Showing results for "life-" in Literary Fiction

When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride.

One boy, one boat, one tiger.... British comedian, actor and broadcaster Sanjeev Bhaskar, OBE performs this brilliant edition of a work of fiction that is loved by fans around the world. After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a 16 year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan - and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for an extraordinary adventure.

Poland, 1891. Marie Curie (then Marya Sklodowska) was engaged to a budding mathematician, Kazimierz Zorawski. But when his mother insisted Marya was not good enough, he broke off the engagement. A heartbroken Marya left Poland for Paris to study chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne. Marie would go on to change the course of science forever and become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. But what if Marie had made a different choice?

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness.

Twenty-five-year-old Francine Veyrenattes, confined to the family farm, already feels that life is passing her by. But after Francine lets slip a terrible secret, culminating in the violent deaths of her brother and uncle, her world is shattered. Fleeing the farm for the seaside, Francine finds herself disintegrating. Lying in the sun with her toes in the sand, she restlessly wishes for things to be somehow easier, to have a life worth living.

Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices - after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men.

They may never have a life together‚ but they will have their moment. They will have this much. England‚ September 1934. Two young lovers‚ Catherine and Daniel‚ have trespassed into the rose garden of Burnt Norton‚ an abandoned house in the English countryside. Hearing the sound of footsteps‚ they hide‚ and then witness the poet T.S. ('Tom') Eliot and his close friend Emily enter the garden and bury a mysterious tin in the earth.

n Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives. Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael. Yasuko is polished, precise and keenly observant of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was 13, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear.

An Australian literary hoax lies at the core of My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey's captivating contemplation of the art world. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry journal, meets the mysterious Christopher Chubb. An Australian literary hoaxer, Chubb is carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. In this dubious work Sarah recognises a real genius. But whose genius? She is drawn into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping and exile, which couldn't be true unless its teller were mad. Or perhaps haunted.

In this first-ever translation of Lu Yao’s Life, we meet Gao Jialin, a stubborn, idealistic, and ambitious young man from a small country village whose life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his beloved job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city. Against the vivid, gritty backdrop of 1980s China, Lu Yao traces the proud and passionate Gao Jialin’s difficult path to professional, romantic, and personal fulfillment - or at least hard-won acceptance.

Violet Rue is the baby of the seven Kerrigan children and adores her big brothers. What’s more, she knows that a family protects its own. To go outside the family - to betray the family - is unforgivable. So when she overhears a conversation not meant for her ears and discovers that her brothers have committed a heinous crime, she is torn between her loyalty to her family and her sense of justice. The decision she takes will change her life for ever.

Rachel has an unusual problem: she can't die. Her recent troubles - widowhood, a failing business, an unemployed middle-aged son - are only the latest. She's already put up with scores of marriages and hundreds of children, over 2,000 years - ever since she made a spiritual bargain to save the life of her first son back in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. There's only one other person in the world who understands: a man she once loved passionately, who has been stalking her through the centuries, convinced they belong together forever.

As single mother Leah struggles to get her children ready one morning, the doorbell rings. Standing on the doorstep of their terraced house in Whitley Bay is a well-dressed stranger, Clio, who feels an emotional tie to the house that she can’t explain.

Harryboy Boas is a gambling man. An independent Jewish bachelor, he lives in a Hackney boarding house: reading Zola, betting on the dogs at the track, womanising, philosophising, and repressing his tortured wartime past. Until, that is, a new family moves in. As his life dramatically unravels—financially, emotionally, and existentially—Harryboy descends into a murky criminal underworld where debts, violence, gangsters and revenge are the inevitable payback for those who can't pay up ...

After losing her husband and daughter in an auto accident, 42-year-old Emma flies to Paris, discovers she has a twin brother whose existence she had not known about, and learns that her birth parents weren't the Americans who raised her, but a White Russian film star of the 1920s and a French Stalinist.

After a year apart, Maryanne returns to her husband, Roy, bringing their eight-year-old son, Daniel, and his teenage sister, Freya, with her. The family move from Sydney to Newcastle, where Roy has bought a derelict house on the coast. As Roy painstakingly patches the holes in the floorboards and plasters over cracks in the walls, Maryanne believes, for a while, that they can rebuild a life together. But Freya doesn't want a fresh start - she just wants out - and Daniel drifts around the sprawling, run-down house in a dream, infuriating his father, who soon forgets the promises he has made.

Wife. Mother. Spy. A double life is no life at all. Since the disappearance of her husband in 1951, Laura Leverett has been living in limbo with her daughter in Geneva. All others see is her conventional, charming exterior; nobody guesses the secret she is carrying. Her double life began years ago, when she stepped onto the boat which carried her across the Atlantic in 1939. Eager to learn and eager to love, she found herself suddenly inspired by a young Communist woman she met on the boat.

When Leo Plumb drives off drunk from a party in a sports car with a 19-year-old waitress in tow, to the moral and legal fallout must be added the horrible inconvenience to his brother and sisters. Leo's rehab costs have severely depleted 'the nest' - the family's joint trust fund that would have cut them loose from their myriad financial issues.

Vauhini Vara's debut novel begins in India in the 1950s, following a young man born into a Dalit family of coconut farmers in a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. King Rao, as he comes to be known, later moves to the US, where he studies in Seattle, meeting the love of his life and his business partner, the smart and self-assured Margie. King Rao ultimately rises up through Silicon Valley to become the most famous tech CEO in the world and the leader of a powerful, corporate-owned global government. Yet he ultimately ends up living on a remote island.

Gus Bishop lives in a trendy downtown Austin condo. He works in computer security for a high tech Austin tech company and drives a high performance car. Yet, something is missing. Every woman he wants eludes him, and his company is under the threat of being hacked. But after an internet search, Gus meets a strange man who represents a unique insurance company - this company insures its clients, not from death, but from a life that is no longer worth living.