Download or read book The Little Stranger written by Sarah Waters and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2009-05-05 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the multi-award-winning and bestselling author of The Night Watch and Fingersmith comes an astonishing novel about love, loss, and the sometimes unbearable weight of the past. In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to see a patient at lonely Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules. Roddie Ayres, who returned from World War II physically and emotionally wounded, is desperate to keep the house and what remains of the estate together for the sake of his mother and his sister, Caroline. Mrs. Ayres is doing her best to hold on to the gracious habits of a gentler era and Caroline seems cheerfully prepared to continue doing the work a team of servants once handled, even if it means having little chance for a life of her own beyond Hundreds. But as Dr. Faraday becomes increasingly entwined in the Ayreses’ lives, signs of a more disturbing nature start to emerge, both within the family and in Hundreds Hall itself. And Faraday begins to wonder if they are all threatened by something more sinister than a dying way of life, something that could subsume them completely. Both a nuanced evocation of 1940s England and the most chill-inducing novel of psychological suspense in years, The Little Stranger confirms Sarah Waters as one of the finest and most exciting novelists writing today.
Download or read book Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger written by Louis Sachar and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All the kids from Wayside School had to spend 243 days in horrible schools while Wayside was closed to get rid of the infestation of cows! Now the kids are back and the fun begins again on every floor. Miss Mush has prepared a special lunch of baked liver in purple sauce and it is pet day on the 30th floor. There are dogs and cats and frogs and skunks and an orange named Fido, causing a terrible commotion. But the biggest surprise of all is that Mrs Jewls is expecting a baby and a substitute teacher is coming, and everyone knows what that means . . . Wayside School is going to get a little stranger.
Download or read book The Night Watch written by Sarah Waters and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.
Download or read book Little Stranger written by Lisa Olstein and published by Copper Canyon Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lisa Olstein's third collection reverberates with twinned realities: wonder and terror, beauty and difficulty, celebration and lament. Through encounters with science, war, art, animals, and motherhood, Little Stranger explores the exigencies of close attention, the tenuousness of attachment, and the ever more rapidly shifting nature of knowledge. Intimate lyrics, elegies, and narratives speak in voices familiar yet strange. Lisa Olstein's debut collection of poetry, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), won the Hayden Carruth Award, and her second volume, Lost Alphabet (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), was named a "Best Poetry Book of the Year" by Library Journal. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Download or read book A Little Stranger written by Candia McWilliam and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daisy needs to hire a new nanny for her son; the efficient and capable Margaret Pride appears to be the perfect candidate. But as Daisy becomes increasingly removed from family life and the nanny becomes more prominent, oddities in Margaret's behaviour soon surface. Masterfully constructed and crackling with tension, A Little Stranger reveals that self-deception can be just as dangerous as the deceit of others.
Download or read book The House Next Door written by Anne Rivers Siddons and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-07-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The house next door to the Kennedys appears to be haunted by an all-pervasive evil, and the couple watches as a succession of owners becomes engulfed by the sinister force, until the Kennedys set out to destroy the house themselves.
Download or read book The Little Friend written by Donna Tartt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 642 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. • “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.
Download or read book The Stranger in the Woods written by Michael Finkel and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-01-30 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years, making this dream a reality—not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own. “A meditation on solitude, wildness and survival.” —The Wall Street Journal In 1986, a shy and intelligent twenty-year-old named Christopher Knight left his home in Massachusetts, drove to Maine, and disappeared into the forest. He would not have a conversation with another human being until nearly three decades later, when he was arrested for stealing food. Living in a tent even through brutal winters, he had survived by his wits and courage, developing ingenious ways to store edibles and water, and to avoid freezing to death. He broke into nearby cottages for food, clothing, reading material, and other provisions, taking only what he needed but terrifying a community never able to solve the mysterious burglaries. Based on extensive interviews with Knight himself, this is a vividly detailed account of his secluded life—why did he leave? what did he learn?—as well as the challenges he has faced since returning to the world. It is a gripping story of survival that asks fundamental questions about solitude, community, and what makes a good life, and a deeply moving portrait of a man who was determined to live his own way, and succeeded.
Download or read book The Paying Guests written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-09-16 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling novel that has been called “a tour de force” (Wall Street Journal), “unputdownable” (The Washington Post), “a delicious hothouse of a novel” (USA Today), “effortless” (The Economist), “seductive” (Vanity Fair) and “pitch perfect” (Salon) “Superb, bewitching…Forget about Fifty Shades of Grey; this novel is one of the most sensual you will ever read, and all without sacrificing either good taste or a "G" rating” – NPR “One of the year’s most engrossing and suspenseful novels…a love affair, a shocking murder, and a flawless ending … Will keep you sleepless for three nights straight and leave you grasping for another book that can sustain that high.” — Entertainment Weekly (A rating) “Volcanically sexy, sizzingly smart, plenty bloody and just plain irresistible." —USA Today (4 stars) It is 1922, and London is tense. Ex-servicemen are disillusioned; the out-of-work and the hungry are demanding change. And in South London, in a genteel Camberwell villa—a large, silent house now bereft of brothers, husband, and even servants—life is about to be transformed as impoverished widow Mrs. Wray and her spinster daughter, Frances, are obliged to take in lodgers. With the arrival of Lilian and Leonard Barber, a modern young couple of the “clerk class,” the routines of the house will be shaken up in unexpected ways. Little do the Wrays know just how profoundly their new tenants will alter the course of Frances’s life—or, as passions mount and frustration gathers, how far-reaching, and how devastating, the disturbances will be. Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize three times, Sarah Waters has earned a reputation as one of our greatest writers of historical fiction, and here she has delivered again. A love story, a tension-filled crime story, and a beautifully atmospheric portrait of a fascinating time and place, The Paying Guests is Sarah Waters’s finest achievement yet.
Download or read book The Stranger s Child written by Alan Hollinghurst and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them. Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism—The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.
Download or read book The Stranger written by Albert Camus and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-08 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, Camus's masterpiece gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the intrigue, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.
Download or read book Fingersmith written by Sarah Waters and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review The Handmaiden, a film adaptation of Fingersmith, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Tae-Ri, is now available. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.
Download or read book The Stranger in the Lifeboat written by Mitch Albom and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE INSTANT NO.1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The stunning new novel from the bestselling author of global phenomenon Tuesdays with Morrie 'Mitch Albom sees the magical in the ordinary' Cecelia Ahern ____________ Adrift in a raft after a terrible shipwreck, ten strangers try to survive while they wait for rescue. After three days, short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him on board - and the survivor claims he can save them. But should they put their trust in him? Will any of them see home again? And why did the ship really sink? The Stranger in the Lifeboat is not only a deeply moving novel about the power of love and hope in the face of danger, but also a mystery that will keep you guessing to the very end. ____________ What real readers are saying about The Stranger in the Lifeboat: 'Enthralling storytelling as always from this brilliant writer' FIVE STARS 'Just when I thought I had things figured out . . . plot twist. One that was not expected. And another and another and another. Mind. Blown . . . You just just have to read it' FIVE STARS 'Albom can always be depended on to not only write a book that is written well and entertaining, but compels the reader to look within themselves and feel something new' FIVE STARS 'A very exciting, thrilling and poignant tale of trying to survive against the odds' FIVE STARS
Download or read book Goodbye Stranger written by Rebecca Stead and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridge has always been a bit of an oddball, but since she recovered from a serious accident, she's found fitting in with her friends increasingly hard. Tab and Em are getting cooler and better and they don't get why she insists on wearing novelty cat ears every day. Bridge just thinks they look good. It's getting harder to keep their promise of no fights, especially when they start keeping secrets from each other. Sherm wants to get to know Bridge better. But he’s hiding the anger he feels at his grandfather for walking out. And then there is another girl, who is struggling with an altogether more serious set of friendship troubles... Told from interlinked points of view, this is a bittersweet story about the trials of friendship and growing up.
Download or read book A Stranger At Home written by Christy Jordan-Fenton and published by Annick Press. This book was released on 2011-09-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret can’t wait to see her family, but her homecoming is not what she expected. Traveling to be reunited with her family in the arctic, 10-year-old Margaret Pokiak can hardly contain her excitement. It’s been two years since her parents delivered her to the school run by the dark-cloaked nuns and brothers. Coming ashore, Margaret spots her family, but her mother barely recognizes her, screaming, “Not my girl.” Margaret realizes she is now marked as an outsider. And Margaret is an outsider: she has forgotten the language and stories of her people, and she can’t even stomach the food her mother prepares. However, Margaret gradually relearns her language and her family’s way of living. Along the way, she discovers how important it is to remain true to the ways of her people—and to herself. Highlighted by archival photos and striking artwork, this first-person account of a young girl’s struggle to find her place will inspire young readers to ask what it means to belong.
Download or read book The Angel of the Crows written by Katherine Addison and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor, returns with The Angel of the Crows, a fantasy novel of alternate 1880s London, where killers stalk the night and the ultimate power is naming. This is not the story you think it is. These are not the characters you think they are. This is not the book you are expecting. In an alternate 1880s London, angels inhabit every public building, and vampires and werewolves walk the streets with human beings in a well-regulated truce. A fantastic utopia, except for a few things: Angels can Fall, and that Fall is like a nuclear bomb in both the physical and metaphysical worlds. And human beings remain human, with all their kindness and greed and passions and murderous intent. Jack the Ripper stalks the streets of this London too. But this London has an Angel. The Angel of the Crows. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book I Won t Go With Strangers written by Dagmar Geisler and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 43 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lu won’t go with just anyone! Lu is waiting to be picked up after school. She stands on the sidewalk, all alone, and it starts to rain. Ms. Smith walks by, and offers to take her home. Ms. Smith lives in Lu’s neighborhood—but does Lu really know her? Lu asks herself, what’s her first name? Does she dye her hair red? What’s her dog’s name? And she says, “I don’t know you, so I won’t go with you! And besides, Mama said I should wait.” As other adults—all of whom Lu has met in some capacity before—offer to take her home, Lu continues to consider if she really knows them. One by one, she refuses to go with them. Until, finally, the person Mama said she should go home with shows up—though his appearance is a surprise to the reader! This sensitively narrated story illustrates how clear rules and arrangements can help protect and empower children during an especially vulnerable time of day. The ending includes a prompt for readers to create their own similar “safe” list, and a list of resources for parents.
