Showing results for "Childhood" in Genre Fiction

Elphie is a girl like any other and no other. Nothing like her parents - one beautiful, the other pious - nor her saintly sister, Nessarose. Her skin is green, her mind is cunning. One day she will command this strange and wonderful world. For now, her journey is just beginning. The road ahead is full of lessons and heartbreak, the first bruising attempts at friendship - and tantalising whispers of magic. It will lead Elphie to the doors of Shiz University, and to the girl who will change her life forever.

Blending fact and fiction, this trilogy by a very young Tolstoy centres on the inner life of Nikolai as he navigates the universal challenge of growing up. In relating his thoughts and feelings, his self-awareness and embarrassing mistakes, the work is timeless: regardless of era, location and environment, we are given an unvarnished portrait of one boy—both self-important and self-deprecating—as he tries to find his place in the world. The sense of nostalgia, with its strange blend of sadness and solace, is tangible as the years pass and the child becomes a young man.

With her family struggling amidst the nightly bombing raids in London’s East End, Ida Brogan is doing her very best to keep their spirits up. The Blitz has hit the Brogans hard, and rationing is more challenging than ever, but they are doing all they can to help the war effort. When Ida’s oldest friend Ellen returns to town, sick and in dire need of help, it is to Ida that she turns. But Ellen carries a secret, one that threatens not only Ida’s marriage but the entire foundation of the Brogan family. Can Ida let go of the past and see a way to forgive her friend?

Once, a girl called Ace travelled the universe with the Doctor - until, in the wake of a terrible tragedy they parted company. Now, decades on, she is known as Dorothy McShane, the reclusive millionaire philanthropist who heads the global organisation A Charitable Earth. But Dorothy is being haunted by terrible nightmares in which she’s abducted to an alien world. Nightmares that begin just as scores of young runaways are vanishing from the dark alleyways of London.

Samantha Owens' estranged stepfather has died, leaving her his cottage in Nantucket - a place she fled years ago, never planning to return. As a single mom, Samantha can't afford to pass up a financial windfall like oceanfront property. So she travels home to fix up the house and sell it...never suspecting that Landon Reed still lives two doors down. As their long-dormant romance begins to bud again, Samantha must face a past that separated her from the God of her childhood. And she must tell Landon why she fled the island in the first place - a secret that could tear them apart.

After nearly two hundred years of housing retardants, as they were once known, the Beechwood Institute is closing the doors on its dark history, and the complicated task of reassigning residents has begun. Ella Jules, having arrived at Beechwood at the tender age of eight, must now rely on the state to decide her future. Ella’s aging parents have requested that she be returned to her childhood home, much to the distress of Ella’s siblings, but more so to Lynetta, her beloved caretaker who has been by her side for decades.

For some people, Alaska is full of light and beauty. For Haley, it is a dangerous world of dark and tortured memories. She's here to document wildlife activist Kipp Nowak's bear encounters. But her real reason is to unearth the truth about a past murder. The suspense mounts when another body turns up, and Haley begins to wonder if the tragedies she experienced in the past are connected to the dangers and mysterious incidents of the present. Alaska Twilight is the story of a young woman's emergence from the shadows of past sorrow into the light of forgiveness and grace.

In astonishing new masterpiece from the Nobel and twice Booker Prize-winning author of Disgrace and Summertime. After crossing oceans, a man and a boy – both strangers to each other – arrive in a new land. David, the boy, has lost his mother and Simón vows to look after him. In this strange new country they are assigned a new name, a new birthday, a new life.Knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother.

On opposite sides of the world, half-siblings Cassie and Christo have built their lives around work, intent on ignoring their painful past. When a dramatic storm in Galway hits the headlines, they're drawn back there to revisit a glorious childhood summer, the last before their mother died. But their journey uncovers memories of a far less happy summer—one that had tragic consequences. Confronted with the havoc their mother left in her wake, Cassie and Christo are forced to face their past and to deal with the messy tangle of parental love and neglect that shaped them.

Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his 11-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France. This odd couple, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, argue about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the trip is looking like a disaster.

Bittersweet and startling, A Sweet Obscurity is a novel of childhood, love and the consequences of how lives are lived. Since her mother's death, nine-year-old Dido has been living with her eccentric aunt, acting as peacekeeper between Eliza, her estranged husband, Giles, and his girlfriend. They are each cruelly burdened in different ways. Chance draws them down to Cornwall, where a country idyll offers to lighten their urban cares.

What if the villain of your childhood turned out to be someone really rather extraordinary? A disgraced politician, Sir James Hastings is living out his retirement in a secluded Surrey village. He is unmoved by his centenarian mother's death - a woman he emotionally buried upon her abandonment. Raised by his father, a charismatic war-hero turned racing driver, the young James, torn between self-blame and longing, eventually dismissed her.

To save her Tennessee bed-and-breakfast, Sophie Bates needs a fast-cash miracle. Holden McKenzie, her childhood best friend, needs to prove to a prospective employer that he’s a committed man. Their fortunes on the line, Holden proposes...a solution. He’ll take care of Sophie’s bills if she agrees to a temporary marriage of convenience. And why not? They’re comfortable together, they have fun, and they trust each other. It’s as simple as saying “I do.” But the off-the-cuff wedding has all of Honey Creek talking.

Leo Tolstoy began his trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in his early twenties. Although he would in his old age famously dismiss it as an ‘awkward mixture of fact and fiction’, generations of readers and listeners have not agreed, finding the series to be a charming and insightful portrait of inner growth against the background of a world limned with extraordinary clarity, grace and color.

On an island off Ireland’s west coast strange things are afoot: two teenage boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, a couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, a widow seeks a stranger’s help to bury her grief and a horse crashes a house party. Adrift in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom, the residents reach out with love and cruelty, desperation and hope, in their pursuit of connection.

With her marriage falling apart and her longed-for holiday cancelled, Georgina Greenhills gets an unexpected offer: a holiday in the small seaside town nestling in the beautiful South Downs where she grew up. There is only one catch: she must try and solve the mystery of the valuable antiques disappearing from the remote manor house belonging to an old lady called Maudie.

Professional dog walker Felicity Knight loves everything about New York - until her ex-husband starts working at her local vet clinic. She hasn't seen Seth Carlyle in 10 years, but one glimpse of him - too gorgeous, and still too good for her - and Fliss' heart hurts like their whirlwind marriage ended yesterday. So when her grandmother in the Hamptons needs help for the summer, it seems the ideal way to escape her past.

Days before Christmas, CIA Agent Amber Starke is on the run with her murdered best friend's special-needs son. And they're next on his criminal father's hit list. Amber failed her undercover mission to bring down her friend's husband for his crimes, but she won't fail to protect her friend's son. Now that the killer knows she's not just a nanny but an agent, she must rely on her childhood crush, Deputy Lance Goode. The handsome lawman was burned in love by his first wife, who was killed while evading the law. But he'll do everything he can to help Amber, except offer his heart.

Since witnessing the murder of her beloved parents, Miriam Hochstedler suffers from paralyzing anxiety and a deep-seated fear of the Englisch. Unwilling to venture beyond her family’s Tennessee farm, she forms a close bond with a badly injured gelding. Like Miriam herself, the traumatized animal seems unlikely to recover—until skilled horse whisperer Reuben Brenneman arrives.

Grace has always wanted to be a ballerina, ever since she first peered through the windows of the Near North Ballet company. The elegance of the dance seemed transcendent to an immigrant child of the working poor, and so, when she is orphaned, it is to the ballet that she flees. Years later, Grace is on the verge of becoming the company's new prima ballerina - though she is beginning to realise that achieving her long-held dream may not be the triumph she once envisioned.