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On the The Scotiabank Giller Prize 2015 Longlist A love story, an adventure story, a fable without a moral, and an ink-black comedy of manners. Lucien (Lucy) Minor is the resident odd duck in the hamlet of Bury. Friendless and loveless, young and aimless, Lucy is a compulsive liar, a sickly weakling in a town famous for begetting brutish giants. Then Lucy accepts employment assisting the majordomo of the remote, foreboding Castle Von Aux. While tending to his new post as undermajordomo, he soon discovers the place harbours many dark secrets, not least of which is the whereabouts of the castle’s master, Baron Von Aux. In the local village, he also encounters thieves, madmen, aristocrats, an...
NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND LUCAS HEDGES A tragedy of manners from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers 'My favourite book of his yet' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette 'Pure joy' Mail on Sunday 'Buoyantly insane' New Yorker Frances Price is in dire straits. Scandals swirl around the recently widowed New York socialite, and her adult-aged, toddler-brained son Malcolm is no help. Cutting their losses, they grab their cat, Small Frank, and head for the exit. Paris becomes the backdrop for a giddy drive to self-destruction, helped along by a cast of singularly curious characters. Brimming with pathos, warmth and wit, French Exit is a riotous send-up of high society and a moving story of mothers and sons.
Now a major film starring Jaoquin Phoenix, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhal and Riz Ahmed. Shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, deWitt's dazzlingly original second novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother. Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. Across 1000 miles of Oregon desert his assassins, the notorious Eli and Charlies Sisters, ride - fighting, shooting, and drinking their way to Sacramento. But their prey isn't an easy mark, the road is long and bloody, and somewhere along the path Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. The Sisters Brothers pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable ribald tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life-and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.
The book of human skin is a large volume with many pages of villainy writ upon it. There are people who are a disease, you know. 13 May, 1784, Venice: Minguillo Fasan, heir to the decaying, gothic Palazzo Espagnol, is born. Yet Minguillo is no ordinary child: he is strange, devious and all those who come near him are fearful. Twelve years later Minguillo is faced with an unexpected threat to his inheritance: a newborn sister, Marcella. His untempered jealousy will condemn his sister to a series of fates as a cripple, a madwoman and a nun. But in his insatiable quest to destroy her, he may have underestimated his sister's ferocious determination, and her unlikely allies who will go to extraordinary lengths to save her...
In our third anthology, Aimee Bender introduces us to a young woman unable to summon the desire to sleep with her husband without payment in cash, Matt Sumell's protagonist feels capable of anything but can save no one, Rick Moody charts the rise an fall of a romance via Twitter, Patrick deWitt presents a bleak, funny tale of two movers who are going nowhere, and Jenny Offill chronicles the awkward vigil of a man caring for his terminally ill ex-wife.
The epitome of East Coast glamour, Tiger House is where the beautiful and the damned have always come to play in summer, scene of martinis and moonlit conspiracies, and newly inherited by the sleek, beguiling Nick. The Second World War is just ending, her cousin Helena has left in search of married bliss in Hollywood, and Nick's husband is coming home. Everything is about to change. Their children will surprise them. One summer, on the cusp of adolescence, Nick's daughter and Helena's son make a sinister discovery that plunges the island's bright heat into private shadow.
The long-awaited second novel by the author of “arguably the most exciting debut novel of the decade: The Last Samurai.” (Sam Anderson, New York). “All I want is to be a success. That’s all I ask.” Joe fails to sell a single set of the Encyclopedia Britannica in six months. Then fails to sell a single Electrolux and must eat 126 pieces of homemade pie, served up by his would-be customers who feel sorry for him. Holed up in his trailer, Joe finds an outlet for his frustrations in a series of ingenious sexual fantasies, and at last strikes gold. His brainstorm, Lightning Rods, Inc., will take Joe to the very top — and to the very heart of corporate insanity — with an outrageous s...
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this “masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait” (Literary Hub). This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives. Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood’s masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer.
'I absolutely adored it' NINA STIBBE**Selected as a Washington Post Book of the Summer**From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes a novel about an ordinary man who thought life's surprises were behind him - until a chance encounter changed everything________________________________________________ Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of st...
Michael Winter's The Big Why takes the tradition of the historical novel and twists it into the cool, sinuous, entertaining shape we've all been waiting for. His characters are real and from the past, but the lives they live feel contemporary and emotionally modern. Winter's version of the American artist Rockwell Kent is an over aged, erotically fleckless Huck Finn ready to leave the superficial art world of New York and light out for the territory. Only he heads the wrong way: north and east to Brigus, Newfoundland, before and at the beginning of World War One. A socialist and a philanderer, certain in the greatness of his work, he is drawn north by a fascination for the rocky Atlantic coa...