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For Pip, swimming is a necessity. With a hopeless mother, a drug-addled sister and a best friend more interested in her own love-life than in friendship, swimming provides a welcome escape. But as Olympic stardom beckons, Pip must decide whether her future lies in the water or on land. Swimming is a novel about growing up, about talent, and about having what it takes to survive.
Claire Keegan’s brilliant debut collection, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year, and earned her resounding accolades on both sides of the Atlantic. Now she has delivered her next, much-anticipated book, Walk the Blue Fields, an unforgettable array of quietly wrenching stories about despair and desire in the timeless world of modern-day Ireland. In the never-before-published story “The Long and Painful Death,” a writer awarded a stay to work in Heinrich Böll’s old cottage has her peace interrupted by an unwelcome intruder, whose ulterior motives only emerge as the night progresses. In the title story, a priest waits at the altar to perform a marriage and, during the ...
How hard can it be for an American to pass France's unique exam for English teachers? This wickedly funny memoir examines France's love-hate affair with the modern world. "Her tragi-comic story explains how France produces the worst English teachers in the world" - LE POINT; 'Funny and ferocious" - THE PARIS TIMES; "Dramatically funny" - L'EXPRESS; "Highly instructive" - NOUVEL OBS
The story of a teenage girl's journey from a small Midwestern swim team to her first state meet, her brutal professional training, and the final, record-breaking swims that lead to her dizzying ascent to the Olympic podium in Barcelona. In the loneliness of adolescence, in the family tragedies that threaten to engulf her, Pip discovers the resilience of the human spirit and the spectacular power of her own body.
Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years. For much of that time he was shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and, later, his fellow hostages, amongst them John McCarthy.
By turns humorous, bittersweet, historical, or surreal, each of these carefully selected stories invites readers to explore a different facet of Paris.
Compassionate, witty, and unsettling, Antarctica is the debut collection of one of Ireland's most exciting and versatile new talents. Claire Keegan, winner of several prestigious awards including the William Trevor Prize, writes stories that have a razor-sharp narrative style and unembellished tone, and move from the cruel, hard life of rural Ireland to the hot landscape of the southern United States. From the title story about a married woman who takes a trip to the city with a single purpose in mind—to sleep with another man—Antarctica draws you into a world of obsession, betrayal, and fragile relationships. In "Love in the Tall Grass," Cordelia wakes on the last day of the twentieth c...
A History of British Working-Class Literature examines the rich contributions of working-class writers in Great Britain from 1700 to the present. Since the early eighteenth century the phenomenon of working-class writing has been recognised, but almost invariably co-opted in some ultimately distorting manner, whether as examples of 'natural genius'; a Victorian self-improvement ethic; or as an aspect of the heroic workers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical culture. The present work contrastingly applies a wide variety of interpretive approaches to this literature. Essays on more familiar topics, such as the 'agrarian idyll' of John Clare, are mixed with entirely new areas in the field like working-class women's 'life-narratives'. This authoritative and comprehensive History explores a wide range of genres such as travel writing, the verse-epistle, the elegy and novels, while covering aspects of Welsh, Scottish, Ulster/Irish culture and transatlantic perspectives.
Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party.
**NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Lush.' Sunday Times 'Superb.' Daily Mail 'Elegantly written.' Sunday Telegraph From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican ar...