Showing results for "life" in World Literature

In late 2000, a young boy in Ahmedabad dreams of owning a business. To accommodate his friends' passion, he opens a cricket shop. However, nothing comes easily in a turbulent city. To realise their goals, they will have to face it all - religious politics, calamities, unacceptable love and, above all, their own mistakes. Will they make it? Can an individual's dreams overcome the nightmares of real life? Can we succeed despite mistakes?

In 1912, scientist Marie Curie spent two months on the British seaside at the home of Hertha Ayrton, an accomplished mathematician, inventor, and suffragette. At the time, Curie was in the throes of a scandal in France over her affair with Paul Langevin, which threatened to overshadow the accomplishment of her second Nobel Prize. Performed by Kate Mulgrew and Francesca Faridany at the Minetta Lane Theatre, this play by Lauren Gunderson is an ode to two remarkable women.

Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home. But Taukiri’s brother, Ārama, is braver than he looks, and he has a friend, and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sadness.

At the start of the 20th century, on the edge of the Russian empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste....

Nala and Rajan, a young couple, begin their married life in 1946, on the eve of Ceylon's independence from Britain. Arranged in marriage, they learn to love each other and protect their growing family, against the backdrop of increasing ethnic tension. As the country descends into a bloody civil war, Nala and Rajan must decide which path is best for their family; and live with the consequences of their mistakes.

Taukiri was born into sorrow. Auē can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home. But Taukiri’s brother, Ārama, is braver than he looks, and he has a friend, and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sadness.

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now 14, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the '60s is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for.

Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir. Even so, people recognized the depth of his realization, and he was sought out by people of all walks of life for the teaching to be experienced in just being around him.

Simone Harlowe is a young Indigenous lawyer, straddling two lives and two cultures while studying for her Masters at Harvard. Her family life in Sydney is defined by the complex relationship she has with her father Tony, a prominent and respected figure in the Aboriginal community. As Simone juggles the challenges of a modern woman’s life—career, family, friends and relationships—her father is confronting his own uncomfortable truths as his secret double life implodes. Can Simone accept him for the man he is and forgive him for the man he’s not?

Pigeonholed in popular memory as a Jazz Age epicurean, a playboy, and an emblem of the Lost Generation, F. Scott Fitzgerald was at heart a moralist struck by the nation's shifting mood and manners after World War I. In Paradise Lost, David Brown contends that Fitzgerald's deepest allegiances were to a fading antebellum world he associated with his father's Chesapeake Bay roots. Yet as a midwesterner, an Irish Catholic, and a perpetually in-debt author, he felt like an outsider in the haute bourgeoisie haunts.

Cuatro compañeros de universidad se trasladan a Nueva York, donde solo cuentan con su amistad y su ambición para abrirse camino. Willem es guapo, amable y quiere ser actor; JB es un pintor ingenioso y a veces cruel, dispuesto a destacar en el difícil mundo del arte; Malcolm es un arquitecto soñador, y Jude es el joven retraído, brillante y enigmático que pronto se convertirá en el epicentro del grupo.

Almost ten years have passed since Julia Win came back from Burma, her father's native country. Though she is a successful Manhattan lawyer, her private life is at a crossroads; her boyfriend recently left her, she has suffered a miscarriage, and she is, despite her wealth, unhappy with her professional life. Julia is lost and exhausted. One day, in the middle of an important business meeting, she hears a stranger's voice in her head that causes her to leave the office without explanation.

Catherine has experienced something so traumatic that she can't speak. Or won't speak. The doctors say the only way forward is to look into her past. Fifteen years ago, Catherine met the love of her life at university. Lucian was charming, adored her and she was drawn into the hedonistic and careless lifestyle of his wealthy friends. They were inseparable—then one morning Catherine left him without a word.

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote the one-and-a-quarter-million words of In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer. For, in this stylish, erudite and frequently hilarious book, de Botton dips deeply into Proust’s life and work - his fiction, letter, and conversations – and distils from them that rare self-help manual: one that is actually helpful.

After their grandfather's death, siblings Helen, Sylvie and Brendan, and Helen's daughter, film student Tig, are gathered together at Iluka, a typical fibro beach house in a small town on the south coast. Iluka is the house they grew up in when their troubled mother ran away to the bright lights of the city, leaving their grandparents to raise them. As they slowly clear the house for sale and relive various memories, they find a bundle of letters addressed to each of them from their missing mother, Marguerite, that were sent long after they'd been told she died.

Alfie's mum, Emilia, has been lying to him forever. It's only ever been the two of them in Ireland, but when Emilia's appendix explodes, she drops a second bombshell: she has a family back in Australia and she and Alfie are going to meet them. When Penny Bains opens the door of her Tasmanian farmhouse to a boy with an Irish accent claiming to be the son of her missing daughter, Emilia, her life is turned upside down.

The historic houses in the seaside town of Beaufort, North Carolina, have held the secrets of their inhabitants for centuries. One of the most enduring refuses to be washed away by the tide: What happened to Rebecca and Townsend Saint James on that fateful night of their disappearance in 1976? Now, the granddaughter they never knew, Keaton Smith, is desperate for a fresh start. So when her mother needs someone to put her childhood home in Beaufort on the market, she jumps at the chance to head south.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays. The first complete collection of Weil's missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences.

With the release of a flurry of feature and TV films about his life and work, and the publication of new books looking at his correspondence, his boat, and even his favorite cocktails, Ernest Hemingway is once again center stage of contemporary culture. Now, in this concise and sparkling account of the life and work of America's most storied writer, Clancy Sigal, himself a National Book Award runner-up, presents a persuasive case for the relevance of Ernest Hemingway to readers and listeners today.

The dazzling new novel from Michelle de Kretser, author of Questions of Travel, best seller and winner of the Miles Franklin Award. Set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. It feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.