Showing results for "Tim-" in Literary Fiction

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man. But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care.

A boy meets a girl. The past meets the future. A finger meets a trigger. The beginning meets the end. England is forever; England must fall. The Ministry of Time is a novel about Commander Graham Gore (R.N. c.1809-c.1847) and a woman known only as the bridge. As their relationship turns from the strictly professional into something more and uneasy truths begin to emerge, they are forced to face the reality of the project that brought them together.

Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was 36. They were married when Clare was 23 and Henry was 31. Impossible but true, because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically his genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time, pulled to moments of emotional gravity from his life, past and future. His disappearances are spontaneous, his experiences unpredictable, alternately harrowing and amusing.

Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future. Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There's still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war. That's how war works. Right?

Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place - middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They're exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they've seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work. Problem is, they're not alone.

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people's lives together for more than half a century. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral....

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

Here are turnings of all kinds - changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours - where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they have made for themselves. Beautifully crafted, and as tender as they are confronting, these elegiac stories examine the darkness and frailty of ordinary people and celebrate the moments when the light shines through.

Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunchbox washed up on the shore of her beach home. Within it lies a diary that expresses the hopes and dreams of a young girl. She suspects it might have arrived on a drift of debris from the 2011 tsunami. With every turn of the page, she is sucked deeper into an enchanting mystery. In a small cafe in Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao Yasutani is navigating the challenges thrown up by modern life. In the face of cyber-bullying, the mysteries of a 104-year-old Buddhist nun and great-grandmother, and the joy and heartbreak of family, Nao is trying to find her own place - and voice - through a diary.

Jeff Winston's life is not how he imagined it would be. An unhappy marriage and unrewarding job - and then he died. Aged 43. And woke up again, back in his college room, in 1963, age 18. With all his memories intact. If he applies those memories, he can be rich - he can have anything he wants - in this new chance at life. Until he dies at 43 and wakes up in his 18-year-old body again...and again in a continuous 25-year cycle, each time starting from scratch at the age of 18 to reclaim lost loves, make a fortune or remedy past mistakes.

In a house full of history and secrets, the past will not stay where it belongs.... Lou has always loved Hill House, the derelict manor on the abandoned land near her home. As a child, the tragic history of its owners, the Mandevilles, inspired her dream to become a history teacher. But in her late 20s, working in a shop to pay off student debts, life is passing her by. That changes when a family disaster sends Lou’s life into a downward spiral, and she seeks comfort in the ruined corridors of Hill House.

Si Morley is bored with his job as a commercial artist, and his social life doesn't seem to be going anywhere. So when he's approached by an affable ex-football star and told he's just what the government is looking for to be part of a top-secret project, he doesn't hesitate. One night he steps out of his twentieth-century New York apartment into the winter of 1882 and finds a kind of Eden.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award and now a major film. When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his colleague, better than the kid's parents, what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him. A relentlessly gripping and deeply moving novel about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal.

Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Willard is a tormented veteran who can't save his beautiful wife, Charlotte, from a slow death by cancer no matter how much sacrificial blood he pours on his 'prayer log'. Carl and Sandy Henderson, a husband-and-wife team of serial killers, trawl America's highways searching for suitable models to photograph and exterminate. The spider-handling preacher Roy and his crippled virtuoso-guitar-playing sidekick are running from the law. And caught in the middle of all this is Arvin, Willard and Charlotte's orphaned son, who grows up to be a good but also violent man in his own right.

In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present.

Time is a resource. Everyone knows it has to be managed. And on Discworld, that is the job of the Monks of History, who store it and pump it from the places where it's wasted (like underwater; how much time does a codfish need?) to places like cities, where there's never enough time. But the construction of the world's first truly accurate clock starts a race against, well, time for Lu Tze and his apprentice, Lobsang Ludd. Because it will stop time. And that will only be the start of everyone's problems.

Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot's shame in Sodom; Noah's isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the 17th century.

Tom Keely's reputation is in ruins. And that's the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he's lost faith in everything precious to him. Holed up in a grim high-rise, cultivating his newfound isolation, Keely looks down at a society from which he's retired, hurt and angry. He's done fighting the good fight, and well past caring. But even in his seedy flat, ducking the neighbours, he's not safe from entanglement. All it takes is an awkward encounter in the lobby. A woman from his past, and a boy the likes of which he's never met before.

The Child in Time opens with a harrowing event. Stephen Lewis,a successful author of children's books, takes his three-year-old daughter on a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket. While waiting in line, his attention is distracted and his daughter is kidnapped. Just like that. From there, Lewis spirals into bereavement that has effects on his relationship with his wife, his psyche and time itself.