Showing titles in City Life

Emily can't remember the last time she left the house. Or spoke to anyone besides her grandmother, beloved children's author Catriona Robinson. After Catriona's death, Emily is at a complete loss...until she gets an unexpected letter from the woman she loved most. Catriona has revealed there might be one last, lost unpublished manuscript in her wildly popular book series. And she's left a secret diary and trail of clues that only Emily can follow.

Dora Frenhofer, a once successful but now aging and embittered novelist, knows her mind is going. She is determined, however, to finish her final book, and reverse her fortunes, before time runs out. Alone in her London home during the pandemic, she creates, and is in turn created by, the fascinating real characters from her own life. Like a twenty-first-century Scheherazade, Dora spins stories to ward off her end.

In Thieving Sun, Julienne, a student of sculpture, and Gaspar, a young composer, fall in love at a small college and share a home for more than a decade before encountering the fundamental rift that will change their lives. Through a series of microtonal music scales, the story is told in nonlinear scenes that unfold over the whole of Julienne’s life.

The “Metro” of the title of this brilliant and mordant social comedy refers to the Moscow underground - the sparkling subway system that enchants its young hero, seven-year-old Sasha, on his first visit to Moscow. The vaulted ceilings and gleaming escalators appear to his young eyes as emblems of a higher life, of beauty, harmony, and hidden strength. Years later, Sasha escapes the jaws of a provincial ammunition factory and returns to Moscow as an aspiring actor, whereupon he enters quite another “Moscow underground”.

In Great Uncle Edward, a family gathers for dinner. At ninety-three, Great Uncle Edward commands the table in his three-piece suit; Cousin Russell attended both Harvard and Yale but is now reduced to selling off the family books; sisters Betty and Molly are caught between ghosts of a storied past and creeping destitution. These lives are signposts along the downward spiral of an old aristocracy.

What's more important—revenge . . . or the child you never knew you had? Jolie Chapman was my first love. Now she's my most bitter enemy. Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice . . . who am I kidding—I don't believe in second chances anymore. Tripp Montgomery was my first love. I gave him my innocence. Then he broke my heart. And I committed the ultimate betrayal. These Manhattan royals are out for revenge. Sweet, sweet revenge. But there's something they want more. Their daughter.

Beginning eight years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by Poundland, and London, where frenzied riots give way to Olympic fever, Middle England follows a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through a time of immense change.

In the early '90s, Scarlet, a painter and high fashion model, finds herself working in some of the world’s most famous fashion capitals. As her adventure continues, she meets Johnny of The Westies, an up-and-coming band on the cusp of superstardom. What ensues is an unhinged ride of a novel following the audacious lead female protagonist as she navigates her life through fame, addiction, infidelity, and all the ups and downs of dating a legendary musician from one of the biggest rock bands in history.

It’s October in Montreal, 2002, and winter is coming on fast. Past due on his first freelance gig and ensnared in lies to his family and friends, a graphic design student with a gambling addiction goes after the first job that promises a paycheck: dishwasher at the sophisticated La Trattoria. Though he feels out of place in the posh dining room, warned by the manager not to enter through the front and coolly assessed by the waitstaff in their tailored shirts, nothing could have prepared him for the tension and noise of the kitchen, or the dishpit’s clamor and steam.

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

Wenn das Licht des Tages stirbt und sich das Totenhemd der Nacht auf Pflastersteine und Asphaltstraßen herabsenkt, geht ein Raunen durch alte Ziegelmauern. Es ist die Zeit des Zwielichts, in welcher die Gebäude im Mondlicht zu träumen beginnen... Die schiefen Palazzi von Venedig flüstern einander längst vergessene Geheimnisse zu. In den verfallenen Häuserblocks von Berlin ertönt ein Wispern. Beide Städte erzählen dem Leser unheimliche Geschichten. Grotesk, bizarr, durchwoben von Schmerz und Angst.

Once a promising actor, Tim Brettigan has gone missing. His father thinks he may have seen him among some homeless people. And though she knows he left on purpose, his mother has been searching for him all over the city. She checks the usual places and stum­bles upon a local community group with lofty goals and an enigmatic leader who will alter all of their lives. Christina, a young woman rapidly becoming addicted to a boutique drug that gives her a feeling of blessedness, is inexplicably drawn to the same collective by a man who’s convinced he may start a revolution.

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.

Down on her luck, former Wall Street dynamo Gabrielle Clayton agreed to move into Paul Reed’s ramshackle but affordable apartment on the condition that they keep strict personal boundaries. Then Gabrielle discovered she and Paul shared a good deal more than the rent - like one outrageous claw-foot bathtub located smack in the middle of the kitchen - and things started heating up!

A promising illustrator moves into adulthood contemplating all that he’s had to do for money - from the mundane to the grueling to the sexual. He also reflects on everything that has slipped away, including a boyfriend, close acquaintances, success, and allure. But sketch by sketch, he sometimes feels the enormity of all that is possible.

By the time Lou turns eighteen, modeling agents across Portland have scouted her for her striking androgynous look. Lou has no interest in fashion or being in the spotlight. She prefers to take photographs, especially of Ivy, her close friend and secret crush. But when a hike ends in a tragic accident, Lou finds herself lost and ridden with guilt. Determined to find a purpose, Lou moves to New York and steps into the dizzying world of international fashion shows, haute couture, and editorial shoots.

A husband and wife hear a mysterious bump in the night. A father mourns the closeness he has lost with his son. A friendship with a married couple turns into a dangerous codependency. With gorgeous sensitivity, assurance, and a propulsive sense of menace, these stories center on disappearances both literal and figurative—lives and loves that are cut short, the vanishing of one's youthful self.

1884 - When Betsan Morgan’s mother succumbs to a devastating illness, she doesn't think her life could get much worse. But then her father moves in his new beau, an unserious flitty woman and coincidentally also the bargirl in the pub he works in, and she soon learns her house is no longer a home. All she can do is sit in the attic and stare at the portrait of her mother. Her new stepmother, Elinor, couldn’t even let them have the grace of keeping it in the hallway.

In a small pocket of the city, between the houses of No.77 and No.79 on Eastbourne Road, there’s a neglected community garden. Once vibrant and welcoming, and a sanctuary for the people when they needed it most, the garden’s gate is firmly closed. But it only takes a small seed of an idea for big changes to happen. And as the neighbours’ need for connection grows, the twilight garden comes out of hibernation.

It's the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva. Orla wants to make music, but juggling two jobs and partying every night isn't helping. Back in Ireland her parents' marriage has crumbled, she's not speaking to her father, and her mother and sister are drinking too much.