Showing results for "lifes a" in Psychological

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same. Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran-and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

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.

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.

Giovanna’s pretty face is changing, turning ugly, at least so her father thinks. Giovanna, he says, is looking more like her Aunt Vittoria every day. But can it be true? Is she really changing? Will she turn out like her despised Aunt Vittoria, a woman she hardly knows but whom her mother and father have spent their whole lives avoiding and deriding? There must be a mirror somewhere in which she can see herself as she truly is.

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 Like Life's eight exquisite stories, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations. Harry has been reworking a play for years in his apartment near Times Square in New York. Jane is biding her time at a cheese shop in a Midwest mall. Dennis, unhappily divorced, buries himself in self-help books about healthful food and healthy relationships.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the "stream of consciousness" technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions. "The Good Anna" follows a stern but kind German immigrant, "Melanctha" the tragic life of an African-American woman of the same name, and "The Gentle Lena" a dreamy and unopinionated servant whose passiveness becomes her undoing.

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.

Shep Knacker has long saved for “The Afterlife”: an idyllic retreat to the Third World where his nest egg can last forever. Traffic jams on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway will be replaced with “talking, thinking, seeing, and being” — and enough sleep. When he sells his business for a cool million dollars, his dream finally seems within reach. Yet his wife Glynis has concocted endless excuses why it’s never the right time to go.

A successful writer returns to her hometown of Baltimore on the hunt for new material and stumbles into the middle of a mystery which takes her back to her school days. Former classmate Callie Jenkins hit the headlines when she was jailed for seven years, having refused to give up the whereabouts of her missing child. But why did she remain silent? And what ever happened to the little boy? Cassandra thinks she can find out.

After surviving the death of her daughter and kidnapping of her nephew, Tess is ready to return to a normal life. But her troubled past has other plans, and when an old threat reemerges, Tess must seek the help of an unlikely ally to set things right.

Two sisters go missing. Only one returns. We believe what we want to believe. We believe what we need to believe. When my sister and I disappeared three years ago, they found Emma's car at the beach. Some people believed she had gone there to find a party or meet a friend who never showed. They believed that she'd gone for a swim. They believed that she'd drowned. Maybe by accident. Maybe a suicide. Everyone believed Emma was dead. As for me, well - it was not as simple as that.

With no apparent plot, life, to the hero of My Other Life, is often messier than fiction—sometimes it appears our hero is leading many separate lives. The only connection is that they all involve the same person. Pavel Medved, Paulie, or Paul Theroux, the fictional narrator of these memoirs and a man of many guises, has reconstructed his past, giving it wit and life, tragedy and pathos and imposed an order on it through careful editing.

A scandalous revelation is about to devastate a picturesque town where the houses are immaculate and the neighborhoods are tightly knit. Devoted mother Cora O’Connell has found the journal of her friend Laurel’s daughter - a beautiful college student who lives next door - revealing an illicit encounter. Hours later, Laurel makes a shattering discovery of her own: her daughter has vanished without a trace. Over the course of one weekend, the crises of two close families are about to trigger a chain reaction that will expose a far more disturbing web of secrets.

When the granddaughter of one of Florida’s most powerful judges disappears, it triggers a personal trauma for Detective Alice Garner: the kidnapping and murder of her own child. As a flood of painful memories comes rushing back, Alice sees herself in the guilt-ridden and emotionally fragile mother Charlotte Burke, who has become the target of a rush to judgment.

Eve and Leah are identical twins - but beyond that, they’re polar opposites. Struggling journalist Leah envies Eve’s seemingly perfect life - the loyal husband, the beautiful twin daughters, the stellar career - little knowing that what Eve longs for most is Leah’s independence. When a shocking event upends their world, one woman seizes a split-second chance to change everything and follow her sister down a different life path.

Their children are friends first. They hit it off immediately, as kids do. So the parents are forced to get to know each other. But as they get closer, they start to take their eyes off their children. And while they have been looking the other way, evil has crept in. Every parent's biggest nightmare is about to come true....

You want to save your marriage. She wants to destroy it. Paula worries that her marriage to Tommy is hanging by a thread. She loves how safe her husband makes her feel, but lately, it seems like he's pulling away from her, and he keeps avoiding a much-needed conversation about finally having children. When Tommy suggests a cruise getaway for the two of them, Paula is thrilled. He's fighting for this marriage, and he's even promised that they will talk about growing their family. It's Paula's dream come true. Until the couple meets beautiful Anna.

Three Lives was written in 1905/06 and published in 1909 at the author’s expense. The work consists of three independent novellas: The Good Anna, Melanctha, and The Gentle Lena. Each of the titular characters lives in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Baltimore.

Maya and Daughter live in complete isolation in a secluded woodland, their days aligned with the light and changing seasons, a complex pattern of routine and ritual. Daughter has never questioned the life her mother has chosen for them; the life that has meant she's never met another soul, or known anywhere except their forest home. But one day, when Daughter is almost sixteen, a red-haired stranger steps into the confines of their territory.