Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Rabbit Foot Bill
A lonely boy in a prairie town befriends a local outsider in 1947 and then witnesses a shocking murder. Based on a true story. Canwood, Saskatchewan, 1947. Leonard Flint, a lonely boy in a small farming town befriends the local outsider, a man known as Rabbit Foot Bill. Bill doesn’t talk much, but he allows Leonard to accompany him as he sets rabbit snares and to visit his small, secluded dwelling. Being with Bill is everything to young Leonard—an escape from school, bullies and a hard father. So his shock is absolute when he witnesses Bill commit a sudden violent act and loses him to prison. Fifteen years on, as a newly graduated doctor of psychiatry, Leonard arrives at the Weyburn Mental Hospital, both excited and intimidated by the massive institution known for its experimental LSD trials. To Leonard’s great surprise, at the Weyburn he is reunited with Bill and soon becomes fixated on discovering what happened on that fateful day in 1947. Based on a true story, this page-turning novel from a master stylist examines the frailty and resilience of the human mind.
Field Study
Award-winning and beloved author Helen Humphreys discovers her local herbarium and realizes we need to look for beauty in whatever nature we have left — no matter how diminished Award-winning poet and novelist Helen Humphreys returns to her series of nature meditations in this gorgeously written and illustrated book that takes a deep look at the forgotten world of herbariums and the people who amassed collections of plant specimens in the 19th and 20th centuries. From Emily Dickinson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s collections to the amateur naturalists whose names are forgotten but whose collections still grace our world, herbariums are the records of the often-humble plants that are still with us and those that are lost. Over the course of a year, Humphreys considers life and loss and the importance of finding solace in nature. Illustrated throughout with images of herbarium specimens, Humphreys’s own botanical drawings, and archival photographs, this will be the perfect gift for Humphreys’s many fans, nature enthusiasts, and for all who loved Birds Art Life.
And A Dog Called Fig
And A Dog called Fig is a study of how animals help writers deal with the challenges of the creative process, interspersing the authors own experience with stories of other famous writers and their dogs
Coventry: A Novel
“Elegant . . . illuminates the impact of war on ordinary people . . . an elegy and a celebration.”—Ann Hood, author of The Knitting Circle On the evening of November 14, 1940, Harriet Marsh stands on the roof of the historic Coventry cathedral and marvels at the frost glittering beneath a full moon. But it is a bomber’s moon, and the Luftwaffe is coming to unleash destruction on the city. For Harriet; for the young fire watcher, Jeremy, standing beside her; and for his artist mother, Maeve, hiding in a cellar, this single night of horror will resonate for the rest of their lives. Coventry is a testament to the power of the human spirit, an honest and ultimately uplifting account of heartache transformed into compassion and love.
Machine Without Horses
“One of the best—and most wonderfully experimental—historical fiction titles of the year. . . . Truly spectacular.” —Toronto Star What is an ordinary life worth? A seasoned writer stumbles across an obituary and imagination is sparked. The brief words of memoriam describe a woman who was both extraordinary—eccentric, revered in her field, a renowned expert—but also utterly ordinary. How does a writer, intrigued by all that isn’t said, create a story, or capture an unknowable woman and all the secret passions, choices and compromises that make up a life? In Machine Without Horses, Helen Humphreys explores the real life and the imagined internal life of the famous and famously private salmon-fly dresser Megan Boyd, a craftswoman who worked for sixty years out of a bare-bones cottage in a small village in the north of Scotland. Humphreys, both present in the story and its architect, reveals with her inimitable style the complicated emotional landscape that can exist under even the most constant surface.
The River
A breathtaking mix of observation, prose, natural history, and art We tend to look at landscape in relation to what it can do for us. Does it move us with its beauty? Can we make a living from it? But what if we examined a landscape on its own terms, freed from our expectations and assumptions? This is what celebrated writer Helen Humphreys sets out to do in this beautiful, groundbreaking examination of place. For more than a decade Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario. In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom. The result is The River, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and full-colour original photographs to get at the truth. In doing this, Humphreys has created a work of startling originality that is sure to become a new Canadian classic.
The Evening Chorus
A “delicate and incandescent” novel of love, loss, escape, and the ways the natural world can save us amid the chaos of war (San Francisco Chronicle). World War II. Downed during his first mission, James Hunter is taken captive as a German POW. To bide his time, he studies a nest of redstarts at the edge of camp. Some prisoners plot escape; some are shot. And then, one day, James is called to the Kommandant’s office. Meanwhile, back home, James’s new wife, Rose, is on her own, free in a way she has never known. Then, James’s sister, Enid, loses everything during the Blitz and must seek shelter with Rose. In a cottage near Ashdown Forest, the two women jealously guard secrets, but f...
The Frozen Thames
In its long history, the river Thames has frozen solid forty times. These are the stories of that frozen river. And so opens this breathtaking and original work of forty vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the river froze between 1142 and 1895. In breathtaking prose, acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys deftly draws us into these intimate moments and transports us through time. Whether it’ s Queen Matilda trying to escape her besieged castle in a snowstorm, or lovers meeting on the frozen river in the plague years, or a simple farmer persuading his oxen that the ice is safe, Humphrey’ s achingly beautiful prose acts like a photograph, capturing a moment and etching it forever on our imaginations. Stunningly designed and illustrated throughout with full-colour period art, The Frozen Thames is a genre-bending work from one of our most respected writers.
The Reinvention of Love
When Charles Sainte-Beuve, a French journalist, met Victor Hugo, an ambitious young writer, he was swept into a world of grand emotions, a world where words can become swords. But Charles' attraction moves on from Victor, to his wife Adèle. Soon the two lovers are on the edge of a great scandale and a wounded Victor must exact his price for betrayal.Set during the tumultuous reign of Napoleon III, this mesmerising novel draws a rich portrait of old Paris, where duels were fought and cholera-ridden bodies float in the Seine. An atmospheric story of delicacy and emotion, The Reinvention of Love brings together the voices of two women destroyed by Victor Hugo's ferocious ambition, and the unique, acerbic and heart-breaking voice of Charles Sainte-Beuve, first Hugo's friend and then his unlikely competitor in love.
True Story
Helen Humphreys' brother, Martin, was her closest ally and friend. Two years ago, he suddenly became ill and died in just a few months. In the year that followed, Humphreys wrote this intense and affecting memoir. Though the book is deeply personal, it is also, inescapably, about the devastating events that we all experience.As the year goes on, Humphreys begins to restructure her life. She absorbs the seasons, landscapes, she gets a new dog, plants fruit trees. And she tells this story: moving fluidly between stories of childhood and adulthood, from life to death and its aftermath, she describes her loss, and how she has come to terms with grief. Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, True Story is articulate, loving and exquisitely crafted. It will make you catch your breath with recognition and sorrow.
