Download or read book The Woman Upstairs written by Claire Messud and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Told with urgency, intimacy, and piercing emotion, this New York Times bestselling novel is the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed, and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own. Nora Eldridge is a reliable, but unremarkable, friend and neighbor, always on the fringe of other people’s achievements. But the arrival of the Shahid family—dashing Skandar, a Lebanese scholar, glamorous Sirena, an Italian artist, and their son, Reza—draws her into a complex and exciting new world. Nora’s happiness pushes her beyond her boundaries, until Sirena’s careless ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. A New York Times Book Review Notable Book • A Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year • A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy Book • A Huffington Post Best Book • A Boston GlobeBest Book of the Year • A Kirkus Best Fiction Book • A Goodreads Best Book

Download or read book The Woman Upstairs written by Claire Messud and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard. But one afternoon, Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who punch, push and call him a "terrorist," and Nora is quickly drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries--until Sirena's own ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Written with intimacy and piercing emotion, this urgently dispatched story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill--and the devastating cost--of giving in to one's passions. The Woman Upstairs is a masterly story of America today, of being a woman and of the exhilarations of love.

Download or read book The Wife Upstairs written by Rachel Hawkins and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Top 10 New York Times bestseller ‘I was completely blown away by The Wife Upstairs. This is a compulsive, irresistible retelling of Jane Eyre with a modern, noir twist – and wow, does it work’ Samantha Downing, bestselling author of My Lovely Wife

Download or read book The Lady Upstairs written by Halley Sutton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A racy and hard-to-put-down piece of neo-noir."--Washington Post A modern-day noir featuring a twisty cat-and-mouse chase, this dark debut thriller tells the story of a woman who makes a living taking down terrible men...then finds herself in over her head and with blood on her hands. The only way out? Pull off one final con. Jo's job is blackmailing the most lecherous men in Los Angeles--handsy Hollywood producers, adulterous actors, corrupt cops. Sure, she likes the money she's making, which comes in handy for the debt she is paying off, but it's also a chance to take back power for the women of the city. Eager to prove herself to her coworker Lou and their enigmatic boss, known only as the Lady Upstairs, Jo takes on bigger and riskier jobs. When one of her targets is murdered, both the Lady Upstairs and the LAPD have Jo in their sights. Desperate to escape the consequences of her failed job, she decides to take on just one more sting--bringing down a rising political star. It's her biggest con yet--and she will do it behind the Lady's back, freeing both herself and Lou. But Jo soon learns that Lou and the Lady have secrets of their own, and that no woman is safe when there is a life-changing payout on the line. A delicious debut thriller crackling with wit and an unforgettable feminist voice, The Lady Upstairs is a chilling and endlessly surprising take on female revenge.

Download or read book The Upstairs Wife written by Rafia Zakaria and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s other great metropolis—Rafia Zakaria’s family was suffering through a crisis of its own: her Uncle Sohail, the man who had brought shame upon the family, was near death. In that moment these twin catastrophes—one political and public, the other secret and intensely personal—briefly converged. Zakaria uses that moment to begin her intimate exploration of the country of her birth. Her Muslim-Indian family immigrated to Pakistan from Bombay in 1962, escaping the precarious state in which the Muslim population in India found itself following the Partition. For them, Pakistan represented enormous promise. And for some time, Zakaria’s family prospered and the city prospered. But in the 1980s, Pakistan’s military dictators began an Islamization campaign designed to legitimate their rule—a campaign that particularly affected women’s freedom and safety. The political became personal when her aunt Amina’s husband, Sohail, did the unthinkable and took a second wife, a humiliating and painful betrayal of kin and custom that shook the foundation of Zakaria’s family but was permitted under the country’s new laws. The young Rafia grows up in the shadow of Amina’s shame and fury, while the world outside her home turns ever more chaotic and violent as the opportunities available to post-Partition immigrants are dramatically curtailed and terrorism sows its seeds in Karachi. Telling the parallel stories of Amina’s polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities.

Download or read book The Burning Girl A Novel written by Claire Messud and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist "[A] masterwork of psychological fiction.… Messud teases readers with a psychological mystery, withholding information and then cannily parceling it out." —Chicago Tribune Julia and Cassie have been friends since nursery school. They have shared everything, including their desire to escape the stifling limitations of their birthplace, the quiet town of Royston, Massachusetts. But as the two girls enter adolescence, their paths diverge and Cassie sets out on a journey that will put her life in danger and shatter her oldest friendship. The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence. Claire Messud, one of our finest novelists, is as accomplished at weaving a compelling fictional world as she is at asking the big questions: To what extent can we know ourselves and others? What are the stories we create to comprehend our lives and relationships? Brilliantly mixing fable and coming-of-age tale, The Burning Girl gets to the heart of these matters in an absolutely irresistible way. The Burning Girl was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, NPR, Financial Times, Town & Country, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, Refinery29, and Literary Hub.

Download or read book The Upstairs House written by Julia Fine and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Chicago Review of Books Fiction Award A Good Morning America Book of the Month Selection • A Popsugar Must-Read Book of the Month • A Buzzfeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year “Provocative…. [An] assured, beautifully written book.” —Sarah Lyall, New York Times In this provocative meditation on new motherhood—Shirley Jackson meets The Awakening—a postpartum woman’s psychological unraveling becomes intertwined with the ghostly appearance of children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown. There’s a madwoman upstairs, and only Megan Weiler can see her. Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she’s also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation—a thesis on mid-century children’s literature. Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown—author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon—whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle—and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger. Using Megan’s postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman’s fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and “barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances” (Washington Post).

Download or read book The Lady Upstairs written by Marilyn Nissenson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lady Upstairs is the dramatic story of Dorothy Schiff---liberal activist, society stalwart, and the most dynamic female newspaper publisher of her day. From 1939 until 1976 she owned and guided the New York Post, the oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States. Dolly, as she was called, made the Post one of the most dedicated supporters of New Deal liberalism in the country, while simultaneously maintaining its distinct personality as a chatty, parochial, New York tabloid. Unfazed by political or personal controversy, Schiff backed editorial writers like James Wechsler and Max Lerner and reporters like Murray Kempton and Pete Hamill. Under her guidance the Post broke the story of Richard Nixon's slush fund. It helped bring down such icons of the day as Joseph McCarthy, Walter Winchell, and Robert Moses. It supported the civil rights movement and opposed the Vietnam War. Although Dolly seldom appeared in the newsroom, she approved and commented on every major story and every minor column in the paper, until eventually selling it to Rupert Murdoch. Dolly's private life could have been a staple of the Post's society gossip columns. Endlessly flirtatious, she married four times and had extra-marital romances with, among others, Franklin Roosevelt and Max Beaverbrook. She was a friend of national politicians such as Adlai Stevenson, the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and Nelson Rockefeller. Born into a staunchly Republican German-Jewish banking family, she used her inheritance to further causes of the political left. She used her charm and her social connections in the service of her paper, which was the center of her life. The Lady Upstairs is the portrait of a unique life and a crucial era in American history.

Download or read book The Emperor s Children written by Claire Messud and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-06-26 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bestselling, masterful novel about the intersections in the lives of three friends, now on the cusp of their thirties, making their way—and not—in New York City. There is beautiful, sophisticated Marina Thwaite—an “It” girl finishing her first book; the daughter of Murray Thwaite, celebrated intellectual and journalist—and her two closest friends from Brown, Danielle, a quietly appealing television producer, and Julius, a cash-strapped freelance critic. The delicious complications that arise among them become dangerous when Murray’s nephew, Frederick “Bootie” Tubb, an idealistic college dropout determined to make his mark, comes to town. As the skies darken, it is Bootie’s unexpected decisions—and their stunning, heartbreaking outcome—that will change each of their lives forever. A richly drawn, brilliantly observed novel of fate and fortune—of innocence and experience, seduction and self-invention; of ambition, including literary ambition; of glamour, disaster, and promise—The Emperor’s Children is a tour de force that brings to life a city, a generation, and the way we live in this moment. A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year

Download or read book Upstairs Girls written by Michael Rutter and published by Farcountry Press. This book was released on 2012-11-26 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prostitutes make up one of the most engaging chapters in the story of the American West. Upstairs Girls opens a window on the lives of these women for hire. Historian Michael Rutter offers a thorough and fascinating history of prostitution in the West, with details on why women turned to this profession and what their lives were like. Chapters on the notorious madams, the tragic Chinese sex trade, occupational hazards, rowdy dancehall girls, and the efforts of the ''Moral Purity Movement'' supplement the heart-breaking and sometimes humorous profiles on some of the most famous madams and prostitutes in history.

Download or read book The Girl Upstairs written by Georgina Lees and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Don’t miss The Lost Wife – the brand new jaw-dropping thriller from Georgina Lees* ‘Compelling, heartbreaking and beautifully written. This superb thriller will stay in my mind for a very long time’ B P Walter, Sunday Times-bestselling author of The Dinner Guest

Download or read book The Woman Upstairs written by Ruth Heald and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Oh... my... goodness. What a rollercoaster of a read, just brilliant, full of twists and turns and I was gripped from the first page. A brilliant, addictive psychological thriller... A nail-biting and edge-of-your-seat ending.' NetGalley Reviewer, 5 stars You'd be lost without her... She's the shoulder you cry on when the father of your children disappears. She's the person you turn to when he comes back, begging for forgiveness. She's by your side when you discover his guilty secrets. She helps rock your babies to sleep when they cry. She's your friend when you have no one else. She's the woman upstairs, whose feet you hear treading around as you drift off at night, thankful you aren't alone. But what if you're about to lose everything because of her? One of the most twisted, shocking, heart-stopping psychological thrillers you'll ever read! Fans of K.L. Slater, The Wife Between Us and The Girl on the Train, prepared to be kept up way past your bedtime as you race through this addictive page-turner. Readers absolutely love The Woman Upstairs 'WOW!... This book has more twists than a corkscrew. You no sooner get through with one twist and BAM the next one comes.' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'Wow and wow again! A stonkingly goodread... I raced through this, it's that good!!' NetGalley Reviewer, 5 stars 'Whoa!! I stayed up till 6am reading this! I needed to know the ending! This book is TWISTED.' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'WOW!!... Fabulous.' NetGalley Reviewer, 5 stars 'Sooooo good! I couldn't put this book down and flipped pages late into the night... Must read!' Goodreads Reviewer 'Brilliant... Another thoroughly engrossing read from an author who is quickly becoming one of my favourites. I cannot think of a single thing that I did not love about this book... This is a compulsive and addictive read from the word go, and I simply devoured it.' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'What an amazing book!' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'Absolutely brilliant... Very addictive... I so recommended this book!' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'A fantastic thriller that I could not put down.' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'A book that will leave you spellbound!!!' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars 'This was quite the thriller rollercoaster! Many twists and turns - very suspenseful!... A surprising twist at the end. Definitely recommend!' NetGalley Reviewer, 5 stars 'I read this book in one day since I just couldn't put it down! I have read a lot of mysteries but this one kept you guessing through the whole book and what I thought were the answers turned out to be wrong! You will definitely want to pick this one up!!' Goodreads Reviewer, 5 stars

Download or read book The Battle Upstairs written by Maci Bookout and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this eclectic collection of free verse, Maci Bookout lays bare the pain of past heartbreak, while revealing the strength of womanhood and the power to be found in the truth. Taking cues from the style of Rupi Kaur and Charly Cox, Maci’s poetry tells a picturesque tale that weaves through her life thus far, from the emotional collapse of past relationships to the serenity and fortitude she found within herself.

Download or read book Kant s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write An Autobiography in Essays written by Claire Messud and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glimpse into a beloved novelist’s inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature. In twenty-six intimate, brilliant, and funny essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on contemporary classics from Kazuo Ishiguro, Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, and Valeria Luiselli; examines three facets of Albert Camus and The Stranger; and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In the luminous title essay, she explores her drive to write, born of the magic of sharing language and the transformative powers of “a single successful sentence.” Together, these essays show the inner workings of a dazzling literary mind. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again "an absolute master storyteller" (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).

Download or read book A Delicate Truth written by John le Carré and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-05-07 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of A Legacy of Spies. "A novel that beckons us beyond any and all expectations."—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post A counter-terrorist operation, code-named Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Three years later, a disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be—or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher “Kit” Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing, how can he keep silent?

Download or read book An Unnecessary Woman written by Rabih Alameddine and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2014-02-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A happily misanthropic Middle East divorcee finds refuge in books in a “beautiful and absorbing” novel of late-life crisis (The New York Times). Aaliya is a divorced, childless, and reclusively cranky translator in Beirut nurturing doubts about her latest project: a 900-page avant-garde, linguistically serpentine historiography by a late Chilean existentialist. Honestly, at seventy-two, should she be taking on such a project? Not that Aailiya fears dying. Women in her family live long; her mother is still going crazy. But on this lonely day, hour-by-hour, Aaliya’s musings on literature, philosophy, her career, and her aging body, are suddenly invaded by memories of her volatile past. As she tries in vain to ward off these emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left. In this “meditation on, among other things, aging, politics, literature, loneliness, grief and resilience” (The New York Times), Alameddine conjures “a beguiling narrator . . . who is, like her city, hard to read, hard to take, hard to know and, ultimately, passionately complex” (San Francisco Chronicle). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, An Unnecessary Woman is “a fun, and often funny . . . grave, powerful . . . [and] extraordinary” Washington Independent Review of Books) ode to literature and its power to define who we are. “Read it once, read it twice, read other books for a decade or so, and then pick it up and read it anew. This one’s a keeper” (The Independent)

Download or read book The Party Upstairs written by Lee Conell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-07-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An electrifying debut novel that unfolds in the course of a single day inside one genteel New York City apartment building, as tensions between the building's super and his grown-up daughter spark a crisis that will, by day's end, change everything. Ruby has a strange relationship to privilege. She grew up the super's daughter in the basement of an Upper West Side co-op that gets more gentrified with each passing year. Though not economically privileged herself, her close childhood friendship with Caroline, the daughter of affluent tenants, and the mere fact of living in such a wealthy neighborhood, close to her beloved Natural History Museum, brought her certain advantages, even expectations. Naturally Ruby followed her dreams and took out loans to attend a prestigious small liberal arts college and explore her interest in art. But now, out of school for a while, she is no closer to her dream job, or anything resembling it, and she's been forced by circumstances to do the last thing she wanted to do: move back in with her parents, back into the basement. And Caroline is throwing one of her parties tonight, in her father's glorious penthouse apartment, a party Ruby looks forward to and dreads in equal measure. With a thriller's narrative control, The Party Upstairs distills worlds of wisdom about families, great expectations, and the hidden violence of class into the gripping, darkly witty story of a single fateful day inside the Manhattan co-op Ruby calls home.