Showing titles in City Life

Set in one year, Three Rooms follows a young woman as she moves from a rented room at Oxford, where she’s working as a research assistant; to a stranger’s sofa, all she can afford as a copyediting temp at a society magazine; to her childhood home, where she’s been forced to return, jobless, even a room of her own out of reach. As politics shift to nationalism, the streets fill with protestors, and news drip-feeds into her phone, she struggles to live a meaningful life on her own terms, unsure if she’ll ever be able to afford to do so.

The narrator of Rob Doyle's Threshold has spent the last two decades traveling, writing, and imbibing drugs and literature in equal measure, funded by brief periods of employment or "on the dole" in Dublin. Now, stranded between reckless youth and middle age, his travels to far-flung places have acquired a de facto purpose: to aid the contemporary artist's search for universal truth.

"Llamadas de Ámsterdam" es una extraordinaria historia de amor. Con una impecable tensión narrativa, Juan Villoro despliega una trama hecha de coincidencias, separaciones, misteriosas oportunidades de reencuentro. La acción ocurre en una calle circular, tratada sobre la pista donde una vez corrieron caballos de carreras. Ahí, dos amantes apuestan su "resto" en busca de una última recompensa.

After young Jieun accidentally misuses her powers, causing her beloved family to vanish, she lives a million restless lives in search of them. Overnight, in the village of Marigold on top of a hill, she conjures up her Mind Laundry, where she cleanses painful experiences, transferring them into stains on a T-shirt and turning them into dazzling red petals. We meet five souls: a frustrated young filmmaker; a tortured social-media influencer; a distraught mother who has discovered her husband’s other family; a young woman two-timed by her lover; a talented photographer and victim of bullying.

Kingsley Lynch fell to her death from a seven-story, downtown rooftop garden. Was it an accident, suicide, or was she pushed? The two detectives assigned to the case decided she jumped. Her husband, an influential city councilor disagrees, and six weeks later Kate Gazzara is assigned to reinvestigate.

Bridget Steele’s father taught her two things: how to build and how to fight. With those skills, she created her own company and began building for New York City’s elite. Often the only woman in the room, she’s faced sexism, corruption, and harassment, but armed with her designer hard hat and steel-toed stilettos, she’s up for any challenge. Bridget figured out quickly she had to be 10 times better just to be considered equal.

*Formerly: The Need To Have Him A scandalous game... A stranger in her apartment... An intruder with an agenda... A game gone wrong? Maybe! “Don’t move,” were the words that will forever echo in her mind. In one second, Joi’s world changed. He stood behind her, hands over her mouth. And her life would never be the same. Joi thought it was a game. But it wasn’t! After that night, Dominic tried to move on. He tried to get past the guilt he feels. A game played through a social media app, has him wondering about the woman at the root of it all. Her teasing and taunting of men, that ...

When Another Country appeared in 1962, it caused a literary sensation. James Baldwin's masterly story of desire, hatred and violence opens with the unforgettable character of Rufus Scott, a scavenging Harlem jazz musician adrift in New York. Self-destructive, bad and brilliant, he draws us into a Bohemian underworld pulsing with heat, music and sex, where desperate and dangerous characters betray, love and test each other to the limit.

Looking up at the departures board in Heathrow airport, her flight to New York boarding soon, she knows that getting on that plane changes everything. Her life in London has grown stale, her relationship with boyfriend Dom has run its course, and New York has always been her dream. But it’s a risk – she’ll miss her parents, her friends, her job. What if Bea could live both lives? In one she goes back home for Christmas, and in another she heads to the Big Apple.

The vibrant stories in I’ll Give You a Reason explore race, identity, connection, and belonging in the Ironbound, an immigrant neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey. A young widow goes on her first date since her husband’s death and finds herself hunting a bear in the woods with a near stranger. An unhappy wife compares her mother’s love spells and rituals to her own efforts to repair her strained marriage. A self-conscious college student discovers a porn star who shares her name and becomes obsessed with her doppelgänger’s freedom and comfort with her own body.

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, this evocative novel is made up of three stories linked by time and place, and also by the moving, unexpected interactions of a rich cast of characters. Barcelona Dreaming is narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love, all of whose lives will be changed forever. Underpinning the novel, and casting a long shadow, is a crime committed against a young Moroccan immigrant.

As the economy collapses around her in 2008, recent art school graduate Binnie takes a job as a paralegal to pay the bills. As her art projects languish on the back burner, she begins to obsessively imagine her daily grind expressed in unsettling and sometimes violent dioramas. Somehow, someday, she’ll find the time to construct them. In the meantime, she’ll walk this unsatisfying tightrope between financial stability and the life of a working artist. But after a shocking and surreal death occurs at the law firm, Binnie wonders if her frustration is pushing her darkest imaginings into life.

Greta Hansen has arrived in Manhattan to intern with the Vanderhaven Corporation, a company owned by distant and very wealthy relatives. But she soon realizes she’s actually been hired to keep watch on their capricious daughter, social media celebrity Cece. No last name required. Why bother? The entire Twitterverse already watches every fabulous move she makes. Including an unfortunate shoplifting mishap when Cece decides to go off script. It’s then that a handsome - and homeless - stranger comes to the rescue.

In a Seoul slum marked for demolition, residents’ shadows have begun to rise. No one knows how or why—but, they warn each other, do not follow your shadow if it wanders away. Employees of a small electronics repair shop, Eungyo and Mujae can only watch their tight-knit community begin to fade as the landscape of their lives is torn apart, building by building. Their growing connection with one another provides solace, but against an uncaring ruling class and the inevitability of the rising shadows, their relationship may not be enough.

Daisy Hastings has always thought she was born in the wrong era. So when she bags a summer job at the Tower of London helping to run their Knight school, it feels like a step in the right direction. Theodore ‘Teddy’ Fairfax is a loose cannon. A disgraced distant relative of the royal family, he’s tall, dark and now (begrudgingly) helping with the Tower of London’s summer programme – and there’s nowhere he’d like to be less. When Teddy’s oath to be an obstruction almost gets Daisy fired, she declares war. But as the two cross swords, they start to discover they both need a little rescuing.

A dazzling novel about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility . . .

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

Oakland, California, 1983: a city churning with violent crime and racial conflict. Officer Hanson, a Vietnam veteran, has abandoned academia for the life-and-death clarity of police work, a way to live with the demons that followed him home from the war. But Hanson knows that justice requires more than simply enforcing the penal code. He believes in becoming a part of the community he serves - which is why, unlike most officers, he chooses to live in the same town where he works. This strategy serves him well...to a point. He forges a precarious friendship with the drug king of East Oakland.

When Bunny Linden abandons her three children with her older sister, Jayne, in 1972, she knows Jayne will be the perfect mother. The mother Bunny, a teen runaway, could never be. As months turn into years without word, Jayne and her husband, Rodger, a rising journalism star, strive to give the children the opportunity to flourish and feel loved. When Jayne and Rodger finally have a child of their own, a seemingly stable home is built. But then, after nearly a decade, Bunny resurfaces and sets a chain of events in motion that detonates all their lives.

If you like the way a pony tail looks coming out the back of a ball cap, ice cream trucks, karaoke, sports gambling, Fleetwood Mac, clear liquor, and the Code of the Sea, and if you’ve ever wondered what the world looks like from atop the three-legged stool of intuition, confidence, and rhythm, you can buy this book.