-
7 1/2
0$5.99Book Condition: Great
Books considered to be in ‘great’ condition are as new. This status is applied to books without noticeable wear and tear and can include literally new books as well as those of exceptional condition and quality.==========
Synopsis:
A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty …Read more below -
A Keeper
0$5.99When Elizabeth Keane returns to Ireland after her mother’s death, she’s focused only on saying goodbye to that dark and dismal part of her life. Her childhood home is packed solid with useless junk, her mother’s presence already fading. But within this mess, she discovers a small stash of letters—and ultimately, the truth.
Forty years earlier, a young woman stumbles from a remote stone house, the night quiet except for the constant wind that encircles her as she hurries deeper into the darkness away from the cliffs and the sea. She has no sense of where she is going, only that she must keep on.
-
A Life Apart
0$5.99A Life Apart tells two stories. The first is of Ritwik’s; a story of a young man’s escape from a blighted childhood of squalor and abuse in Calcutta to the edge of what he considers to be a new world, full of possibilities, in England, where he has a chance to start all over again. But his past, especially the scarred, all-consuming relationship with his mother, is a minefield: will Ritwik find the salvation he is looking for?
Could it arrive in the form of the second story that comprises the novel, the one he is writing himself, the story of an Englishwoman in the old world of Bengal on the eve of India’s first partition? Or could it be in the figure of the eighty-six-year-old Anne Cameron, fragile and damaged, who gives shelter to Ritwik in London in exchange of the care that she needs? And then one night, in the badlands of King’s Cross, Ritwik meets the suave, unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik’s own goes into free fall.
Set in India during the 1970s and ’80s, in England in the ’90s and in Raj Bengal in the 1900s, this award-winning first novel from one of India’s most acclaimed new writers is about dislocation and alienation, outsiders and losers, the tenuous and unconscious intersections of lives and histories, and the consolations of storytelling. Unsentimental yet full of compassion, and written with unrelenting honesty, this scalding debut marks a new turning point in writing from and of the Subcontinent.
-
A Lost Wife’s Tale
0$4.99Edith Lutz doesn’t want to be found. She’s left behind a comfortable home in a flurry of hastily packed bags, fleeing for an anonymous life in the city. With a new look, new name and new job as live-in housekeeper to wealthy publisher Adam, she’s hoping to outwit her past and build herself a new life.
-
A Perfect Heritage
0$5.99The House of Farrell – home of The Cream, an iconic face product that has seen women flocking to its bijoux flagship store in the Berkeley Arcade since 1953.
At Farrell, you can rely on the personal touch. The legendary Athina Farrell remains the company’s figurehead and in her kingdom at the Berkeley Arcade, Florence Hamilton plies their cosmetics with the utmost discretion. She is sales advisor – and holder of secrets – extraordinaire.
But of course the world of cosmetics is changing and the once glorious House of Farrell is now in decline, its customers tempted away by more fashionable brands.
Enter Bianca Bailey, formidable business woman, mother of three, and someone who always gets her way. Athina and Bianca lock horns over the future of the House of Farrell but it is the past that tells its devastating tale of ambition and ego, passion and wonder.
Here is a tale of survival … and a perfect heritage.
-
A Plan Unravelled
0$5.99Ten minutes.
That’s all I had between make-up and filming. I usually took this time, be it ten minutes, fifteen or sometimes only thirty seconds, to grab some water or rehearse my lines in my caravan. I shouldn’t have strayed from routine.
Ten minutes. That’s all it took for me to destroy every bit of success I’d achieved in the past fifteen years.
I’d only been eight when I’d written out Ruby’s Master Plan:
Move to New York.
Get an acting gig.
Make money.
I’d ticked them all off by the age of eighteen.
-
A Question of Trust
0$4.991950s London. Tom Knelston is charismatic, working class and driven by ambition, ideals and passion. He is a man to watch. His wife Alice shares his vision. It seems they are the perfect match.
Then out of the blue, Tom meets beautiful and unhappily married Diana Southcott, a fashion model. An exciting but dangerous affair is inevitable and potentially damaging to their careers. And when a child becomes ill, Tom is forced to make decisions about his principles, his reputation, his marriage, and most of all, his love for his child.
-
A Taxonomy of Barnacles
0$4.99The Barnacle sisters – Bell, Bridget, Benita, Beryl, Belinda and Beth – have been raised by their eccentric, self-made father in a fabulous, gigantic Fifth Avenue apartment that, encrusted with Barry Barnacle’s scientific collections, feels like a little piece of the Museum of Natural History transplanted to the other side of Central Park. Now that most of the sisters have come of age, Barry Barnacle proposes a contest, a test of wits and wills that should at long last settle what is to Barry the most essential of all questions: nature or nurture? Whichever of his daughters can most spectacularly carry on his name will inherit his fortune; the others are out cold. It’s a proposition to set a Jane Austen heroine on her ear, but the Barnacle girls are up to the challenge. Throw the girls’ mother Bella and their childhood crushes – the Finch twins next door – into the mix and the stage is set for a completely inventive and utterly fresh social comedy that is as beautifully written as it is unique.
-
A Venetian Affair
0$4.99In the waning days of Venice’s glory in the mid-1700s, Andrea Memmo was scion to one the city’s oldest patrician families. At the age of twenty-four he fell passionately in love with sixteen-year-old Giustiniana Wynne, the beautiful, illegitimate daughter of a Venetian mother and British father. Because of their dramatically different positions in society, they could not marry. And Giustiniana’s mother, afraid that an affair would ruin her daughter’s chances to form a more suitable union, forbade them to see each other. Her prohibition only fueled their desire and so began their torrid, secret seven-year-affair, enlisting the aid of a few intimates and servants (willing to risk their own positions) to shuttle love letters back and forth and to help facilitate their clandestine meetings. Eventually, Giustiniana found herself pregnant and she turned for help to the infamous Casanova–himself infatuated with her.
Two and half centuries later, the unbelievable story of this star-crossed couple is told in a breathtaking narrative, re-created in part from the passionate, clandestine letters Andrea and Giustiniana wrote to each other.
-
All that I am
0$5.99All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places.
When eighteen-year-old Ruth Becker visits her cousin Dora in Munich in 1923, she meets the love of her life, the dashing young journalist Hans Wesemann, and eagerly joins in the heady activities of the militant political left in Germany. Ten years later, Ruth and Hans are married and living in Weimar Berlin when Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany. Together with Dora and her lover, Ernst Toller, the celebrated poet and self-doubting revolutionary, the four become hunted outlaws overnight and are forced to flee to London. Inspired by the fearless Dora to breathtaking acts of courage, the friends risk betrayal and deceit as they dedicate themselves to a dangerous mission: to inform the British government of the very real Nazi threat to which it remains willfully blind. All That I Am is the heartbreaking story of these extraordinary people, who discover that Hitler’s reach extends much further than they had thought.
Gripping, compassionate, and inspiring, this remarkable debut novel reveals an uncommon depth of humanity and wisdom. Anna Funder has given us a searing and intimate portrait of courage and its price, of desire and ambition, and of the devastating consequences when they are thwarted.
-
All Through the Night
0$5.99Mary Higgins Clark, the Queen of Suspense, celebrates the season with this Christmas classic featuring two of her most beloved characters.
All of Alvirah’s deductive powers and Willy’s world-class common sense are called upon as the two stumble into a Christmas mystery. A woman abandons her newborn at a Manhattan church. Simultaneously, a thief is absconding with a treasured artifact, a chalice adorned with a star-shaped diamond. To elude police, he grabs the stroller and disappears. Seven years later, the mother returns to the scene and finds Alvirah and Willy helping neighborhood kids prepare for a Christmas pageant at an after-school shelter. Soon the savvy sleuths set out to solve the puzzle of the missing child and chalice — and to unmask scam artists threatening to shut down the shelter.
-
Alphabet Weekends
0$4.99Natalie and Tom have been best friends forever, but Tom wants them to be much more. When Natalie’s longtime boyfriend walks out on her just when she thinks he’s going to propose, Tom offers her a different and wildly romantic proposition. He suggests that they spend twenty-six weekends together, indulging in twenty-six different activities from A to Z, and at the end of that time Tom’s convinced they’ll be madly in love. Natalie, however, is not so sure. As Natalie’s touring the alphabet with Tom, her mother’s going through her own romantic crisis—while Tom’s unhappily married sister-in-law, Lucy, struggles with temptation. And over the course of six amazing months, three generations of passionate dreamers are going to discover that, no matter how clever they are, love—and life—is never as easy as A, B, C . . .
