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.
The Ash House
The Tjoa ash house originally intended for ancestral tablets has stood at the top of Kota Cahaya's exclusive Green Hill for a century. Now, it is all drooping lintels and sagging roof; a haunted house with a haunted heir in it--Arno Tjoa, a Barbie-doll fixated cripple whom Sister Mary Michael, the clairvoyant nun, has been sent to set free. Arno believes that Bing Fa--the fascinating spirit of a pipa-diva trapped in a ghost marriage to his grandfather--is the key to solving the misfortunes plaguing the house. All will be well with Girl, the comatose maid he is obsessed with, Irene Tjoa his controlling aunt, and the Tjoa fortunes if Bing Fa is released from her doll-house prison. However, as the family's skeletons are unearthed, the nun realizes it is not in her power to save everyone or everything. Who must be sacrificed? What must be left to turn to dust? Set in a 21st century Southeast Asian port city where spirits still linger, The Ash House weaves between the visible and invisible to tell the story of an overseas-Chinese merchant family haunted by the legacy of love gone wrong, with an ending both unexpected and heartbreaking.
Land of Sand and Song
Legend has it that a magical spring lies dormant in the heart of the Khuzar desert. Said to be a gift from the gods, the spring holds the cure to all mortal woes. As mercenaries from everywhere try in vain to find the mystical spring, 17-yearold Desert Rose is on the run after her chieftain father is overthrown and captured by rebel clans. Now out for revenge, she sets out alone to the Oasis Capital to assassinate the person instigating the rebellion: the corrupt Emperor Zhao, who will stop at nothing to possess the elixir of life from the spring. To infiltrate the Imperial Guard, Desert Rose must pass a series of trials to test her wit, mettle, and her loyalty. But the real test lies in navigating the cut throat court politics with no ally but a rogue prince and a latent magic stirring in her - magic that can bring a kingdom to its knees or destroy her from within.
The Sea
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “extraordinary meditation on mortality, grief, death, childhood and memory" (USA Today) about a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside to grieve the loss of his wife. In this luminous novel, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel—among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.
The Margins
They wanted to escape capitalism; instead, they created the perfect business. Only Ethan Hicks knows what happened up on the mountain, for everyone else is dead. Hundreds of them, hundreds of westerners, their bodies yet to be recovered from the devastated commune that sits high above the Kullu Valley. It's an unfolding tragedy that has caught the attention of the world's media, and pressure is rapidly growing on the Indian authorities to provide answers. For them, of course, Ethan--found barely alive at the foot of the mountain--is the key to everything. And the account he gives to investigators will prove extraordinary: of a remote commune that grew beyond recognition through a simple quirk of fate. Of a harmonious society that became driven by greed. Of a paradise befouled by its own inhabitants. Yet, for all of Ethan's candour, there were some events that took place on the mountain of which he cannot speak--dark, terrible secrets that he intends to take to his grave.
The Zero Season
In post-WWII Paris, a Cambodian student radical and French drifter play a dangerous game of lust and revenge. It is 1949, and young Etienne Legast is in trouble. Estranged from his pious Catholic family, having fled a messy love affair with an older man at the end of the war, he returns home to Paris for a funeral, only to find himself quick drawn into a deadly debt to a neighborhood gangster and an unexpected romance with Samphan, an orphaned Cambodian student radical. Though the two young men come from different worlds, they soon develop a bond that helps them transcend their respective tragedies - until revolutionary political intrigues and the Parisian underworld threaten to pull them under once more.
Hope at Sea
Hope doesn’t only want to listen to her father’s stories about his voyages at sea, she wants to be part of those stories. And so, unbeknownst to her parents, she stows away on her father's 19th-century merchant vessel. But look... The wind has picked up and the sky is darkening... Could there be such a thing as an adventure that is too exciting? Join high-spirited Hope on a trip of a lifetime in this exquisitely illustrated picture book that also captures the love between a father and child.
1, 2, 3 Under the Sea (Spongebob Squarepants)
"Created by Stephen Hillenberg"--P. [4] of cover.
The Sea, the Sea
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHN BURNSIDE When Charles Arrowby retires from his glittering career in the London theatre, he buys a remote house on the rocks by the sea. He hopes to escape from his tumultuous love affairs but unexpectedly bumps into his childhood sweetheart and sets his heart on destroying her marriage. His equilibrium is further disturbed when his friends all decide to come and keep him company and Charles finds his seaside idyll severely threatened by his obsessions.
The Midnight Children: a Vanishing
Zak and Min's father mysteriously disappears at breakfast and curious things then begin to happen to them. Min encounters two small creatures with spider-like legs, a doll that runs, talks and steals and Shaz, the shaman, who gives her a box with a finger bone inside. Zak is chased by a strange man on all fours in the shopping mall, flees from snakes that interrupt his homework and is visited by a ghostly old lady in his bedroom who happens to love matcha ice cream. Trying to find their father, they are transported to an eerie world called the Moonlight Lands where oily creatures want to kidnap and eat them. The novel concludes with Zak vanishing one night during dinner.
Speed of Lightness
A window on modern Japan, this off-kilter, anti-sentimental literary thriller is an eye-opening journey into the hinterlands of a postmodern nation. Kyoto University student Aozora Fujiwara has been playing too much mah-jong and now he's deep in debt. When Aunt Okane ('money') dies and leaves a collection of priceless art to him and his sister, Mai, he thinks his problems are solved. But they're only just beginning: Mai's disappeared and he can't liquidate the estate without her. The quest that ensues takes Aozora to the deep south of Japan and the unlikely setting of a Dutch theme park called, Amsterland... The joy in Sherwood's tale is in Aozora's madcap journey, during which he meets a slew of silly--and often sinister--souls. Among them: an oyster-loving businessman who sells lifelike inflatable dolls, and a corpulent crime boss who looks like a cross between Liberace and Kim Jong-Il. In his carefully woven descriptions, Sherwood shows unusual insight into a fastchanging society of disaffected youth and sleazy governance. This picaresque on steroids offers a refreshingly irreverent look at contemporary life in a not entirely implausible Japan.
