Showing results for "Anna" in Literary Fiction

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky.

Leo Tolstoy's classic story of doomed love is one of the most admired novels in world literature. Generations of readers have been enthralled by his magnificent heroine, the unhappily married Anna Karenina, and her tragic affair with dashing Count Vronsky.

A decomposed body washes up on a beach near Glasgow. The victim, Tracy Eadie. Junkie. Prostitute. Fourteen years old. Rosie Gilmour, tabloid journalist and crusader for justice, receives evidence linking police officials with Tracy's disappearance. Digging deeper, Rosie uncovers a sickening network of corruption and abuse, leading back to the very top of the establishment. And to powerful figures who want their secrets kept hidden. Rosie has found the story of a lifetime.

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

Hannah, Cate and Lissa are young, vibrant and inseparable. Living on the edge of a common in East London, their shared world is ablaze with art and activism, romance and revelry - and the promise of everything to come. They are electric. They are the best of friends. Ten years on, they are not where they hoped to be. Amidst flailing careers and faltering marriages, each hungers for what the others have. And each wrestles with the same question: what does it take to lead a meaningful life?

The extraordinary new dystopian novel from the author of the international best seller I'm Not Scared. Summer has ended, but the heat will not let up. Ash has covered everything. Anna and Astor live in the house behind the fence, surviving in a world stripped of adults. The rooms are piled high with rubbish. Their mother's skeleton lies perfect on the bed. And every few days, Anna must head out beyond the fence for provisions and medicine. Each time she goes, she may never come back.

Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.

Rabbit Hayes loves her life, ordinary as it is, and the extraordinary people in it. She loves her spirited daughter, Juliet; her colourful, unruly family; the only man in her big heart, Johnny Faye. But it turns out the world has other plans for Rabbit, and she's OK with that. Because she has plans for the world too, and only a handful of days left to make them happen.

It tells of the love affair between Anna and Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Russia, faith is challenged, bonds are broken, love dies and is reborn.

Anna is a possession. She is owned by the man named Will, shielded from the world of struggles by his care. He loves her, protects her and then breaks her. Anna is obedient, dutiful and compliant. Anna does not know her place in the world. When she falls pregnant, Anna leaves her name behind, and finds the strength to run. But the past - and Will - catch up with her in an idyllic town with a dark secret, and this time, it's not just Anna who is at risk.

When Anna Konig first meets Bairn, the Scottish ship carpenter of the Charming Nancy, their encounter is anything but pleasant. Anna is on the ship only to ensure the safe arrival of her loved ones to the New World. Hardened by years of living at sea, Bairn resents toting these naive farmers - dubbed "Peculiars" by deckhands - across the ocean. As delays, storms, illness, and diminishing provisions afflict crew and passengers alike, Bairn finds himself drawn to Anna's serene nature.

She is noticed by Elliot as he trains in in the gym. He sees her dedication to building her body and taking up space, and he is drawn to her strength. She is observed by her mother, as she grows from a taciturn, tremulous child into a determined and distant woman, who severs all familial ties. She is watched by her former colleague Susie, who offers her sanctuary and support as she leaves her partner and rebuilds her life, transforming her body and reinventing herself online. Each of these three witnesses desires closeness.

In Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, one of our very best writers brings the opulent world of the Tudors to bloody, glittering life. It is the backdrop to the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell: lowborn boy, charmer, bully, master of deadly intrigue, and, finally, most powerful of Henry VIII’s coutiers. But the bloody theatre of Cromwell’s ascension will leave no one unscathed.

A sweeping, multigenerational saga for fans of Downton Abbey, set around the stately home of Cavendon Hall as the roaring '20s change the family's fortunes forever. It's 1926. One stately home's future lies with four very different young women.... On a summer weekend in 1926, the Ingham family gathers at Cavendon Hall, the great house in Yorkshire that has been their family home for centuries, summoned by the earl.

Nora Brown teaches high school English and lives a quiet life in Seattle with her husband and six-year-old daughter. But one November day, moments after dismissing her class, a girl’s face appears above the students’ desks—“a wild numinous face with startling blue eyes, a face floating on top of shapeless drapes of purples and blues where arms and legs should have been. Terror rushes through Nora’s body—the kind of raw terror you feel when there’s no way out, when every cell in your body, your entire body, is on fire—when you think you might die.”

Late one night, a teenage couple drives up to the big white clapboard home on the Blessing estate and leaves a box. In that instant, the lives of those who live and work there are changed forever. Skip Cuddy, the caretaker, finds a baby girl asleep in that box and decides he wants to keep the child . . . while Lydia Blessing, the matriarch of the estate, for her own reasons, agrees to help him.

Berlin, 1989. As the wall between East and West falls, Miriam Winter cares for her dying father, Henryk. When he cries out for someone named Frieda - and Miriam discovers an Auschwitz tattoo hidden under his watch strap - Henryk’s secret history begins to unravel. Searching for more clues of her father’s past, Miriam finds an inmate uniform from the Ravensbrück women’s camp concealed among her mother’s things. Within its seams are dozens of letters to Henryk written by Frieda.

The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home to bury Philip, the head of the family. Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, has dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe. Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where under the influence of psychedelic drugs a new ruling class will be reborn. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other.

Anna Karenina is beautiful, married to a successful man, and has a son whom she adores. But a chance meeting at a train station in Moscow sets her passionate heart alight, and she is defenceless in the face of Count Vronsky's adoration. Having defied the rules of nineteenth-century Russian society, Anna is forced to pay a heavy price.

The Fair Fight is a pulsating historical novel set within the world of female pugilists and their patrons in late 18th-century Bristol. It's an un-pauseable story which takes you from a filthy brothel to the finest houses in the town, from the world of street fighters to another of champions. It is about fighting your way to the top - and not only with your fists. Alive with the smells and sounds of the street, The Fair Fight is a major debut with incredibly wide appeal.