Showing titles in City Life

London, 1946. Struggling to cope with the idea of raising her daughter in a hostile environment, African Caribbean nurse Hope makes the difficult decision to entrust her precious baby to her best friend, Eunice, to take back home to Antigua. But their plan goes disastrously wrong. In the decades that follow, all of them will witness - and play a part in - the seismic changes rocking the British Isles, as the old establishment crumbles, immigration builds and the country adjusts to the realities of a post-war, post-colonial future.

What is honor? What is loyalty? What is homelessness? What is madness? Maddy Stevenson thought she knew something of these questions - from movies and television, growing up in sheltered Newport Beach, California. Now a new graduate from Stanford and an intern at San Francisco’s leading daily newspaper, she has a chance encounter with a homeless Black man who believes he is the Masked Avenger - the defender of those on society’s fringes, and who wrestles with demons that Maddy can only guess at.

Queen of Angels rollicks on the colorfully profane streets of 1970s New York amid comic romance, gangland violence, psychedelic drugs, and teenage heartbreak. Mick, the wild, drug-dealing son of a wealthy Irish surgeon, has fallen hard for Terri, a guilt-ridden 14-year-old from a poor Irish Catholic family. As a ruse to evade Terri's strict parents, the lovers join a production of Romeo and Juliet at Mick's school. They recruit Mick's brooding best friend Ferdinand and Terri's repressed older sister Helen, who are unexpectedly cast as Romeo and Juliet.

When she steps into her first yoga class after a 30-year hiatus, Tess Rose is unaware that her life is about to transform. After decades devoted to her thriving career and its seeming success, the serenity she experiences in the yoga room causes Tess to question her path. What has her fast-paced New York City life been about? Where is she heading? Her intersection with the mysterious Neal Clay, whose quiet simplicity and joy for life simultaneously unnerves and fascinates her, fuels her personal transformation. After years of searching for love, in Neal she finds a comrade.

It is the mid-'80s, two decades into the kleptocratic, brutal rule of Ferdinand Marcos. The Philippine economy is in deep recession, and civil unrest is growing by the day. But Primi Peregrino has her own priorities: tracking down books and pursuing romantic connections with their authors.

Written entirely in East Coast Scots, A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working-class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo, as well as his long-suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.

Leo und Mila haben so viele Hürden gemeistert und sind nun endlich glücklich vereint. Doch das, was ihre Liebe vervollständigen könnte, erweist sich plötzlich als das, was die beiden voneinander trennt: der Wunsch nach einem Kind. Zwischen den Liebenden tut sich ein Abgrund des Schweigens auf, der unüberwindbar erscheint.

Leo sieht endlich wieder eine Zukunft vor sich: Er hat seine Krankheit besiegt, ist glücklich mit Mila an seiner Seite und als junger Modedesigner erfolgreich. Doch eine weitere Hürde liegt noch vor ihm. Wenn er Mila nicht verlieren will, muss er sich endlich mit den Schatten seiner Vergangenheit auseinandersetzen. Gemeinsam begeben sich die beiden auf die Reise nach Italien zu Leos Wurzeln und stoßen dabei auf eine Wahrheit, die alles verändert.

Fleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city, she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.

When Jane’s partner goes missing she needs to find out if he’s in danger while also contending with the politics of a large international film festival: Hollywood power brokers, Russian oil speculators, Chinese propagandists, and a board chair who seemingly has it out for her.

Soul Survivor is a dramatic story of a young Black male against his biggest enemy, the police. The NYPD is here to protect and serve, but who is going to protect us from them? Soul Williams is the answer for innocent people who have been battered, beaten, and even killed at the hands of corrupt police officers. All the tragedies of Soul’s life were at the hands of the police. Soul witnessed his mother, Deborah, being shot down by a corrupt police officer. One of the corrupt cops on the scene was his own father, Doc.

After years of braving the Arctic’s frigid temperatures or endless hours tracking the Spirit Bear to capture the perfect shot for National Geographic, Meg Jeffries decides to move back to the city — San Francisco. Westin Drake is famous for fast cars and box office sales. When the public mistakes a simple kiss on the cheek for a budding romance, Meg and West are caught in a media frenzy. Somewhere amid the backseat getaways and plastered smiles, Meg discovers the man behind the glossy photographs, and West wonders how he’ll ever let her go once the cameras stop rolling.

Sheri Calloway turns a job layoff into an opportunity to finally free herself from the weight of the stifling, generational family trauma which has long hovered over the town of Spruce Junction, North Carolina. She and her three children board a train to embark on a new life in Baltimore, Maryland to “make better moves”. Sheri is enthralled by everything Baltimore has to offer. But Sheri eventually learns that things are not always as they seem when she inadvertently comes face-to-face with a drug crisis that has Baltimore firmly in its grip.

Susan Richards is a writer who never seems to meet a deadline, even when her job depends on it. When she loses two jobs in short order due to her tardiness, she decides it’s time to do something drastic. Susan turns to her cousin Mindy Winters, a Christian living in New York City, and asks to come and stay with her until she gets on her feet. Maybe New York will provide the opportunity she needs to build a new career as a writer.

In America, we're good at dividing ourselves into tribes - into "insiders" and "outsiders" - based on race, background, and beliefs. But what happens when a person is an outsider within her own tribe? Serach Gottesman, the mathematically gifted eldest daughter of a rigidly Orthodox-Jewish Boro Park family and Paloma Rodriguez, the street-smart Bronx-bred daughter of a neglectful Latina immigrant mother, seek broader vistas within a relationship that is forbidden by both of their communities.

Set in the heart of global finance, Shadow Banking follows the lives of City hopefuls, as they try to wheel, deal and backstab their way to billions. Remember: lifes a trade. It is 1994. Al Denham turns up to his first day at City banking giant Trenchart Colville, he thinks hes there to start a job. But in fact, he's at the beginning of a journey that will change his life forever. Al is joined by a ragtag combination of the brash and the charming, the box-tickers and the risk-takers.

A jogger is warned about giant, ravenous squirrels lurking in an idyllic park in Burbank, California. He doesn’t heed the warning, but soon finds out why he should have.

Kindness can be a heavy lift.

Cabbages... The Turkish variety are prized for their enlarged leaf bud, that’s where we put the heroin... There’s a stash of heroin waiting to be imported, and no one seems sure what to do with it... But Ayla’s a gardener, and she has a plan. Offering a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London heroin trade, Keeping the House lifts the lid on a covert world thriving just beneath notice: not only in McDonald's queues and men's clubs, but in spotless living rooms and whispering kitchens.

She wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into, the tedious cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world. But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, do get to see the outside world. Growing up in rural Claremont, working amid the hustle and bustle, lawn parties and houses of joy in Trenchtown, the two sisters take a chance and move to England with their husbands, that far-off land of riches, where they settle down to motherhood among the jazz cafés and bleak streets of Brixton.