Showing results for "never" in Literary Fiction

In one of the most acclaimed novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England. Narrated by Kathy, now thirty-one, Never Let Me Go dramatizes her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world.

Lydia is the favourite child of Marilyn and James Lee - a girl who inherited her mother's bright-blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. When Lydia's body is found in the local lake, James is consumed by guilt, and Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to hold someone accountable. But it's the youngest in the family - Hannah - who may be the only one who knows what really happened.

A killer is changing the rules. One murder at a time. You wake up all alone, in the middle of a forest, miles from anywhere. Beside you lie five objects - a lighter, grease, picture-frame wire, a piece of silk, a bottle of water - which you will need to use if you want to survive. You’ve been taken by the Whispering Man, and there is no escape. He makes the rules, and nobody ever gets out alive. Enigmatic investigator Colter Shaw is fighting to stop the murders. But another victim has been snatched from her family, and he’s running out of time.

On being kicked by life harder than he could ever imagine, Sachin had three options. He could look life in the eye and fight back. He could succumb and do something that would haunt him forever. Or he could flee to a place where there were no traces of the blow he had received. So Goa it was. In search of solace, perhaps, by working in a small shack at an unknown beach. Dealing with the local police, resurrecting a dying shack, and managing rowdy parties, risking having his bones and jawline broken, does Sachin get what he was seeking?

September 1977. Mette Misvãr, a three-year-old girl, disappears without trace from the sandpit outside her home. Her tiny, close middle-class community in the tranquil suburb of Nordas is devastated, but their enquiries and the police produce nothing. Curtains twitch, suspicions are raised, but Mette is never found.

Florence Darrow wants to be a writer. Correction: Florence Darrow IS going to be a writer. Fired from her first job in publishing, she jumps at the chance to be assistant to the celebrated Maud Dixon, the anonymous best-selling novelist. The arrangement comes with conditions - high secrecy, living in an isolated house in the countryside­. Before long, the two of them are on a research trip to Morocco, to inspire the much-promised second novel. Beach walks, red sunsets and long, whisky-filled evening discussions...win-win, surely?

Lotti Coates lives in the shadow of a genius: her father, George, is a brilliant and celebrated Australian painter. When Lotti meets the outcast waif Kyla at a suburban Canberra school, two worlds are set to collide. Slowly Kyla is drawn into the orbit of the Coates family. Or is it the other way around? As Lotti and Kyla navigate their way towards adulthood, dark secrets start to unravel, with devastating consequences....

They find her just as the sun is beginning to rise in the early morning mist. They had begun at dawn, the group of searchers keen to get going. A missing child spurred everyone on. In the end, it was a flash of color, a bright neon pink that caught her eye. They had been looking for pink. Nothing tests your faith like being a mother. The first time your children walk to school alone, their first sleepover, when they finally fly the nest. As a parent, you have to believe that everything will be ok.

At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick's world in two.

Siblings Bert, Willet, and Pansy know better than to go swimming at the old rock quarry. According to their father, it's the Devil's place, a place that's been cursed and forgotten. But Mississippi Delta summer days are scorching hot, and they can't resist cooling off in the dark, bottomless water - until the day six-year-old Pansy vanishes...not drowned, not lost, simply gone. When their father disappears as well, Bert and Willet leave their childhoods behind to try and hold their broken family together.

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.

Never a Cloud is a big old-fashioned, contemporary, social novel narrated by Violet Grey, an eccentric, out-of-the-ordinary loner, living on the coast of Maine. The deeply emotional love story of a complicated family in an enchanted place. A winter gathering at Margot Reid’s family home, Otyrburn, but this year is different, her oldest friend Owen and she will restore the walled garden. The party is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of the mysterious Ava Kerouac, Violet’s daughter and Margot’s half-sister—whom Margot has never met.

Days before her wedding, Julia Walsh is blindsided twice: once by the sudden death of her estranged father...and again when he appears on her doorstep after his funeral, ready to make amends, right his past mistakes, and prevent her from making new ones. Surprised, to say the least, Julia reluctantly agrees to turn what should have been her honeymoon into a spontaneous road trip with her father to make up for lost time.

Doc Ebersole lives with the ghost of Hank Williams—not just in the figurative sense, not just because he was one of the last people to see him alive, and not just because he is rumored to have given Hank the final morphine dose that killed him.

Private investigator Tucker Randall doesn’t have time for cold cases, but when Gary Fisher begs them to solve his brother’s murder eleven years ago before their father dies, the partners can’t say no. What at first seems like a simple cold case in a small Tennessee town explodes into a deadly conspiracy involving gunrunning, corrupt officials, and a series of execution-style murders. And at the center of it all stands a sadistic killer with a twisted concept of right and wrong.

A self-anointed spinster at 51, Myra Lipinski is reasonably content with her quiet life, her dog, Frank, and her career as a visiting nurse. But everything changes when Chip Reardon, the golden boy she adored in high school, is assigned as her new patient. Choosing to forgo treatment for an incurable illness, Chip has returned to his New England hometown to spend what time he has left. Now, Myra and Chip find themselves engaged in a poignant redefinition of roles, and a complicated dance of memory, ambivalence, and longing.

Noa is desperate to be loved. More than anything else – more than her studies, more than her job, her friends, her family – she wants to belong to someone. And she knows if this can happen, if someone will just choose her, she’ll finally be happy. Elliot is terrified. Terrified about what will happen to his brother, Willy, if he isn’t there to keep him safe. Terrified that his friends will find out that he doesn’t have any of his own opinions. Terrified that the girl he loves will realise he isn’t a real person.

A woman fleeing her previous existence meets a fellow Singaporean on an overnight train in Norway. A foreign worker is decapitated in an HDB building site accident. A Singaporean wife must negotiate Beijing as her British husband awaits a heart transplant. And in different corners of the world, Singaporeans and exiles mark National Day in their own ways.

When Clara Winter left her rural Adirondack Mountain town for college, she never looked back. Her mother, Tamar, a fiercely independent but loving woman who raised Clara on her own, all but pushed her out the door, forcing Clara to build a new life for herself, far from her roots, far from her high-school boyfriend, and far from the life she had known. Now more than a decade has passed, and Clara, a successful writer, has been summoned home.

A woman learns of a friend's illness and wonders if she ever truly knew him. A boy who sees ghosts heeds the advice of a fortune-teller, with surprising consequences. A girl wakes up and realises everybody in her Bedok neighbourhood has vanished. From Cyril Wong, award-winning author of The Last Lesson of Mrs de Souza, comes another beautiful book about characters in crisis, with two stories crossing intriguingly into creative autobiography.