Showing results for "but-" in Literary Fiction

A thought-provoking, discomforting and beautiful novel about love, obsession, community and friendship. Nothing But My Body is an eight day journey through a young woman's mind, a queer sex worker in Australia, as she navigates through break ups and infatuation across a year. Set during the bushfire season of 2019 and into the coronavirus pandemic, sex work is the constant backdrop of the story as it moves between Sydney, Berlin, Orange and Bellingen.

Girl is spending the summer at an artist's residency in Scotland. Far from her home in Australia and her tight-knit Malaysian family, she is meant to be writing a postcolonial novel and working on a PhD on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. But she can't stop thinking about her upbringing and the stories of her parents and grandmother who raised her. How can she reconcile their dreams for her with her lived reality?

A national best seller upon its publication, Anywhere but Here is a moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer. As they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions, Ann and Adele bring to life a novel that is a brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation. Simpson's first novel is ultimately a heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter's invaluable relationship.

Meet Otto and Cecil. Two brothers who grew up privileged in the Welsh countryside. They enjoyed watching nature shows, playing with their pet pony, impersonating their Grandfather…and killing the help. Murder is the family business after all. Downton Abbey, this is not. However, it’s not so easy to continue the family legacy with the constant stream of threats and distractions seemingly leaping from the hedgerow.

'There once was a man who, one night between the main course and the sweet at a dinner party, went upstairs and locked himself in one of the bedrooms of the house of the people who were giving the dinner party....' As time passes by and the consequences of this stranger's actions ripple outwards, touching the owners, the guests, the neighbours and the whole country, so Ali Smith draws us into a beautiful, strange place where everyone is so much more than they first appear....

Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot. Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can't shake the sense that there's something not quite right about the place...The longer Áine spends inside the flat - pretending to work from home; dissecting messages from the friends whose lives seem to have moved on without her - the less it feels like home.

Is there such a thing as a perfect marriage? David thought so. But when his wife, Mary Rose, dies suddenly he has to think again. In reliving their 20 years together David sees that the ground beneath them had shifted and he simply hadn't noticed. Or had chosen not to. Figuring out who Mary Rose really was and the secrets that she kept - some of these hidden in plain sight - makes David wonder if he really knew her. Did he even know himself? Nothing but Blue Sky is a precise and tender story of love in marriage.

Eight-year-old Leeza hates the boys on twenty-fifth street. Worse than anything, she thinks, after they spit on her and tell her she smells. At home, Leeza's stepmother shows her no sympathy, scrubbing her skin raw and ordering her to chew gum. When the teasing from the "beady-eyed" twins on twenty-fifth takes a dangerous turn, so does the tension between Leeza, her stepmother, and her father.

Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a speaking engagement in Reno, not carrying much besides a breast pump and a spiralling case of postpartum depression. Her temporary escape from domestic duties and an opportunity to reconnect with old friends mutates into an extended romp away from the confines of marriage and motherhood, and a seemingly bottomless descent into the past.

Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for 9000 years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control.

A native Texan, Edwin “Bud” Shrake has written more than two dozen works and is best known for "The Borderland", which was named one of the 10 best books of 2000 by the "Los Angeles Times". Fort Worth lawyer Ben Carpenter’s 30th birthday party turns into a bizarre trip across the Mexican border. And things get even stranger when he finds himself in a confrontation with a dangerous legal opponent.

Over six feet tall, blonde, and blue-eyed, Billy looks like an Adonis. But he is not the full shilling; one slice less than a sandwich. When you meet him, you might not notice at first, but after a couple of minutes, it becomes apparent. He’s not the brightest bulb in the chandelier. In Billy’s mind, he’s a superhero: a righter of wrongs, a saver of souls, and that’s where it all goes wrong. At the bus stop, he meets and talks with people as he goes to work, and they all look at Billy a different way.

For most people, going to college is the beginning of their lives away from their parents, when they search for the meaning of their lives. Not so for Bobbie Lamont, who chooses to stay at home with her parents instead of moving away. After graduating from Saint. Augustine Academy for Girls and then falling in love with Malcolm Pryce, Bobbie was ready for the next stage of her life, attending college at Tulane University. Once again, her only friend is Billie Carver, who is also attending Tulane.

Like the small towns J. California Cooper has so vividly portrayed in her previous novels and story collections, Wideland, Oklahoma, is home to ordinary Americans struggling to raise families, eke out a living, and fulfill their dreams. In the early 20th century, Irene and Val fall in love in Wideland. While carving out a home for themselves, they also allow neighbors Bertha and Joseph to build a house and live on their land.

A woman flees the hospital even as her infant son is breathing his last breaths. An aging construction worker comes to grips with the end of the only life he's ever known. A deadbeat father meets his son for the first time, only to be blindsided by the boy's birth defect. A man steals a corpse in order to give his father the burial he wanted.

Billy Bradshaw is only 12 when a juvenile court judge sentences him to community service, and throws him to the care of six aging Bohemians in the Liberty Street Home for the Elderly. Billy's summer takes an unexpected turn when a new administrator arrives to Liberty Street, planning to get rid of the troublesome denizens of Hall B. Billy decides to save the home the Bohemians have created, and he doesn't face the challenge alone. Aided by Cassidy, the administrator's eccentric daughter, Billy embarks on a journey through the seedy New Orleans underground.

Thomas McGuane's high-spirited and fiercely lyrical new novel chronicles the fall and rise of Frank Copenhaver, a man so unhinged by his wife's departure that he finds himself ruining his business, falling in love with the wrong women, and wandering the lawns of his neighborhood, desperate for the merest glimpse of normalcy.

God Sees the Truth, But Waits is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he did not commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles "The Confessed Crime", "Exiled to Siberia", and "The Long Exile". The concept of the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder and banished to Siberia also appears in one of Tolstoy's previous works, War and Peace, during a philosophical discussion between two characters who relate the story and argue how the protagonist of their story deals with injustice and fate.

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business decisions. The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old.

"Oh, If I Could But Shiver!" is a German folktale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 4 in the collection. It was also included by Andrew Lang in The Blue Fairy Book (1889). - The Grimms' first, 1812 edition contained a much shorter version, "Good Bowling and Card Playing". - It is classified as its own Aarne-Thompson index type 326 of a male protagonist's unsuccessful attempts to learn fear, which eventually leads to his awareness of mortality. A father had two sons.