Displaying the top 100 results that match your query. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/rssapi.jsp?browse=true&N=7520+7240 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1511975 The son of an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1551759 The sequel to Hilary Mantels 2009 Man Booker Prize winner and New York Times bestseller, Wolf Hall delves into the heart of Tudor history with the downfall of Anne Boleyn Though he battled for seven years to marry her, Henry is disenchanted with Anne Boleyn. She has failed to give him a son and her sharp intelligence and audacious will alienate his old friends and the noble families of England. When the discarded Katherine dies in exile from the court, Anne stands starkly exposed, the focus of gossip and malice. At a word from Henry, Thomas Cromwell is ready to bring her down. Over three terrifying weeks, Anne is ensnared in a web of conspiracy, while the demure Jane Seymour stands waiting her turn for the poisoned wedding ring. But Anne and her powerful family will not yield without a ferocious struggle. Hilary Mantels Bring Up the Bodies follows the dramatic trial of the queen and her suitors for adultery and treason. To defeat the Boleyns, Cromwell must ally with his natural enemies, the papist aristocracy. What price will he pay for Annes head?-- http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1390991 Follows a middle-aged man as he reflects on a past he thought was behind him, until he is presented with a legacy that forces him to reconsider different decisions, and to revise his place in the world. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1302341 Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1170825 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=1252022 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=991271 At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesnt always recognize the changes in those around her. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=725001 Living with an old-world mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and believes that a long-standing family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=615819 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=672396 Integrating both Maori myth and New Zealand reality, The Bone People became the most successful novel in New Zealand publishing history when it appeared in 1984. Set on the South Island beaches of New Zealand, a harsh environment, the novel chronicles the complicated relationships between three emotional outcasts of mixed European and Maori heritage. Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a loner, convinced that to care for anything is to invite disaster. Her isolation is disrupted one day when a six-year-old mute boy, Simon, breaks into her house. The sole survivor of a mysterious shipwreck, Simon has been adopted by a widower Maori factory worker, Joe Gillayley, who is both tender and horribly brutal toward the boy. Through shifting points of view, the novel reveals each characters thoughts and feelings as they struggle with the desire to connect and the fear of attachment.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=767103 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=671613 India, 1857 - the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrells The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years. Farrells story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion - at once brutal, blundering, and wistful - is soon revealed. The Siege of Krishnapur is a companion to Troubles, about the Easter 1916 rebellion in Ireland, and The Singapore Grip, which takes place just before World War II, as the sun begins to set upon the British Empire. Together these three novels offer a picture of the follies of empire.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=542252 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=479822 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=417840 In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls school in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callies failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutation - and a guilty secret - that have followed Callies grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the familys second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the genes epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=315177 It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdiniesque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyns own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=331920 True History of Kelly Gang is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in a voice at once crude and delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching. Carey gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and, finally, as his countrys beloved Robin Hood. In 1878 Francis Harty, a poor farmer, said, Ned Kelly is the best bloody man that has ever been in Benalla, I would fight up to my knees in blood for him - I have known him for years, I would take his word sooner than another mans oath. By the time of his hanging in 1880 a whole country would seem to agree - and it is a measure of Peter Careys achievement that he has not only made art from his countrys great story but that he persuades us all to understand the true measure of that best bloody man.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=325766 The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sisters death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental. But just as the reader expects to settle into Lauras story, Atwood introduces a novel-within-a-novel. Entitled The Blind Assassin, it is a science fiction story told by two unnamed lovers who meet in dingy backstreet rooms. When we return to Iris, it is through a 1947 newspaper article announcing the discovery of a sailboat carrying the dead body of her husband, a distinguished industrialist.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=158710 On a chilly February day, two old friends meet in the throng outside a crematorium to pay their last respects to Molly Lane. Both Clive Linley and Vernon Halliday had been Mollys lovers in the days before they reached their current eminence. Clive is Britains most successful modern composer; Vernon is editor of the quality broadsheet The Judge. Gorgeous, feisty Molly had had other lovers, too, notably Julian Garmony, foreign secretary, a notorious right-winger tipped to be the next prime minister. In the days that follow Mollys funeral, Clive and Vernon will make a pact with consequences neither has foreseen. Each will make a disastrous moral decision, their friendship will be tested to its limits, and Julian Garmony will be fighting for his political life. And why Amsterdam? What happens there to Clive and Vernon is the most delicious climax of a novel brimming with surprises.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=291208 Traveling from India to New England and back again, the stories in this debut collection unerringly chart the emotional journeys of characters seeking love beyond the barriers of nations and generations. Imbued with the sensual details of Indian culture, they also speak with universal eloquence to everyone who has ever felt like a foreigner. Like the interpreter of the title story - Lahiri translates between the strict traditions of her ancestors and the baffling New World.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=133840 In The Hours, Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters who are struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The novel opens with an evocation of Woolfs last days before her suicide in 1941, and moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family. Clarissa Vaughan is a book editor who lives in present-day Greenwich Village; when we meet her, she is buying flowers to display at a party for her friend Richard, an ailing poet who has just won a major literary prize. Laura Brown is a housewife in postwar California who is bringing up her only son and looking for her true life outside of her stifling marriage. With rare ease and assurance, Cunningham makes the two womens lives converge with Virginia Woolfs in an unexpected and heart-breaking way during the party for Richard.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=137898 The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologists moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=179430 Graham Swifts first novel since the highly acclaimed Ever After is a subtle yet deeply felt exploration of the ways in which friendship and love are shaped by the past and by fate. At its center is a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. Now, the death of one of them, and the survivors task of driving their friends ashes from London to the seaside town where theyll be scattered, compels them to take stock. Through conversation and memory they trace the paths they have followed by choice and by accident: through war and its aftermath, through the dramas of their family lives and of their shifting relationships with one another. In brilliantly realized, richly humorous voices, Swift has created a narrative language that perfectly expresses not only the comforts of old habits and friendships but the profound emotional revelations this brief but far-reaching journey will bring them.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=175914 The author of The Stananic Verses creates a fascinating family saga about the birth and maturity of a land and its people--a brilliant incarnation of the human comedy. Rushdie has achieved a magnificent and unique work of fiction.--The Philadelphia Inquirer. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=162812 Central to this novel are two men divided by class and experience, but sharing a mutual respect and empathy. One is Lieutenant Billy Prior, cured of shell shock by famed psychologist Dr. William Rivers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, and determined to return to the front in France even as the war enters its final ferocious phase in the late summer of 1918. The other is Dr. Rivers himself, consumed by the medical challenge and moral dilemma of restoring men to health so that they can be sent back to the battlefields and almost certain death. Billy Prior is a working-class man on the rise, a temporary gentleman, who inhabits a sexual, social, and moral no-mans-land. His sexual encounters with both women and men are tinged with a cynical fatalism that the war has engendered. Still, he is eager to join a fellow Craiglockhart graduate, the poet Wilfred Owen, in France in time to participate in the great English offensive, the one last push intended to redeem all the shining heroism and senseless slaughter that has gone before.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=115278 Frank Bascombe is no longer a sportswriter, yet hes still living in Haddam, New Jersey, where he now sells real estate. Hes still divorced, though his ex-wife, to his dismay, has remarried and moved, along with their two children, to Connecticut. (He bought her old house and made it his home.) In the midst of his so-called Existence Period, Frank is happy enough in his peculiar way, more or less sheltered from fresh pain and searing regret. And he has high hopes for this 4th of July weekend (while the nation lurches toward another election, Bush vs. Dukakis, in uncertain prosperity). As a realtor hes seeking a house and a lifes accommodation for deeply hapless clients relocating from Vermont; in his free time he takes pride in managing his entrepreneurial, and civic, sidelines. Then he will travel to the Jersey Shore, where his girlfriend and delight awaits him. Finally, up the Northeast Corridor, to Connecticut, there to pick up his larcenous and emotionally troubled teenage son, and together they will visit as many sports halls of fame as they can in two days. But Franks Independence Day turns out not as hed planned. This decent, appealingly bewildered, profoundly observant man is wrenched, gradually and inevitably, out of his private refuge. And in this embattled ascent Richard Ford captures the mystery of life - in all its conflicted glory - with grand humor, intense compassion and transfixing power.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=224860 The Stone Diaries is one ordinary womans story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling misconnections she discovers between. Daisys struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=213873 It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves George Best, Geronimo, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He hates zoos, kissing, and the boys from the Corporation houses. He cant stand his little brother Sinbad. He wants to be a missionary like Father Damien, and he coerces the McCarthy twins and Willy Hancock into playing lepers. He never picks the scabs off his knees before theyre ready. Kevin is his best friend. Their names are all over Barrytown, written with sticks in wet cement. They play football, knickknack, jumping to the bottom of the sea. They shoplift. Robbing Football Monthly means four million years in purgatory. But a good confession before you died and youd go straight to heaven. Paddy wants to know why no one jumped in for him when Charles Leavy had been going to kill him. He wants to stop his da arguing with his ma. Hes confused: he sees everything, but he understands less and less.--BOOK JACKET. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=28856 Butlers acclaimed first novel, The Alleys of Eden, is one of the finest books ever written about the tragic American experience in Vietnam. Now, in his first book of short fiction, Butler offers a compelling chorus of voices that together depict the experiences of the many Vietnamese expatriates living in America. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=24561 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=29559 Winner of Englands Booker Prize, a coast-to-coast bestseller, and the literary sensation of the year, Possession is a novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and a triumphant love story. Revolving around a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets, Byatt creates a haunting counterpoint of passion and ideas. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=187286 A compelling portrait of the perfect English butler, who, at the end of his career in postwar England, reviews his life and secretly questions the greatness of the nobleman he served. This Booker Prize-winning novel is now a Merchant-Ivory film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=38320 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=57636 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=100022 http://www.phoenixpubliclibrary.org/record.jsp?R=223274