Literary Life

The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an idealist and a materialist intersect at an estate called Howards End. There, the lives of three families become entangled. As chance brings them together, societal conventions come into question as does the ownership of Howards End. Through the fate of the estate - as well as the lives of the families who are affiliated with it - Forster creates a brilliant parallel to the fate of English society itself.

After another relationship disaster Alice Littleton returns home to spend summer in Dublin’s Sandycove with her Mum, Ciara and beloved grandmother Eva at their family deli and grocers. As Alice settles back into her old life with best friend Becca and her new boyfriend Conal Blake, she begins to fall in love with the comings and goings of their family shop and once more enjoying the rhythms of Irish life.

From “the great German-language writer of his generation” (Joshua Cohen) comes the second novel of Christian Kracht’s career narrated by an eponymous “Christian”. Eurotrash begins in Zurich, where Christian has returned to care for his 80-year-old mother after her discharge from a psychiatric institution. Confronting the dark shadows of his family’s past—particularly his grandfather’s strong ties with the Nazi regime—and struggling to navigate the emotionally wrenching terrain of his relationship with his mother, he sets off on a road trip with her.

In the stories that make up Oblivion, David Foster Wallace joins the rawest, most naked humanity with the infinite involutions of self-consciousness--a combination that is dazzlingly, uniquely his. These are worlds undreamt-of by any other mind. Only David Foster Wallace could convey a father's desperate loneliness by way of his son's daydreaming through a teacher's homicidal breakdown ("The Soul Is Not a Smithy"). Or could explore the deepest and most hilarious aspects of creativity.

Cette fresque familiale canadienne fut l'un des plus grands succès de la littérature nord-américaine, dès la parution en 1927 du premier des seize romans, aussi célèbre que Autant en emporte le vent de Margaret Mitchell. En 1863, durant la guerre de Sécession, la famille Whiteoak, qui s'est agrandie avec la naissance de Philippe, invite à Jalna Lucy et Curtis Sinclair, sudistes et esclavagistes, qui vont secrètement organiser depuis le Canada, un front de résistance. De se trouver mêlée peu ou prou aux conspirations de Curtis enchante Adeline.

Inside the church of a Benedictine monastery on Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion.

Maddy is a devoted stay-at-home wife and mother, host of excellent parties, giver of thoughtful gifts, and bestower of a searingly perceptive piece of advice or two. She is the cornerstone of her family, a true matriarch...until she commits suicide, leaving her husband Brady and teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling, wondering what happened. How could the exuberant, exacting woman they loved disappear so abruptly, seemingly without reason, from their lives? How they can possibly continue without her?

A young man of astonishing promise when he emigrated from Ghana in 1955, Samuel Tyne was determined to accomplish great things. Fifteen long years later, he’s an insignificant government employee who hates his job when he unexpectedly inherits his uncle’s crumbling mansion in Aster, Alberta. Despite his wife’s resistance and the sullen complaints of his 13-year-old twin daughters, Samuel quits his job and moves his family to the town. For here, he believes, is that fabled second chance, and he is determined not to fail again.

I'll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting up a film in the projectionist booth, he's confronted by the ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood's silent film era. Lois invites Felix to revisit - and in some cases relive - scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema's big screen.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now.

An absorbing chronicle of a much overlooked chapter in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ life - her 19-year editorial career. History remembers Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as the consummate first lady, the nation’s tragic widow, the tycoon’s wife, and the quintessential embodiment of elegance. Her biographers, however, skip over an equally important stage in her life: her nearly 20-year-long career as a book editor. Jackie as Editor, written by one of the authors Jackie edited, is the first book to focus exclusively on this remarkable woman’s editorial career.

"Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!" is the advice Teresa Rae Wood shares with the listeners of her local radio show, Modern Pioneers, and the advice she strives to live by every day. She has fled a bad marriage and rebuilt a life with her children, Claire and Joshua, and their caring stepfather, Bruce. Their love for each other binds them as a family through the daily struggles of making ends meet. But when they received unexpected news that Teresa, only 38, is dying of cancer, their lives all begin to unravel and drift apart.

After years spent living on the run, Samuel Hawley moves with his teenage daughter, Loo, to Olympus, Massachusetts. There, in his late wife's hometown, Hawley finds work as a fisherman, while Loo struggles to fit in at school and grows curious about her mother's mysterious death. Haunting them both are twelve scars Hawley carries on his body, from twelve bullets in his criminal past - a past that eventually spills over into his daughter's present, until together they must face a reckoning yet to come.

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.

Once more, we catch up with the delightful goings-on in the fictitious 44 Scotland Street from Alexander McCall Smith. With customary charm and deftness, Alexander McCall Smith gives us another instalment in this popular series, now running in its eighth season in The Scotsman.

They seemed like the perfect couple - young, good-looking, made for each other. The moment Pauline, a stranger to the Polish Eastern Avenue neighborhood of Baltimore (though she lived only 20 minutes away), walked into his mother’s grocery store, Michael was smitten. And in the heat of World War II fervor, they are propelled into a hasty wedding. But they never should have married.

The sheriff's deputy at the front door brings hard news to Ree Dolly. Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date. Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, Sidik Fofana’s electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience. Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone’s mind. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other’s lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.

Nora and Theresa Flynn are 21 and 17 when they leave their small village in Ireland and journey to America. Nora is the responsible sister; she's shy and serious and engaged to a man she isn't sure that she loves. Theresa is gregarious; she is thrilled by their new life in Boston and besotted with the fashionable dresses and dance halls on Dudley Street. But when Theresa ends up pregnant, Nora is forced to come up with a plan - a decision with repercussions they are both far too young to understand.

The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Crusoe set sail from Kingston upon Hull on a sea voyage in August 1651, against the wishes of his parents, who wanted him to pursue a career in law.