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Book DescriptionA first novel that heralds a bold new writer, Water Wings is at once a disturbing glimpse of the underbelly of small-town life, and a big-hearted journey into the mysteries of girlhood. Darlene Oelpke is getting married, again. After a string of failed relationships, beautiful, vampish Darlene has finally chosen a second husband - inexplicably, Reg the Shoe Store Man. Her grown-up daughters, Vivian and Hannah, are home for the occasion, and find themselves immersed in memories of their girlhood both thrilling and tragic. And as they revisit the landscape of their youth - the river, the forest, their worn-out green house - they uncover long-buried secrets, as well as deep ties to one another. The sisters recall the death of their father, killed in a bizarre boating accident when they are still young. Vivian, then an imperious teenager who wields her intelligence like a weapon, does her best to keep the memory of their father alive, particularly for...

Book DescriptionThe ever-acerbic and seriously funny Amicus Curious, Q.C., is on the prowl for justice and the rule of law in this imaginative feline mystery. One cold winter morning, on the front lawn of the Law Society, Justice Ted Mariner sees an alley cat kill a bird. The angry judge remands the "murderer" into the custody of the Society's librarians, who provide the cat with bread and water and a Humpty Dumpty potato chip box for his bed. As their new colleague is a friend of the court, the librarians dub him Amicus Q.C. (for Questing Cat). They soon find him in the journals room, sniffing around the reasonably fresh corpse of Jeremiah "The Splinter" Debeers, anti-establishment lawyer, holy-roller, and general pain in the backside for his fellow benchers, the wealthy old-boy governors at the Law Society. Debeers had several enemies, but was his death just a freak photocopying accident? What exactly are the confidential records from the Society's wine cellar doing on the copier...

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement in 1994, Russian writer Victor Erofeyev proclaimed Leonid Dobychin "one of the main heroes of twentieth-century Russian literature." Obscure for many years, Dobychin is now celebrated as a modernist master. His short stories are black-humored slices of life from the early days of the Soviet Union--subtle and tightly constructed miniatures linked by recurring themes and full of ironic juxtaposition, context, allusion, and style. For Dobychin early Soviet society was an absurdist wonderland.

Book DescriptionThe classic works of literature contained in each of these volumes represent each author's best and most famous writings. A wonderful introduction to world literature, this finely crafted and affordable series offers the works of these world-renowned authors to a wider audience. Includes Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility . Las obras clasicas de literatura en cada volumen son una representacion de los mejores y mas famosos escritos de los autores. Una introduccion maravillosa a la literatura universal, esta serie hermosamente disenada pone las obras de los autores mundialmente conocidos al alcance de todos.

Book DescriptionJerry Cornelius ? English assassin, physicist, rock star, messiah to the Age of Science ? is one of fantastic literature?s greatest creations. Acclaimed by Moorcock?s readers, critics, and peers from Mick Jagger to J. G. Ballard, Cornelius is the ultimate postmodern antihero, more Borgesian than Asimovian. Three of the stories in this collection are here anthologized for the first time: "The Spencer Inheritance," which enmeshes Jerry with Princess Di; "Cheering for theRockets," involving an attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant; and "Firing the Cathedral," a novella based on 9/11 and its aftermath.

Amazon.comAdmirers of Belgian writer Michel Faber's magnificent breakthrough novel, The Crimson Petal and the White , may be surprised by how well his taut but unhurried prose translates to shorter fiction in the three novellas of The Courage Consort . It helps, of course, that the stories--minor marvels of suspenseful pacing and atmosphere--are unified by a large, old-fashioned theme: the loss of innocence (and, in one case, the struggle to preserve it). In the title story, an English vocalensemble travels to Belgium for a two-week residency at a rural chateau, an opportunity to rehearse a notoriously difficult and possibly pointless new composition. Catherine, the soprano--and the dependent, emotionally fragile wife of the ensemble's director--hears plangent cries from the surrounding woods each night. Like Mrs. Dalloway, Catherine feels herself approaching middle age without having achieved adulthood. If she goes into the woods--facing the ghostly legend of a...

Book DescriptionFrom the award-winning author of A Student of Weather , a funny, sad-eyed novel about a woman caught between real love and movie love--and real love doesn't stand a chance. This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she rapidly becomes so saturated with old movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Equally addicted are her three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named after Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the jaded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness, and sudden...

Book Description Eastern philosophy and legal thinking meet in this mystery novel in which Max Macarthur faces the greatest challenge of his young career when he must serve as defense counsel to cult leader Shiva Ram Acharya. In a grisly echo of Jonestown, 20 members of a cult are found savagely executed in an isolated island on Canada's west coast, and Acharya, who was there, claims to have amnesia when questioned about the events. As Macarthur falls under the sway of the brilliant and enigmatic Acharya, he becomes convinced of the cultist's innocence and embarks on a danger-ridden quest to find the true murderer.

Book DescriptionOpening in Calcutta in the 1960s, Amitav Ghosh's radiant second novel follows two families -- one English, one Bengali -- as their lives intertwine in tragic and comic ways. The narrator, Indian born and English educated, traces events back and forth in time, from the outbreak of World War II to the late twentieth century, through years of Bengali partition and violence, observing the ways in which political events invade private lives.

Book DescriptionKunal Basu's panoramic first novel follows the life of a young man as he encounters the flow of the opium trade, from Calcutta to Canton. He gets a job in an 'auction house', only to discover that the 'merchandise' being traded is opium. Disguised as a missionary, Hiran survives cholera, piracy and war in China, arriving back in India to find his homeland on the verge of another rebellion. And he finds himself suddenly father to a half-caste son, the child abandoned by the English owners of the auction house when they fled back in disgrace to Britain. As Hiran dedicates himself to the education of his new son, the cycle of regeneration continues.

Amazon.comFans of Matthew Kneale's historical saga, English Passengers , which won the 2000 Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Booker Prize, be forewarned. A short story collection, such as Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance , is very different. That said, relax and enjoy the fact that Matthew Kneale has mastered both genres. This collection of 12 stories is unified and bound thematically by the portrayal of people on the cusp of a new awareness of the trajectory of their lives, or by a moment or event that changes the equation for them. The stories take place all over the world: China, Ethiopia, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. For some, it is the dislocation of being in a strange place that causes the introspection necessary for change. For others, no external change takes place, but the interior landscape is forever altered. In the first story, "Stone," a conventional English family, used to traveling with a "tour firm," goes...