Showing results for "Dark" in Biographical Fiction

Meet Jim Carrey. Sure, he's an insanely successful and beloved movie star drowning in wealth and privilege — but he's also lonely. Maybe past his prime. Maybe even...getting fat? He's tried diets, gurus, and cuddling with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. Even the sage advice of his best friend, actor, and dinosaur skull collector Nicolas Cage isn't enough to pull Carrey out of his slump.

He became a best-selling novelist while still in college, immediately famous and wealthy. He watched his insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box. He was lost in a haze of booze, drugs and vilification. Then he was given a second chance. This is the life of Bret Easton Ellis, the author and subject of this remarkable novel. Confounding one expectation after another, Lunar Park is equally hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking. It’s the most original novel of an extraordinary career - and best of all: it all happened, every word is true.

Captain Nemo is the fictional life story of one of Jules Verne's most memorable characters from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island. It covers his boyhood friendship with the dreamer Jules Verne, adventures aboard sailing ships, battles with pirates, and survival on a mysterious deserted island. Each time he returns home to his beloved France, Captain Nemo shares the tales of his exploits with the struggling writer Verne.

Now a major Sky TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Moving from Provence to New York to Gloucestershire, from the savageries of a childhood with a cruel father and an alcoholic mother to an adulthood fraught with addiction, Patrick Melrose is on a mission to escape himself. But the drugs don’t make him forget his past, and the glittering parties offer him no redemption....

At his mother’s family house in the south of France, Patrick Melrose has the run of a magical garden. Bravely imaginative and self-sufficient, five-year-old Patrick encounters the volatile lives of adults with care. His father, David, rules with considered cruelty, and Eleanor, his mother, has retreated into drink. They are expecting guests for dinner. But this afternoon is unlike the chain of summer days before, and the shocking events that precede the guests’ arrival tear Patrick's world in two.

Now a major Sky TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril, and Patrick Melrose, now a husband and father, is trying to gather together the pieces of his life. Caught up in the turmoil of broken promises, assisted suicide, adultery and - most tender and terrifying of all - fatherhood, Patrick is still a long way from salvation, but even as the family struggles against the pull of its dark past, a new generation promises new light, new hope and - perhaps - the promise of a brighter future.

The once-illustrious, once-wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery, and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife Mary consumed by motherhood, his mother in thrall to a New Age foundation, and his young son Robert understanding far more than he should. But even as the family struggles against the pull of its ever-present past, a new generation brings a new tenderness, and the possibility of change.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of On the Bright Side by Hendrik Groen, read by Patrick Ryecart. Everyone's favourite octogenarian is back and - together with the Old-But-Not-Dead Club - is more determined than ever to wreak havoc. After a year mourning the death of his beloved friend Eefje, Hendrik picks up his pen once again to chronicle the goings on both inside his care home and in the increasingly confusing world outside.

In the year 1526 King Henry VIII is facing a great personal crisis. He has been married to Queen Catherine of Aragon for seventeen years. But he has no son and the kingdom is without an heir. He has fallen in love with a maid of honor named Anne Boleyn. But she refuses to become his mistress and insists on being recognized as his lawful wife. The tragedy of “The King’s Great Matter” begins to unfold with terrible consequences for all concerned.

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father's ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge - desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

The blood and violence never ends - it only stops long enough for Melena to relax her guard, to think she might actually survive. For the past year, she has worked hard to pick up the pieces of her life. The supernaturals in Fairbanks are tolerating her, the angels are shielding her from her enemies, and she's getting stronger as her body changes into . . . something else. If not for the man she loves being locked away in Purgatory, she might even believe she could be happy.

Patrick Melrose, cleaned-up and world-weary, is a reluctant guest at a glittering party deep in the English countryside. Amid a crowd of flitting social dragonflies, he finds his search for redemption and capacity for forgiveness challenged by his observation of the cruelties around him. Armed with his biting wit and a newly fashioned openness, can Patrick, who has been to the furthest limits of experience and back again, find release from the savageries of his childhood?

Hank Fitzpatrick's life is what you might expect from a manchild stumbling his way from his teens to his thirties in small town Indiana: hypersexual, drunk, stoned, prone to fits of spontaneous masturbation, occasionally Catholic, and accidentally well-intentioned. Caught in the crossfire of raging hormones, bad decisions and family tragedy, Hank is just a boy not yet ready to be a man.

As friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay their final respects to his mother, Eleanor, Patrick Melrose finds himself questioning whether a life without parents will be the liberation he has so long imagined. Yet as the memorial service ends and the family gathers one last time, amidst the social niceties and the social horrors, the calms and the rapids, Patrick begins to sense a new current: the chance of some form of safety - at last.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions...tequila, guns and cocaine. Inspired by the author's time with Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Girl is a smart, rollicking ride told with heart, a loving fictional portrait of a larger-than-life literary icon, and soon to be a major film. Alley Russo is a recent college grad desperately trying to make it in the gruelling world of New York publishing, but like so many who have come before her, she has no connections and has settled for an unpaid magazine internship...

The game of life in Middle-Earth hemisphere is often interrupted like breaking news, a sudden reminder to the occupants on the face of the earth that the eye of the queen of the universe is beaming down on humans and mankind like the ray of the Sun.

Ein schwarzhumoriges Werk über die Tücken des Älterwerdens! Der Protagonist in Wilhelm Genazinos zynischem Roman hat Probleme mit seinem Liebesleben: er ist mit gleich zwei Frauen, Sandra und Judith, zusammen - allerdings wissen die beiden nichts voneinander, und es wird immer schwieriger, das Geheimnis um die Dreiecksbeziehung zu wahren. Gleichzeitig merkt er, dass er die Blüte seines Lebens langsam hinter sich hat - und das Altern bringt ganz eigene Herausforderungen mit sich...

Lieutenant Mike Galway takes command of his first platoon, and it is not at all what he bargained for. What he anticipated was the challenge of training a unit of disciplined Marine infantrymen to go to war. Instead he finds himself responsible for a group of unruly American teenagers, for whom he has to become a combination of surrogate father, psychologist, high school principal, marriage counselor, financial advisor, conflict mediator, and drug and alcohol therapist.

Svantje ist elf Jahre alt und mit ihrer allein erziehenden Mutter neu in die Wohnsiedlung Brookstraße in Frechen eingezogen. Das Mädchen ist sehr still, zurückhaltend und spricht mit niemandem. Eines Tages, während Svantje allein auf einer Bank am Spielplatz sitzt, nähert sich ihr ein zwölfjähriger Junge, der sich ihr als Daryl vorstellt.

Ninety-two-year-old Henry Budge defies most of his family by escaping a rehab hospital to make his way to France for the ceremonies of the 70th observance of D-Day. Before he dies, he hopes to at last address a grief he has allowed to simmer for decades and to rekindle memories of Élodie Bedier, the French Resistance fighter with whom he fell in love 70 years earlier, as a way of confronting his grief at losing her.