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Author: Frank F Claflin , Julius, Printers H.H . Bancroft & Company , Bancroft Company
Book title: The Tragedy of Errors: A Dramatic Poem, Asking of the Novel and the Stage, a ...
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Author: Bobbs-Merrill Company. pbl
Book title: The day of souls : a novel
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- Added date: 22 December 2012
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Author: Small, Maynard & Company. pbl
Book title: Christine of the young heart : a novel
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- Added date: 20 December 2012
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Author: Harold Bell Wright , Book Supply Company
Book title: The Eyes of the World: A Novel
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- Added date: 19 December 2012
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Author: Henry Holt and Company. pbl
Book title: The trangression of Andrew Vane : a novel
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Author: Mabel Wood Martin , Frederick A. Stokes Company
Book title: The Green Gods? Pavilion: A Novel of the Philippines
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- Added date: 15 December 2012
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Author: Little, Brown and Company, publisher
Book title: The wolf-cub : a novel of Spain
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Author: G.W. Dillingham Company. pbl
Book title: The end of the game : a novel
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Author: G.W. Dillingham Company. pbl
Book title: The end of the game : a novel
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Author: Henry Ridgely Evans , Neale Publishing Company
Book title: The House of the Sphinx: A Novel
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Author: Van Zandt Wheeler , Britton Publishing Company
Book title: The Creed of Her Father: A Novel
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Author: Harold Bell Wright , Book Supply Company
Book title: The Eyes of the World: A Novel
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- Added date: 13 December 2012
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Author: Mary Stewart Doubleday Cutting , McBride, Nast & Company
Book title: The Lovers of Sanna: A Novel
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Author: Neale Publishing Company. pbl
Book title: The house of the sphinx : a novel
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Author: J.S. Ogilvie Publishing Company. pbl
Book title: The spirit of the town : a novel presentation in fiction form of the impulse and desire which mould the lives of men
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- Added date: 13 December 2012
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Author: Frank F Claflin , Julius, Printers H.H . Bancroft & Company , Bancroft Company
Book title: The Tragedy of Errors: A Dramatic Poem, Asking of the Novel and the Stage, a ...
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- Added date: 12 December 2012
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Author: Harold Bell Wright , Book Supply Company
Book title: The Eyes of the World: A Novel
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- Added date: 11 December 2012
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Author: Henry Holt and Company. pbl
Book title: The trangression of Andrew Vane : a novel
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- Added date: 10 December 2012
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Author: Small, Maynard & Company, publisher
Book title: The knight-errant : a novel of to-day
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- Added date: 10 December 2012
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Author: Bobbs-Merrill Company. pbl
Book title: The day of souls : a novel
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- Added date: 10 December 2012
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Author: Neale Publishing Company. pbl
Book title: The mysteries of the Zi?mniy dvo?retz (Winter Palace) : a Russian historical novel
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- Added date: 9 December 2012
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Author: Frank F Claflin , Julius, Printers H.H . Bancroft & Company , Bancroft Company
Book title: The Tragedy of Errors: A Dramatic Poem, Asking of the Novel and the Stage, a ...
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- Added date: 8 December 2012
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Author: Henry Holt and Company. pbl
Book title: The trangression of Andrew Vane : a novel
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- Added date: 7 December 2012
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Author: Small, Maynard & Company, publisher
Book title: The knight-errant : a novel of to-day
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- Added date: 7 December 2012
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Author: Small, Maynard & Company, publisher
Book title: The knight-errant : a novel of to-day
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- Added date: 6 December 2012
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Author: Mary Putney
Book title: The China Bride
From Publishers Weekly
Nineteenth-century China, England and Scotland are the settings for Putney's continuing saga of the Renbourne twins, Dominic and Kyle, begun in The Wild Child. There, Kyle handed over his unwanted betrothed, Meriel (a match arranged at birth), to his twin brother, Dominic, and escaped to Spain with his terminally ill mistress, Constancia. Ever since his true love's death, Kyle has been exploring the world. In 1832, he is in Macao. His father's health is failing, however, and Kyle plans to fulfill his lifelong dream of seeing the Temple of Hoshan, "an image of peace and unearthly beauty," then return to England to resume his duties as Lord Maxwell. Unfortunately, China is closed to all Fan-qui (foreigners) and Kyle must stay within the confines of the Canton Settlement, a narrow strip of warehouses serving as shipping point for all European and American trade companies. In order to sneak into the Chinese countryside, Kyle enlists the aid of Jin Kang, who he thinks is a young male Chinese interpreter. Jin is actually Troth Mei-Lian Montgomery, feisty daughter of a Scottish trader and Chinese concubine, who is forced to make her living by spying on "foreign devils." Kyle's rash escapade is predictably unsuccessful, as he is discovered and sentenced to death. He marries Troth (symbolically) and dispatches her to England to tell his family of his fateAwhich, of course, turns out to be different from what she imagines. In chapters alternating between Troth's experiences in England and flashbacks to her adventures with Kyle in China, Putney contrives an awkward tale, dependant for its drama on Kyle's belief that he can never love again, and on Troth's fear of rejection by Kyle's family. Though the conflict rarely grips, the sex scenes are adequately steamy, and Putney provides plenty of atmospheric details.
From Library Journal
Picking up the story of the "irresponsible twin" from The Wild Child (LJ 8/99), Putney's latest historical sweeps its adventure-seeking hero to the other side of the globe and into the narrow, conflicted life of Troth Mei-Lian Montgomery, an orphaned Eurasian daughter of a Scottish trader, with dangerous, passionate, and life-changing results. A master at creating unusual, sympathetic characters in compelling relational situations, Putney takes a woman caught between two worlds and a British peer who has vowed never to marry again and sends them on a forbidden journey that not only challenges their preconceptions about life and each other but eventually brings them love as well. Smoothly integrated references to the ancient practices of tai chi, feng shui, and wing chun add interest and authenticity to this highly sensual, emotionally involving romance, which also addresses a number of women's and ethnic issues still relevant today. This elegantly written work is sure to join Putney's earlier novels in most library romance collections. Putney is a best-selling RITA Award winner and lives in Baltimore.
***
Award-winning author Mary Jo Putney captivated the hearts of readers everywhere with her breathtaking debut, The Wild Child. Now, in her new novel, The China Bride, she has created another fiercely moving love story and another endearing heroine – a rare beauty torn between two cultures who valiantly struggles to discover the woman she is destined to be.
Born to a Scottish father, Troth Montgomery, betrothed to her life as a concubine, never imagined she would one day leave the Orient to arrive at the English estate of a stranger – the brother of the man who had briefly been her husband. Kyle Renbourne, Viscount of Maxwell, had taken Troth as his bride shortly before his apparent execution in a Chinese prison. Now, as his widow, she is entitled to the home she always dreamed of but remains haunted by the memory of a dashing husband and the brief, forbidden love they shared. But then Kyle Renbourne is seemingly reborn, though his mind and body are badly wounded. Together, Troth and Kyle embark on a miraculous journey of hope, faith, and struggle against a deadly menace that has followed them halfway across the world.
"She squeezed his hand, and in her grip he felt the pulse of her chi. Pure and bright, it glowed with a compassion that warmed the depths of his darkness… He felt scalded, melted, transformed."
Written with elegance and gentle passion, The China Bride is a stirring tale of lasting love and the power of forgiveness told by a master storyteller.
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Author: Gao Xingjian
Book title: One Man
One Man's Bible is the second novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Gao Xingjian to appear in English. Following on the heels of his highly praised Soul Mountain , this later work is as candid as the first, and written with the same grace and beauty.
In a Hong Kong hotel room in 1996, Gao Xingjian's lover, Marguerite, stirs up his memories of childhood and early adult life under the shadow of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. Gao has been living in self-imposed exile in France and has traveled to this Western-influenced Chinese city-state, so close to his homeland, for the staging of one of his plays.
What follows is a fictionalized account of Gao Xingjian's life under the Communist regime. Whether in "beehive" offices in Beijing or in isolated rural towns, daily life is riddled with paranoia and fear, as revolutionaries, counterrevolutionaries, reactionaries, counterreactionaries, and government propaganda turn citizens against one another. It is a place where a single sentence spoken ten years earlier can make one an enemy of the state. Gao evokes the spiritual torture of political and intellectual repression in graphic detail, including the heartbreaking betrayals he suffers in his relationships with women and men alike.
One Man's Bible is a profound meditation on the essence of writing, on exile, on the effects of political oppression on the human spirit, and on how the human spirit can triumph.
***
One Man's Bible belongs to that sad class of books sold on the strength of their authors having won a prize. But a prize is rather a thin argument for reading it, especially in a wooden English translation. Does one want to know more about Gao Xingjian than his first novel translated into English, Soul Mountain, told? That book had just enough exotic colour to survive its translation; from its portentous title onwards, One Man's Bible has much less going for it. It needs more story, structure, people, situations, atmosphere, ideas – anything strong enough to come through the obscuring veil of alien words.
When, in 2001, Gao became the first Chinese writer to win a Nobel prize for literature, it came as a surprise. The Chinese literary bureaucrats – today's counterparts of the strange Soviet creatures in Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita – had long been pushing for one of their trusties to win. Gao was certainly not one of those, but neither was he prominent in any of the exiled literary cliques. Since being driven to leave China in the 1980s he had been living in France, writing supposedly experimental, sub-Beckettian plays with Chinese characteristics that some critics in the Chinese-speaking world thought worth discussing. These plays also suited small, subsidised European theatre companies in search of uncommercial exotica full of the timeless wisdom of the east. While still in China, Gao was best known for Bus Stop, a one-acter about people waiting for a bus that never came. What delighted audiences and infuriated the authorities when the play appeared some 20 years ago was its apparent implied message: the never-arriving bus was the wonderful future that the regime promised but could not deliver.
Soul Mountain was fiction in the form of an autobiography (or vice versa) that told a fragmented tale of a writer on the run in the wilder reaches of the Yangtze valley. The background chimed with Gao's own flight from the thought police, as well as being a celebration of "authentic" China surviving 40 years of the party state in remote and picturesque areas. There was quite a lot of sex, too.
One Man's Bible also invites us to read its central character, again an author, as an alter ego of Gao's. As he looks back from cosmopolitan exile in the present – the book was written in the late 1990s – on his life in China, this author makes much of feeling uncomfortable, and wallows in sententiousness. The book starts with a bourgeois childhood before the Communists seized power in 1949 (when the real Gao was eight or nine), moving on to his family's and his own troubles in the unending series of political campaigns that ran through the Mao era and its aftermath. Much of it deals with the cultural revolution, with our hero as participant as well as victim in a hellish process, and with how all this made him what he is now. Between the earlier life and the recent past there is a gap where Soul Mountain might fit.
Like Gao, the central figure in One Man's Bible is an exile based in France who writes fiction and drama in his own language. He enjoys the freedom not to be caught up in politics, and wonders how he came to be what he is. Invitations to events on the international cultural circuit give us scenes in Hong Kong, Sydney, New York, Perpignan and elsewhere, all of which are much the same. None of it seems to matter very much in comparison with the seriously deranged political movements of his youth which, though hindsight tells him they were wrong, he savours the discomfort of remembering.
If Soul Mountain explored China and Chineseness, One Man's Bible is all about enjoying feeling guilty, but not too guilty. It is about not being at home anywhere, not even in your own skin, and making the best of it; about the middle-aged worry over what you were when you were younger. As the central figure looks back over his life, he tries to accept the great realisation that it hasn't meant anything. Yet for all his attempts to be sophisticated, he can't help but feel disappointed at the pointlessness of life. He has not got over the Maoist urge to preach, though it is now a different sermon.
In the past 20 years, having a hard time under the Communist party dictatorship has been the stuff of a commercially flourishing genre of autobiographical writing in English by people, especially women, who have got out. Gao is not into that sort of soppy stuff. His fiction has rather more in common with a newer popular sub-genre of Chinese fiction for foreign readers: unillusioned fucklit, by younger women writers. The China his central character has left was an awful place, but one that gave him access to plenty of women's bodies. The west has given him freedom and more women for his bed, but not happiness or meaning. It has allowed him to hold forth on life and art, even if what he has to say is banal.
As a self-conscious follower of European modernism, Gao does not give us this fictional life in a chronological sequence. He assumes that readers can find their way through the cut-up narrative of the cultural revolution, picking up references as Chinese people of his generation will be able to. Yet most foreigners will simply be confused. They are more likely to follow the novel through the unending couplings with which its subject tries to fill the voids in his past and present lives. We start with a German-Jewish woman in Hong Kong, where one of his plays is being staged. There is another in France, and others collected elsewhere on his travels, as well as the various sexual partners in his earlier life in China. But on the whole, the bodies do not seem to have brains.
The ideas in One Man's Bible are commonplace, its characters are ciphers, and it is not redeemed by wit, grace or self-mockery. Its solipsism is banal. I hope we will not have to endure a third novel in this series on the splendours and miseries of being a Nobel prize-winner.
WJF Jenner is a translator and expert on Chinese writing.
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Author: Jerry Pournelle
Book title: Birth Of Fire
Editorial Reviews
Ingram Birth Of Fire is the story of Garrett Pittston, wrongly convicted of murder. Pittston faces a choice: life in prison, or near-slavery on Mars. Under the appalling conditions imposed by those who run the mines from Earth, Pittston and his fellow workers start a revolution to wrest their freedom from the penal colony. Display advertising in science fiction publications. Previously published by Pocket Books.
Customer Reviews
Avg. Customer Review:
One of the Best Mars Colonization Novels Ever, November 7, 2001 Reviewer:
I had not read any of Jerry Pournelle's other books, when I picked this up years ago. It is an amazingly good yarn dealing with the now cliched notion of the colonization of Mars. The lead protagonist Garrett is given the option to stay in jail in overcrowded earth or get shipped out to Mars on a work detail.
He opts for the latter and gets involved in a revolution to free Mars from the oppressive multinational corporations back on earth. I read this book at least thrice! Great writing. The author moves the action at a good pace. The book felt very believable.
Good story - classic Pournelle, August 3, 2001 Reviewer:
After I read 'Janissaries' I had a 'Pournelle reading frenzy' and this is one of the novels I bought as well.
I like it, it's quite classic. Boy gets to mars 'cause he doesn't have much of a future back home. When arriving on Mars it seems he won't have much of a future there either. But the locals help him out and suddenly he finds himself caught up in a revolution… classic, not the most complex plot ever, but a good read never the less. A juvenile in the Heinlein tradition, August 30, 2000 Reviewer:
Garrett Pittson is a youth without a future in a Washington slum. After a fight between gangs he is convicted to exile and slave labour on Mars. There he is picked up by the Marsmen, emigrants and former convicts turned settlers outside the cities and mines governed by companies - and lands in the midst of a revolution in growing. Allegiance to new-won friends and love to a settler's daughter makes him join the revolution and together with the revolution the Project - using nukes to make volcanoes spew out enough water and gases to strengthen Mars atmosphere sufficiently for humans to live without space suits on Mars. Some fight scenes of the Falkenberg quality. All in all a lot like Heinlein's juveniles - in atmosphere as well as in message. solid but unexceptional Pournelle, May 24, 2000 Reviewer:
A Birth of Fire is an entertaining read with all of the Pournelle elements you would expect. The character of the young protagonist is developed nicely. The plot is solid and moves along well; helped by some interesting military tactics. The Martian setting is very well developed.
However, the book doesn't have the same spark as most other Pournelle novels. The biggest disappointment is that only the main character is developed enough to make the reader care about his fate. We never really learn enough about the thoughts and motivations of the girl who is one of the two supporting characters to become caught up in her story. The Martian colonial society also has a few small but nagging inconsistancies.
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Author: Kiran Desai
Book title: The Inheritance of Loss
This stunning second novel from Desai (Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) is set in mid-1980s India, on the cusp of the Nepalese movement for an independent state. Jemubhai Popatlal, a retired Cambridge-educated judge, lives in Kalimpong, at the foot of the Himalayas, with his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, and his cook. The makeshift family's neighbors include a coterie of Anglophiles who might be savvy readers of V.S. Naipaul but who are, perhaps, less aware of how fragile their own social standing is?at least until a surge of unrest disturbs the region. Jemubhai, with his hunting rifles and English biscuits, becomes an obvious target. Besides threatening their very lives, the revolution also stymies the fledgling romance between 16-year-old Sai and her Nepalese tutor, Gyan. The cook's son, Biju, meanwhile, lives miserably as an illegal alien in New York. All of these characters struggle with their cultural identity and the forces of modernization while trying to maintain their emotional connection to one another. In this alternately comical and contemplative novel, Desai deftly shuttles between first and third worlds, illuminating the pain of exile, the ambiguities of post-colonialism and the blinding desire for a better life, when one person's wealth means another's poverty.
***
Desai's second novel is set in the nineteen-eighties in the northeast corner of India, where the borders of several Himalayan states – Bhutan and Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet – meet. At the head of the novel's teeming cast is Jemubhai Patel, a Cambridge-educated judge who has retired from serving a country he finds "too messy for justice." He lives in an isolated house with his cook, his orphaned seventeen-year-old granddaughter, and a red setter, whose company Jemubhai prefers to that of human beings. The tranquillity of his existence is contrasted with the life of the cook's son, working in grimy Manhattan restaurants, and with his granddaughter's affair with a Nepali tutor involved in an insurgency that irrevocably alters Jemubhai's life. Briskly paced and sumptuously written, the novel ponders questions of nationhood, modernity, and class, in ways both moving and revelatory.
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- Added date: 13 November 2012
- Last checked: 23 March 2013
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Author: Stuart Woods
Book title: Fresh Disasters
With Dark Harbor, Stuart Woods proved yet again that he is the master of the popular crime novel. Now he outdoes himself with the newest addition to the series. Stone Barrington embarks on his most dangerous adventure yet when he takes on a job as a lawyer for a sleazy and clueless con man – and ends up getting embroiled in the underworld of the New York mafia. It started out as just another late night at Elaine’s, where Stone was eating a porterhouse steak and enjoying the company of his friends. But when Herbie Fisher, a notoriously not-so-sharp swindler, walked in, the pleasant atmosphere turned to ice. Herbie convinces Bill Eggers, the managing partner of Woodman Weld, to sign him on as a client – with the goal of taking down the infamous mafia boss Carmine Datilla. And even though Stone doesn’t want to have anything to do with Herbie – or the mafia, for that matter – he is soon coerced into being Herbie’s lawyer. With the help of his ex-partner, Dino, Stone investigates “Datilla the Hun,” and the rest of the mob family, encountering intrigue and danger at every turn. Will Stone finally take a stand, or will he end up at the bottom of Sheepshead Bay? With the swift action, razor-sharp characters, and crackling dialogue that are Stuart Woods’s hallmarks, Fresh Disasters is Woods at the very height of his storytelling powers.
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- Last checked: 20 March 2013
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Author: Salman Rushdie
Book title: The Satanic Verses
Publisher: Viking Books
Year: 1989
ISBN: 0670825379
No book in modern times has matched the uproar sparked by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which earned its author a death sentence. Furor aside, it is a marvelously erudite study of good and evil, a feast of language served up by a writer at the height of his powers, and a rollicking comic fable. The book begins with two Indians, Gibreel Farishta ("for fifteen years the biggest star in the history of the Indian movies") and Saladin Chamcha, a Bombay expatriate returning from his first visit to his homeland in 15 years, plummeting from the sky after the explosion of their jetliner, and proceeds through a series of metamorphoses, dreams and revelations. Rushdie's powers of invention are astonishing in this Whitbread Prize winner.
From Publishers Weekly
Banned in India before publication, this immense novel by Booker Prize-winner Rushdie ( Midnight's Children ) pits Good against Evil in a whimsical and fantastic tale. Two actors from India, "prancing" Gibreel Farishta and "buttony, pursed" Saladin Chamcha, are flying across the English Channel when the first of many implausible events occurs: the jet explodes. As the two men plummet to the earth, "like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar," they argue, sing and are transformed. When they are found on an English beach, the only survivors of the blast, Gibreel has sprouted a halo while Saladin has developed hooves, hairy legs and the beginnings of what seem like horns. What follows is a series of allegorical tales that challenges assumptions about both human and divine nature. Rushdie's fanciful language is as concentrated and overwhelming as a paisley pattern. Angels are demonic and demons are angelic as we are propelled through one illuminating episode after another. The narrative is somewhat burdened by self-consciousness that borders on preciosity, but for Rushdie fans this is a splendid feast.
Review
"A glittering novelist – one with startling imagination and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling." – V.S. Pritchett, The New Yorker
"Abundant in enchanting narratives and amazingly peopled, The Satanic Verses is both a philosophy and an Arabian nights entertainment. What wit, what real warmth in Rushdie’s thousand-eyed perceptions of the inferno within us and the vainglory of our aspirations! His ambitions are huge, and his creativity triumphantly matches them...A staggering achievement, brilliantly enjoyable." – Nadine Gordimer
"A masterpiece." – Bill Bruford, TheSunday Times
"Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Voltaire's Candide, Sterne's Tristam Shandy.... Salman Rushdie, it seems to me, is very much a latter day member of their company." – New York Times Book Review
"Further evidence of Rushdie’s stature as one of the most original, imaginative, perplexing, and important writers of our time." –Publishers Weekly
"A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles jokes… Rushdie has the power of description, and we succumb." – Victoria Glendinning, The Times
"An exhilarating… populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary contemporary novel… a roller coaster ride over a vast majority of the imagination" – Angela Carter, The Guarduan
"A truly original novel…sustained at headlong pace by the author whose powers of invention and construction, command of every variety of English and Anglo-Indian idiom, sense of desperate comedy, and within of intellectual reference have been well-exercised before, but neber on such a scale." – Hyam Maccoby, The Sunday Telegraph
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Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Book title: Jailbird
No one can make America into childlike myth like Vonnegut can. Here he takes capitalism, labor history, Sacco-Vanzetti, McCarthyism, and Watergate, and puts them all into the slender memoirs of Walter F. Starbuck - a chauffeur's son who was mentored by the scion of a great and ruthless corporation, was sent to Harvard, but was abandoned when he was caught dabbling in the 1930s left-wing; which meant that Walter had to make his own way as a WW II soldier, Washington civil servant, unintentional stoolie in a Hiss/Chambers-type case, unemployed husband (his concentration-camp-survivor wife supported them with interior decorating), and finally Nixon's token "advisor for youth affairs" and a very minor Watergate convict. So now old Walter is getting out of minimum-security prison (where he has met Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout), without a friend in the world - his wife is dead and his son is "a very unpleasant person. . . a book reviewer for The New York Times" - and with hopes of becoming a bartender somewhere in Manhattan. All this is told in Vonnegut's customary fatless, detail-rich, musical prose (with the usual ironic asides: "And on and on," "Peace," "Strong stuff"), and it's strangely touching, occasionally boldly funny. But as good as he is at building a haunted, hilariously compressed myth out of our shared past, Vonnegut can't keep it from collapsing into silliness when he tries to propel it into the future; Walter's post-prison adventures are so fairy-tale-ish and theme-heavy that they lose that precariously balanced aura of truer-than-true. Once in Manhattan, he meets the major people from his past in one coincidence after another, including his old flame and fellow left-winger Mary Kathleen O'Looney, who is now a N.Y. shopping-bag lady living beneath Grand Central Station - but is she really a bag lady? No! She's really "the legendary Mrs. Jack Graham," neverseen majority stockholder in the all-powerful RAMJAC Corporation. So Walter is suddenly made a corporate bigwig, and, when Mary Kathleen secretly dies, he illegally (but well-meaningly) keeps the company going. . . and winds up a jailbird again. Rich/poor, honest/criminal, management/labor - Vonnegut is playfully exploring the ease with which an American Everyman can alternate between these ostensible extremes. But he has covered much of that ground before - principally in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater - and he himself seems to become bored and mechanical halfway through. Not top-drawer Vonnegut, then, but guilty/innocent Walter is a fine creation, and there's enough of the author's narrative zip to keep fans happy even while the novel fizzles into foolishness. (Kirkus Reviews)
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Author: Lisa See
Book title: The Interior
The Interior, Lisa See's gripping follow-up to her best-selling novel Flower Net, follows Liu Hulan and David Stark into China 's remote countryside on a heart-pounding journey that begins as a favor to an old friend- and ends with a shocking revelation of murder, betrayal, and greed. After a hit and run accident that leaves a close friend dead, David accepts the job opportunity of a lifetime when he's asked to open a law office for Phillips, MacKenzie Stout in Hulan's home city of Beijing. Meanwhile, Hulan has received an urgent message from an old friend imploring her to investigate the suspicious death of her daughter. The scent of trouble wafts up almost immediately as David and Hulan realize their separate cases have a surprising element in common: the dead girl worked for Knight International, the toy company about to be sold to David's new biggest client, Tartan Enterprises.
In spite of David's protests, Hulan goes undercover, transforming herself from Red Princess to peasant girl, to gain entry into the Knight factory compound. Once inside, rather than finding answers to the girl's death, Hulan unearths more questions, all of which point to possible crimes committed by David's client- ranging from corruption to child labor to unsafe manufacturing practices to far worse. Suddenly Hulan and David find themselves on opposite corners: One of them is trying to expose a company and unearth a killer, while the other is ethically bound to protect his client. Their independent activities collide when a female worker, who gets seriously wounded on the factory floor where Hulan is working, later winds up dead- her body discovered close to where David is finalizing the details of the merger with Knight and Tartan executives.
As the body count rises, the "accidents" and "suicides" begin to look more and more like cold-blooded murders, with the possible suspects ranging from an old peasant farmer to a popular government official to the genius inventor behind Knight International's wildly popular action figure toys. Hulan's trip into the countryside to help piece together clues about her friend's daughter's life brings her back to the past she's long been running from- and forces her to face some ugly truths about herself. At the same time, David sees that his deep desire to overlook the truth- about Hulan's feelings concerning his move to Beijing, about his colleague's death, about his new client's activities- could possibly cost him everything, both professionally and personally.
Deftly weaving her plot from the affluent streets of Los Angeles to the teeming city of Beijing to the primitive culture of China's country villages, Lisa See reveals the striking contrast between Eastern tradition and Western beliefs, the privilege and betrayal of the ruling class, the poverty and desperation of peasant life, and the pull of professional duty and the power of "true heart love." An enthralling story that keeps you guessing until the end, The Interior takes readers deep into the heart of China to reveal universal truths about good and evil, right and wrong- and the sometimes subtle lines that distinguish them.
***
"Lisa See is one of the classier practitioners of that ready-for-Hollywood genre, the international thrillerÖ She draws her characters (especially her Chinese heroine, Liu Hulan) with convincing depth, and offers up documentary social detail that reeks of freshly raked muckÖ Seeís China is as vivid as Upton Sinclairís Chicago." The New York Times
"[Seeís] true ambition is not simply to entertain (which she does) but to illuminate the exotic society that is contemporary China, and to explore the consequences ‚ present and future ‚ of its growing partnership with the United StatesÖ See paints a fascinating portrait of a complex and enigmatic society, in which nothing is ever quite as it appears, and of the people, peasant and aristocrat alike, who are bound by its subtle strictures." The San Diego Union Tribune
"SophisticatedÖ.Seeís writing is more graceful than is common in the genre, and she still has China passionately observed." The Los Angeles Times
"The Interior is packed with well-researched and nuanced reporting on todayís ChinaÖHulan is an insightful guide to both Chinese corruption and those who resist it." Washington Post
"Immediate, haunting and exquisitely rendered, a fine line drawing of the sights and smells of the road overseas." San Francisco Chronicle
"[An] unflinching portrait [of] modern-day China." Booklist
"The novel eschews any cheap exoticism to plunge the reader into the puzzle that is China today as seen through the eyes of outsiders. A unique read, whose credible protagonists make this a thriller with a heart." The Saturday Review
"A cracking good story." The Good Book Guide
"The strength of Seeís work here is her detailed and intimate knowledge of contemporary China, its mores, its peculiar mixture of the traditional and the contemporary, and its often bedeviled relationships with the U.S. " Publishers Weekly
"A must-read for those looking for foreign intrigue." Rocky Mountain News
"A well-written book with a complex plotÖShines a harsh and revealing light on the modern-day Chinese interior and on Beijing, the real China beneath the postcard imagesÖShe explores themes of Old China and new China, and how the more things change the more they remain the same. She illuminates tradition and change, Western and Eastern cultural differences, and the real politics behind the system. All this in the middle of her thriller which is also about greed, corruption, abuse of the disadvantaged, the desperation of those on the bottom of the food chain, and love." Nashville Tennessean
"A unique readÖa thriller with a heart." The Guardian
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Author: Martin Smith
Book title: Wolves Eat Dogs
Amazon.com Review
"Why would anyone jump out a window with a saltshaker?" A good question, especially when the suicide victim is Pasha Ivanov, a Moscow physicist-turned-billionaire businessman-a "New Russian" poster boy, if ever there was one-with several homes, a leggy 20-year-old girlfriend ("the kind [of blonde] who could summon the attention of a breeze"), and every reason to be contented in his middle age. So, wonders Senior Investigator Arkady Renko, in Martin Cruz Smith's Wolves Eat Dogs, what provoked Ivanov to take a header from his stylish 10th-floor apartment? And how does it relate to the shaker clutched in his dead hand or the hillock of table salt found on his closet floor?
Renko, introduced in Smith's 1981 bestseller, Gorky Park, is a cop well out of sync with rapidly changing Russian society, "a difficult investigator, a holdover from the Soviet era, a man on the skids" whose determination to do more than go through the motions of criminal inquiries inevitably exasperates his superiors. Thus, when this saturnine detective declines to accept the verdict that Ivanov did himself in-who peppered that salt around the capitalist's premises, Renko still wants to know, and what about rumors of a security breach at Ivanov's apartment building?-he is exiled to the Ukrainian Zone of Exclusion, the "radioactive wasteland" surrounding Chernobyl, site of a notorious 1986 nuclear disaster and the place where, only a week after Ivanov's demise, his company's senior vice-president is found with his throat slit. There, among cynical scientists, entrepreneurial scavengers, and predators both two- and four-legged-an exclusive coterie of the rejected-Renko chews over the crimes on his plate. Unfortunately, the dosimeter that warns him of radiation exposure at Chernobyl does not also protect him from a pair of malevolent brothers, or a "damaged" woman doctor offering him mutually assured disappointment.
Smith has a keen eye for the comical quirks of modern-day Russia -its chaotic roadways, voracious appetite for post-communist luxuries, and evolving ethics ("Russians used to kill for women or power, real reasons. Now they kill for money"). And this story's bleakly beautiful Ukrainian backdrop nicely complements the desperate hope of Renko's task. Still, the greatest strength of Wolves Eat Dogs (Smith's fifth series installment, after Havana Bay) is its characters, especially Arkady Renko, who despite his lugubrious nature continues to show a heart as expansive and unfathomable as the Siberia steppe.
From Publishers Weekly
Smith's melancholy, indefatigable Senior Investigator Arkady Renko has been exiled to some bitter venues in the past-including blistering-hot Cuba in Havana Bay and the icy Bering sea in Polar Star-but surely the strangest (and most fascinating) is his latest, the eerie, radioactive landscape of post-meltdown Chernobyl. Renko is called in to investigate the 10-story, plunge-to-the-pavement death of Pasha Ivanov, fabulously wealthy president of Moscow 's NoviRus corporation, whose death is declared a suicide by Renko's boss, Prosecutor Zurin. Renko, being Renko, isn't sure it's suicide and wonders about little details like the bloody handprints on the windowsill and the curious matter of the closet filled with 50 kilos of salt. And why is NoviRus's senior vice-president Lev Timofeyev's nose bleeding? Renko asks too many questions, so an annoyed Zurin sends him off to Chernobyl to investigate when Timofeyev turns up in the cemetery in a small Ukrainian town with his throat slit and his face chewed on by wolves. The cemetery lies within the dangerously radioactive 30-kilometer circle called the Zone of Exclusion, populated by a contingent of scientists, a detachment of soldiers and those-the elderly, the crooks, the demented-who have sneaked back to live in abandoned houses and apartments. The secret of Ivanov and Timofeyev's deaths lies somewhere in the Zone, and the dogged Renko, surrounded by wolves both animal and human, refuses to leave until he unravels the mystery. It's the Zone itself and the story of Chernobyl that supplies the riveting backbone of this novel. Renko races around the countryside on his Uralmoto motorcycle, listening always to the ominous ticking of his dosimeter as it counts the dangerous levels of radioactivity present in the food, the soil, the air and the people themselves as they lie, cheat, love, steal, kill and die.
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Author: John Grisham
Book title: A Painted House
Publisher: Dell Publishing Company, Incorporated
Year: 2001
ISBN: 044023722X
The hill people and the Mexicans arrived on the same day. It was a Wednesday, early in September 1952. The Cardinals were five games behind the Dodgers with three weeks to go, and the season looked hopeless. The cotton, however, was waist-high to my father, over my head, and he and my grandfather could be heard before supper whispering words that were seldom heard. It could be a “good crop.”
Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy named Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that’s never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truckload of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it.
For six weeks they pick cotton, battling the heat, the rain, the fatigue, and, sometimes, each other. As the weeks pass Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old could possibly be prepared for, and finds himself keeping secrets that not only threaten the crop but will change the lives of the Chandlers forever.
“A Painted House” is a moving story of one boy’s journey from innocence to experience.
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Author: Steve Martin
Book title: The Pleasure of My Company
In a recent interview with Steve Martin on NPR's Fresh Air, host Terri Gross asked her guest: "Do you remember the point in your career, when people started to realize that you are smart?" The host was referring, of course, to Martin's zany comedic roles that qualify him as a loveable nut. After all, it is tough to equate "King Tut" from Saturday Night Live, as an author of fairly serious repute. Martin, in reality, is an immensely talented writer; his "Shouts and Murmurs" and other brief pieces in the New Yorker were enjoyable and set his writing reputation even before his first novella, Shopgirl was released. His latest, another slim volume, The Pleasure of my Company, emphasizes Martin's status as a promising and talented writer.
Martin's protagonist is a thirty-something single guy, Daniel Pecan Cambridge, whose life is constrained by his obsessive-compulsive behavior. Daniel informs us that his middle name originates from the pecan plantation his "granny" owns in Southern Texas, but we realize it is a fitting name for a "nut." Daniel is a cute one though, even despite his many quirks. His biggest obstacle, one that prevents him from venturing out on long walks anywhere, is his fear of curbs. To avoid them, he searches for opposing "scooped out driveways" in his California town, and draws mental maps that will take him successfully to his favorite hideout-the local Rite Aid. The Rite Aid with its clean lines and atmosphere is like heaven to Daniel and he never tires of walking the aisles, checking out supplies and the cute pharmacist, Zandy. "The Rite Aid is splendidly antiseptic," explains Daniel, "I'll bet the floors are hosed down every night with isopropyl alcohol. The Rite Aid is the axle around which my squeaky world turns, and I find myself there two or three days a week seeking out the rare household item such as cheesecloth." Among Daniel's other obsessions are ensuring that the total wattage of all the bulbs in a house equal 1125 and periodically having to touch all four corners of copiers at the local Kinko's.
No wonder then that Daniel finds his love life a bit constrained. He keeps himself happy by eyeing Elizabeth, the real-estate agent who often works across the street, by mixing drinks for his upstairs neighbor, Phillipa, and with his weekly visits by his caseworker, Clarissa. Of course, there is Zandy at Rite Aid. All along, Daniel supports himself on generous gift checks sent him by his grandmother in Texas.
Daniel is anything but an average guy but amazingly he wins the "Average American" contest sponsored by a frozen pie company. Daniel is such pleasant company, because for the most part, his outlook on life is always sunny and bright. For a brief moment, when he meets the other finalists of the essay competition, he is sad. "We weren't the elite of anything," he notes, "we weren't the handsome ones with self-portraits hanging over their fireplaces or the swish moderns who were out speaking slang at a posh hotel bar. We were all lonely hearts who deemed that writing our essays might help us get a little attention." However, this sinking feeling is only temporary and Daniel reminds himself that he only wrote the essay at the Rite Aid to have a "few extra Zandy-filled minutes."
It is hard not to make comparisons between Daniel and the autistic protagonist Christopher of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Like Christopher, Daniel has some curious insights about the world around him and these casual observations woven into the text make for delightful reading. Referring to his caseworker, Clarissa, Daniel observes: "She's probably reporting on me to a professor or writing about me in a journal. I like to think of her scrawling my name in pencil at the end of our sessions-I mean visits-but really, I'm probably a keyboard macro by now. She types D and hits control/spacebar and Daniel Pecan Cambridge appears. When she looks at me in the face on Tuesdays and Fridays she probably thinks of me not as Daniel Pecan Cambridge but as D-control/spacebar."
Towards the end of The Pleasure of my Company, the story moves along quickly. Daniel becomes involved with Clarissa in a way and they travel to Texas, both for their individual private reasons. By novel's end, Daniel has conquered his fear of curbs and Clarissa has accommodated his obsession with bulb wattage.
The Pleasure of My Company is a delightful novel as warm as the California sun. Martin has managed to capture in Daniel, the essence of a likeable zany man. Daniel's eventual success at having a happy life despite his many handicaps, is uplifting because it reminds us that life is not all bad all the time. It is always fun to root for the underdog and have him win. It might take some doing but Martin shows us that there are indeed "takers for the quiet heart."
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Author: Wilbur Smith
Book title: Assegai
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Year: 2009
ISBN: 0-312-56724-3
In 1913 Leon Courtney, an ex-soldier turned professional hunter in British East Africa, guides rich and powerful men from America and Europe on big game safaris in the territories of the Masai tribe. Leon has developed a special relationship with the Masai.
One of Leon's clients is Count Otto Von Meerbach, a German industrialist whose company builds aircraft and vehicles for the Kaiser's burgeoning army. Leon is recruited by his uncle Penrod Ballantyne (from The Triumph of the Sun) who is commander of the British forces in East Africa to gather information from Von Meerbach. Instead Leon falls desperately in love with Von Meerbach's beautiful and enigmatic mistress, Eva Von Wellberg.
Just prior to the outbreak of World War I Leon stumbles on a plot by Count Von Meerbach to raise a rebellion against Britain on the side of Germany amongst the disenchanted survivors of the Boer War in South Africa. He finds himself left alone to frustrate Von Meerbach's design. Then Eva Von Wellberg returns to Africa with her master and Leon finds out who and what she really is behind the mask...
Assegai is the latest of the Courtney novels.
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Author: David Mitchell
Book title: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
The author of Cloud Atlas's most ambitious novel yet, for the readers of Ishiguro, Murakami, and, of course, David Mitchell.
The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the "high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island" that is the Japanese Empire's single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob's intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island's powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit. Magnificently written, a superb mix of historical research and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a big and unforgettable book that will be read for years to come.
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Author: Annie Wang
Book title: The People’s Republic of Desire
Those who know little to nothing about Chinese culture will receive an eye-opening experience of how China was and how China is now through Annie Wang’s novel The People’s Republic of Desire.
Wang takes readers on a journey with four cosmopolitan women learning to live life in the new China. Niuniu, the book’s narrator, is a Chinese American woman, who spent seven years living in the States obtaining her degree in journalism. In the book, Niuniu is now considered a “returnee” when she goes back to China to get over a broken heart. What she meets upon return to her homeland is not the traditional Confucian values she left, but a new modern China where Western culture seems to have taken over – to an extreme.
Niuniu, the narrator of the book, is called a “Jia Yangguiz” which means a “fake foreign devil” because of her Westernized values. Her friend Beibei is the owner of her own entertainment company and is married to a man who cheats, so Beibei deals with his infidelity by finding her own young lovers. Lulu is a fashion magazine editor who has been having a long-term affair with a married man, and thinks nothing of having several abortions to show her devotion to him. CC, also a returnee, struggles with her identity between Chinese and English.
In The People’s Republic of Desire the days of the 1989 idealism and the Tiananamen Sqaure protests seem forgotten to this new world when making a fast yuan, looking younger, more beautiful, and acting important seems to be of the most concern to this generation.
Wang uses these four woman to make humorous and sometimes sarcastic observations of the new China and accurately describes how Western culture has not only infiltrated China, but is taken to the extreme by those who have experienced a world outside the Confucian values. What was once a China consumed with political passions, nepotism, unspoken occurrences, and taboos is now a world filled with all those things once discouraged – sex, divorce, pornography, and desire for material goods. It’s taken the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” to an all-time high.
Wang offers a glimpse of modern day Beijing and what it would take for any woman – returnee or otherwise – to move forward and conquer dilemmas in the fast-moving Chinese culture. The characters joke that “nowadays, the world is for bad girls” and all the values of their youth have been lost to this new modern generation of faking their identity, origin, and accent. It seems that such a cultural shock would be displeasing to those who knew the old China, but instead these young women seem to be enjoying the newfound liberties.
If you’re looking for a quick read with a plot, you won’t find it in The People’s Republic of Desire. Each of the 101 chapters read like individual short stories, separate stories about friends, family, and other individuals who Niuniu is acquainted with or meets and through which Wang weaves a humorous and often sarcastic trip into Beijing, China.
The book is filled with topics of family, friends, Internet dating, infidelity, rich, poor, and many of the same ideals most cultures worry themselves about. Many of the chapters end with popular phrases that give the reader an insight into Chinese culture and language. Wang does seem to use Niuniu’s journalistic background to intertwine the other characters and come to a somewhat significant conclusion.
As the press release states, “Wang paints an arresting portrait of a generation suffocating in desire. For love. For success. For security. For self actualization. And for the most elusive aspiration of all: happiness.”
With The People’s Republic of Desire, Wang does just that. She speaks not only of the new culture but also of the old ways and how China used to be. She may have educated readers about the new China with her knowledge of the Western and Chinese culture, but also Wang hits the nail on the head when it comes to showing most people’s needs. After all, aren’t most human beings striving for many of these same elusive dreams?
Joanne D. Kiggins
***
From Publishers Weekly
As Wang reveals in intimate detail, today's affluent Beijing women – educated, ambitious, coddled only children enamored of all things Western – are a generation unto themselves. The hyperobservant narrator of this fascinating novel (after Lili: A Novel of Tiananmen) is 20-something Niuniu, a journalist who was born in the United States but grew up in China and returned to America for college and graduate school. Now she's back in Beijing nursing a broken heart and discovering "what it means to be Chinese" in a money- and status-obsessed city altered by economic and sexual liberalization. Supporting Niuniu – and downing a few drinks with her – are her best buddies: entrepreneurial entertainment agent Beibei, sexy fashion mag editor Lulu and Oxford-educated CC. Sounds like the cast of Sex in the Forbidden City, but the thick cultural descriptions distinguish the novel from commercial women's fiction. A nonnative English speaker, Wang observes gender politics among the nouveau riche in careful, reportorial prose. Though Niuniu's romantic backstory forms a tenuous thread between the chapters, and the novel – based on Wang's newspaper column of the same title – doesn't finally hold together, this is a trenchant, readable account of a society in flux.
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Author: Tatsuhiko Takimoto
Book title: Welcome to the NHK!
Publisher: TokyoPop
Year: 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4278-0256-9
The novel that inspired the manga and anime!
Twenty-two-year-old Satou, a college dropout and aficionado of anime porn, knows a little secret — or at least he thinks he does! Believe it or not, he has stumbled upon an incredible conspiracy created by the Japanese Broadcasting Company, N.H.K. But despite fighting the good fight, Satou has become an unemployed hikikomori — a shut-in who has withdrawn from the world…
One day, he meets Misaki, a mysterious young girl who invites him to join her special “project.” Slowly, Satou comes out of his reclusive shell, and his hilarious journey begins, filled with mistaken identity, Lolita complexes — and an ultimate quest to create the greatest hentai game ever!
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Author: David Liss
Book title: A Spectacle Of Corruption
Publisher's Weekly
This sequel to Liss's Edgar Award-winning A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) brings back ex-pugilist Benjamin Weaver and his 18th-century London environs in all their squalid glory. Benjamin has become a "thieftaker," a sort of bounty hunter/private eye, and is investigating the simple case of a threatening letter when he is caught up in a riot, accused of murder and sentenced to hang. After a gutsy escape, he sets about unraveling the mystery of who framed him and why. Donning the disguise of a wealthy coffee planter from Jamaica, Benjamin infiltrates the upper classes, where he encounters a plot centering on a hotly contested House of Commons election. There is much explanation (perhaps too much) of the history and philosophies of the Whig, Tory and Jacobite parties, but this is nicely balanced with Benjamin's forays into London's underbelly, where he has his way with the ladies and dodges dangerous louts looking to kill him. The real fun is the re-creation of the streets of London ("He fell into the alley's filth-the kennel of emptied chamber pots, bits of dead dogs gnawed on by hungry rats, apple cores and oyster shells") and the colorful denizens thereof. Many hours are spent in innumerable coffeehouses, with Benjamin and company imbibing coffee, chocolate, ale, wine and that great destroyer of the poor, rotgut gin, and employing such useful swear words as "shitten stick," "arse pot" and "bum firking." Mystery and mainstream readers with a taste for gritty historical fiction will relish Liss's glorious dialogue, lively rogues, fascinating setting and indomitable hero. (Mar.) Forecast: The many readers who loved Liss's first book have been eagerly awaiting a sequel. Booksellers can recommend both of the Benjamin Weaver books to those who enjoy Bruce Alexander's Sir John Fielding mystery series. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Having survived the dangerous intrigues and nefarious plots surrounding his father's death and the business of the South Sea Company (A Conspiracy of Paper), Benjamin Weaver, former pugilist and thief taker extraordinaire, is once again plunged into the world of electioneering and political corruption in Georgian London. This time, he seeks to clear his name and save his own life after being wrongly accused of killing a dock worker. Forced to assume the disguise of a Jamaican tobacco plantation owner, he moves from the drawing rooms of Westminster to the hovels of Wapping in search of the true murderer, uncovering corruption at all levels, from perjured witnesses to bribed judges to treasonous Jacobites. While it does not resonate as richly as A Conspiracy of Paper, this novel will still delight readers with its picture of a London familiar to fans of Boswell and Defoe. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/03.]-Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
With eloquent wit, Liss manipulates the concepts of misdirection and probability theory in his serpentine third novel (after The Coffee Trader, 2003). Once again, we meet the unconventional protagonist of the author's Edgar-winning debut A Conspiracy of Paper (2000). "Thief-taker," retired prizefighter, and Jew Benjamin Weaver, as resourceful a former rogue as ever, is in peril again-falsely convicted and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dockworker and labor leader whom he barely knew. The year is 1722, and London is abuzz over England's first General Election, vigorously contested by conservative Tories who support Hanoverian King George I and antiroyalist Whigs, who may or may not be in league with Jacobites plotting the restoration of deposed "Pretender" James II of Scotland. Weaver escapes from Newgate Prison (in a marvelously detailed sequence), and, while laboring to clear his name, assumes multiple disguises and forms affiliations with several members of London's political, ecclesiastical, and criminal elites. These include the woman he loves unrequitedly, his cousin's widow Miriam, and her husband, Whig Parliamentary candidate Griffin Melbury; duplicitous parish priest Christopher Ufford (in whose service suspicion for murder had fallen on Weaver); brutal tobacco merchant Dennis Dogsmill and his fetching sister Grace, and numerous other power brokers and ruffians whose allegiances and very identities are seldom what they seem. The dazzling plot, which grows steadily more intricate and circuitous, turns on the allegation that "there [is] a Tory spy among the Whigs," and the likelihood that Weaver's victimization is connected to the election that the charismatic Melburyblithely characterizes as "a spectacle of corruption." Liss's impressive research provides a wealth of information about 18th-century politics, emergent labor organizations, and gradations of etiquette and malfeasance among contrasting social levels. And Weaver's somber, wry, knowing narrator's voice is a deadpan delight. Furthermore, it all ends with yet another twist that seems to promise we'll hear more from-and of-the indefatigable Benjamin Weaver. Let's hope so.
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Author: Mark Twain
Book title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Publisher: The American Publishing Company
Year: 1884
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in the antebellum South. The story is set in the town of "St Petersburg", inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up.
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Author: Mary Russel
Book title: Dreamers of the Day
Publisher: Random House
Year: 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58836-675-7
“I suppose I ought to warn you at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: My little story has become your history. You won't really understand your times until you understand mine.”
So begins the account of Agnes Shanklin, the charmingly diffident narrator of Mary Doria Russell's compelling new novel, Dreamers of the Day. And what is Miss Shanklin's “little story?” Nothing less than the creation of the modern Middle East at the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, where Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell met to decide the fate of the Arab world - and of our own.
A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic, Agnes has come into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel just as the Peace Conference convenes, Agnes, with her plainspoken American opinions - and a small, noisy dachshund named Rosie - enters into the company of the historic luminaries who will, in the space of a few days at a hotel in Cairo, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan.
Neither a pawn nor a participant at the conference, Agnes is ostensibly insignificant, and that makes her a welcome sounding board for Churchill, Lawrence, and Bell. It also makes her unexpectedly attractive to the charismatic German spy Karl Weilbacher. As Agnes observes the tumultuous inner workings of nation-building, she is drawn more and more deeply into geopolitical intrigue and toward a personal awakening.
With prose as graceful and effortless as a seductive float down the Nile, Mary Doria Russell illuminates the long, rich history of the Middle East with a story that brilliantly elucidates today's headlines. As enlightening as it is entertaining, Dreamers of the Day is a memorable, passionate, gorgeously written novel.
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Author: Sara Paretsky
Book title: Fire Sale
The astonishing new V. I. Warshawski novel from one of America 's foremost writers of crime fiction.
V.I. Warshawski may have left her old South Chicago neighborhood, but she learns that she cannot escape it. When V.I. takes over coaching duties of the girls' basketball team at her former high school, she faces an ill-equipped, ragtag group of gangbangers, fundamentalists, and teenage moms who inevitably draw the detective into their family woes.
Through young Josie Dorrado, V.I. meets the girl's mother, who voices her worries about sabotage in the little flag manufacturing plant where she works. The biggest employer on the South Side, discount-store behemoth By-Smart, pays even less, and Ms. Dorrado doesn't know how she'll support her four children if the flag plant shuts down.
The elder Dorrado's fears are realized when the plant explodes; V.I. is injured and the owner is killed. As V.I. begins to investigate, she finds herself onfronting the Bysen family, who own the By-Smart company. Founder William "Buffalo Bill" Bysen, now in his eighties, has four sons who quarrel with each other and with him; the oldest, "Young Mr. William," is close to sixty and furious that his father doesn't cede more power to him. And then there's "Billy the Kid," Young Mr. William's nineteen-year-old son, whose Christian idealism puts him on a collision course with his father, his grandfather, and the company as a whole.
When Billy runs away with Josie Dorrado, V.I. is squeezed between the needs of two very different families. As she tries to find the errant teenagers, and to track down a particularly cruel murderer, her own life is almost forfeit in the swamps that lie under the city of Chicago.
- Size: 836,53 Kb
- Location: direct link
- Filetype: Docs
- Added date: 14 November 2012
- Last checked: 8 May 2013
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Author: Mark Twain
Book title: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Publisher: The American Publishing Company
Year: 1884
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in the antebellum South. The story is set in the town of "St Petersburg", inspired by Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up.
- Size: 637,71 Kb
- Location: direct link
- Filetype: Docs
- Added date: 14 November 2012
- Last checked: 17 April 2013
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