehane) novel—a poignant and probing psychological drama that follows the lives of three siblings in the wake of a violent crime. One September afternoon in 1999, teenagers Matthew, Zoe, and Duncan Lang are walking home from school when they discover a boy lying in a field, bloody and unconscious. Thanks to their intervention, the boy’s life is saved. In the aftermath, all three siblings are irrevocably changed. Matthew, the oldest, becomes obsessed with tracking down the assailant, secretly searching the local town with the victim’s brother. Zoe wanders the streets of Oxford, looking at men, and one of them, a visiting American graduate student, looks back. Duncan, the youngest, who has seldom thought about being adopted, suddenly decides he wants to find his birth mother. Overshadowing all three is the awareness that something is amiss in their parents’ marriage. Over the course of the autumn, as each of the siblings confronts the complications and contradictions of their approaching adulthood, they find themselves at once drawn together and driven apart. Written with the deceptive simplicity and power of a fable, The Boy in the Field showcases Margot Livesey’s unmatched ability to “tell her tale masterfully, with intelligence, tenderness, and a shrewd understanding of all our mercurial human impulses” (Lily King, author of Euphoria).
Download or read book The Missing World written by Margot Livesey and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-03-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Replete with compelling characters and an extravagant plot, this novel of memory and redemption weaves together four separate quests for love and truth in a manner both thrilling and, ultimately, revealing about the imperfections of human nature.
Download or read book Mercury written by Margot Livesey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A taut emotional thriller about love, obsession and the secrets that pull a family apart. Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optician in suburban Boston, he rests assured that he and his wife, Viv, who works at the local stables, will live out quiet lives with their two children. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young racehorse—enters their lives and everything changes. Viv’s friend Hilary has inherited Mercury from her brother after his mysterious death—he was riding Mercury late one afternoon and the horse returned to the stables alone. When Hilary first brings Mercury to board at the stables everyone there is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv dreams of competing with Mercury, rebuilding the ambitions of grandeur that she held for herself before moving to the suburbs. But her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred quickly escalates to obsession. By the time Donald understands the change that has come over Viv, it is too late to stop the impending fate that both their actions have wrought for them and their loved ones. A beautifully crafted, riveting novel about the ways in which relationships can be disrupted and, ultimately, destroyed by obsession, secrets and ever-escalating lies.
Download or read book The Year She Left Us written by Kathryn Ma and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three generations of Chinese-American women in a San Francisco family must confront their past and carve out a future in this extraordinary novel, a “haunting” debut full of “shimmering and unforgettable” characters. (New York Times Book Review) The Kong women are in crisis. A disastrous trip to visit her "home" orphanage in China has plunged eighteen-year-old Ari into a self-destructive spiral. Her adoptive mother, Charlie, a lawyer with a great heart, is desperate to keep her daughter safe. Meanwhile, Charlie must endure the prickly scrutiny of her beautiful, Bryn Mawr educated mother, Gran—who, as the daughter of a cultured Chinese doctor, came to America to survive Mao's Revolution—and her sister, Les, a brilliant judge with a penchant to rule over everyone's lives. As they cope with Ari's journey of discovery and its aftermath, the Kong women will come face to face with the truths of their lives—four powerful intertwining stories of accomplishment, tenacity, secrets, loneliness, and love. Beautifully illuminating the bonds of family and blood, The Year She Left Us explores the promise and pain of adoption, the price of assimilation and achievement, the debt we owe to others, and what we owe ourselves.
Download or read book Broken Like This written by Monica Trasandes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale told in bittersweet flashbacks follows a fateful car accident of a young woman devotedly loved by a man and a woman, who discover that the comatose woman is pregnant and that her health is being overseen by her malevolent stepfather.
Download or read book The House On Fortune Street written by Margot Livesey and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seems like mutual good luck for Abigail and Dara when they meet at university and, despite their differences, become fast friends. Years later, they remain an unlikely pair: Abigail, an actress who confidently uses her charms both on and off stage, is reluctant to commit; Dara, a therapist, throws herself into every relationship with frightening intensity. Yet each seems—another stroke of luck?—to have found “true love”—Abigail with her academic boyfriend, and Dara with a tall, dark violinist. Soon, however, trouble threatens both relationships and the women’s friendship. Through four ingeniously interlocking narratives, Margot Livesey skillfully reveals how luck—good and bad—plays a vital role in our lives, and how our childhood legacies may be harder to leave behind than we hope. “Vibrant, evocative, irresistible” (Los Angeles Times), The House on Fortune Street offers a surprisingly provocative detective story of the heart, one that will keep you in its thrall.
Download or read book The Myth of You and Me written by Leah Stewart and published by Crown. This book was released on 2006-04-25 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Searingly honest, beautiful, and full of fragile urgency, The Myth of You and Me is a celebration and portrait of a friendship that will appeal to anyone who still feels the absence of that first true friend. When Cameron was fifteen, Sonia was her best friend—no one could come between them. Now Cameron is a twenty-nine-year-old research assistant with no meaningful ties to anyone except her aging boss, noted historian Oliver Doucet. When an unexpected letter arrives from Sonia ten years after the incident that ended their friendship, Cameron doesn’t reply, despite Oliver’s urging. But then he passes away, and Cameron discovers that he has left her with one final task: to track down Sonia and hand-deliver a mysterious package to her. Now without a job, a home, and a purpose, Cameron decides to honor his request, setting off on the road to find this stranger who was once her inseparable other half. The Myth of You and Me, the story of Cameron and Sonia’s friendship—as intense as any love affair—and its dramatic demise, captures the universal sense of loss and nostalgia that often lingers after the end of an important relationship.
Download or read book Dailiness written by Mark Jarman and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “In this wonderful collection of essays, Mark Jarman explores with wit and passion the practice of poetry―of making it, of reading it, of living it. In his vivid analyses of works by Brooks, Boisseau, Donne, Herbert, Rukeyser and Twichell, among others, he explores how the poems and their authors negotiate time and mortality, faith and devotion. He also offers an intimate examination of his own gorgeous work and how it comes onto the page. A delight for readers and writers of poetry.”―Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and Mercury The essays in Dailiness are about how a poet makes a poem. For Mark Jarman a poem results from a deliberate and conscious act. He is especially interested in the way human consciousness connects devotional prayer to poetry. In these essays he considers poems written millennia apart―from Gilgamesh to George Herbert’s work, from the poems of Robert Frost to those of Seamus Heaney, to his own recently-written poems and those of his contemporaries. As the poems celebrate the work of daily creation, they possess a religious aspect. In Dailiness Jarman sheds light on how poems accomplish this work. "An uplifting way to think about writing daily."―Chapter 16 "In 'Days' Philip Larkin writes, 'Where can we live but days?' Mark Jarman might reply, 'Where can we write but days?' Dailiness conjures up the quotidian, the everyday, the workaday, but also an elevated awareness of the present as we are in it mid-stream, and poetry as (in Auden’s words) 'a way of happening.' In these thoughtful and thought-provoking essays on the art and craft of poetry, from pronoun to metaphor, Herbert to Heaney, repetition to translation, Jarman rings the changes on 'dailiness,' calling us back to attention, writing as devotion."―A. E. Stallings, author of Like "A deep and wide-ranging knowledge/appreciation of poetry and the tradition―how the values and craft of poetry apply practically―are the foundation of Dailiness. Yet this is not a handbook or an academic study; rather, it is a true, personal, and entirely accessible account detailing how care, attention, and thoughtfulness lead to meaning. From the Metaphysicals to the Moderns and contemporary poets, from plays to pop lyrics, this is a devotional book―in both the vocational and spiritual sense of that word―by a master of the art, illustrating the ways in which poetry celebrates and illuminates being as an act of consciousness, and, moreover, how the making and understanding of poems are relevant to our lives in the moment, and perhaps in a life to come."―Christopher Buckley, author of Star Journal and Cruising State "'Daily life is the native country where we feel at home,' writes Mark Jarman in this elegant book. If we think of elegance in its root sense as selection and choice, we can find beauty in deliberation, 'the hours in the practice room' or 'at the desk.' Jarman’s elegant essays strike out profoundly from subjects like Gilgamesh and The Aeneid to the best devotional poetry and contemporary practice. This is a book to live with as much as to read. It will keep you coming back."―David Mason, author of Ludlow and Voices, Places
Download or read book An Unexpected Guest written by Anne Korkeakivi and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party.
Download or read book Her Here written by Amanda Dennis and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An atmospheric debut novel about one lost young woman’s search for another “Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing.” —Washington Post Elena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation. Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself. An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.
Download or read book Learning by Heart written by Margot Livesey and published by Markham, Ont. : Penguin Books Canada. This book was released on 1986 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Eleven Hours written by Pamela Erens and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR Best Book of 2016 A New Yorker Book We Loved in 2016 Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2016 The Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2016 Flavorwire Most Anticipated Book From the critically acclaimed author of The Virgins, Eleven Hours is an intimate exploration of the physical and mental challenges of childbirth, told with unremitting suspense and astonishing beauty. Lore arrives at the hospital alone—no husband, no partner, no friends. Her birth plan is explicit: she wants no fetal monitor, no IV, no epidural. Franckline, a nurse in the maternity ward—herself on the verge of showing—is patient with the young woman. She knows what it’s like to worry that something might go wrong, and she understands the distress when it does. She knows as well as anyone the severe challenge of childbirth, what it does to the mind and the body. Eleven Hours is the story of two soon-to-be mothers who, in the midst of a difficult labor, are forced to reckon with their pasts and re-create their futures. Lore must disentangle herself from a love triangle; Franckline must move beyond past traumas to accept the life that’s waiting for her. Pamela Erens moves seamlessly between their begrudging partnership and the memories evoked by so intense an experience: for Lore, of the father of her child and her former best friend; for Franckline, of the family in Haiti from which she’s exiled. At turns urgent and lyrical, Erens’s novel is a visceral portrait of childbirth, and a vivid rendering of the way we approach motherhood—with fear and joy, anguish and awe.
Download or read book My Life in Middlemarch written by Rebecca Mead and published by Crown. This book was released on 2014-01-28 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not. In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself, My Life in Middlemarch is for every ardent lover of literature who cares about why we read books, and how they read us.
Download or read book The Care and Management of Lies written by Jacqueline Winspear and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of the Maisie Dobbs series turns her prodigious talents to this World War I standalone novel, a lyrical drama of love struggling to survive in a damaged, fractured world. By July 1914, the ties between Kezia Marchant and Thea Brissenden, friends since girlhood, have become strained—by Thea’s passionate embrace of women’s suffrage, and by the imminent marriage of Kezia to Thea’s brother, Tom, who runs the family farm. When Kezia and Tom wed just a month before war is declared between Britain and Germany, Thea’s gift to Kezia is a book on household management—a veiled criticism of the bride’s prosaic life to come. Yet when Tom enlists to fight for his country and Thea is drawn reluctantly onto the battlefield, the farm becomes Kezia’s responsibility. Each must find a way to endure the ensuing cataclysm and turmoil. As Tom marches to the front lines, and Kezia battles to keep her ordered life from unraveling, they hide their despair in letters and cards filled with stories woven to bring comfort. Even Tom’s fellow soldiers in the trenches enter and find solace in the dream world of Kezia’s mouth-watering, albeit imaginary meals. But will well-intended lies and self-deception be of use when they come face to face with the enemy? Published to coincide with the centennial of the Great War, The Care and Management of Lies paints a poignant picture of love and friendship strained by the pain of separation and the brutal chaos of battle. Ultimately, it raises profound questions about conflict, belief, and love that echo in our own time.
Download or read book The Season written by Kristen Richardson and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Smithsonian Best History Book of 2019 In this enthralling history of the debutante ritual, Kristen Richardson sheds new light on contemporary ideas about women and marriage. Kristen Richardson, from a family of debutantes, chose not to debut. But as her curiosity drove her to research this enduring custom, she learned that it, and debutantes, are not as simple as they seem. The story begins in England six hundred years ago when wealthy fathers needed an efficient way to find appropriate husbands for their daughters. Elizabeth I’s exclusive presentations at her court expanded into London’s full season of dances, dinners, and courting, extending eventually to the many corners of the British empire and beyond. Richardson traces the social seasons of young women on both sides of the Atlantic, from Georgian England to colonial Philadelphia, from the Antebellum South and Wharton’s New York back to England, where debutante daughters of Gilded Age millionaires sought to marry British aristocrats. She delves into Jazz Age debuts, carnival balls in the American South, and the reimagined ritual of elite African American communities, which offers both social polish and academic scholarships. The Season shares the captivating stories of these young women, often through their words from diaries, letters, and interviews that Richardson conducted at contemporary balls. The debutantes give voice to an array of complex feelings about being put on display, about the young men they meet, and about what their future in society or as wives might be. While exploring why the debutante tradition persists—and why it has spread to Russia, China, and other nations—Richardson has uncovered its extensive cultural influence on the lives of daughters in Britain and the US and how they have come to marry.
