Showing results for "Dark Life" in Urban

1812. In Bath and London, Jane Austen's characters are attending balls, and the Bridgerton family are making waves in Regency high society. But these are the grimy streets of Liverpool: a city where the extreme wealth of international commerce meets brothels and brawls, smugglers and secrecy; where both high and low society operate amidst revolutionary rumblings from France and the shadow of the recently abolished slave trade.

This is a satellite-dish-free zone of tall houses, standing shoulder to shoulder with big front doors, five floors apiece. You could almost be in Kensington. This is where the actors, writers and media types live, where small children wearing smart uniforms and shoes in the shape of lightbulbs get ferried every day to schools that are not local. Some people are luckier than others; fortune smiles on some and gobs on the rest. Jo Metcalf smokes and spies on the smug Cunninghams down the street as they play their bile-inducing game of happy families.

Innocent Phoebe has only known a life of privilege. Street-smart Paula has had to make her own way in the world. When the two girls meet as teenagers, they form a deep sisterly bond, recognising in one other a yearning for love and for lives that are different from the ones into which they were born. But when they each suffer a personal trauma, they are torn apart and set out on very different paths.

Frazzled mum Alice Ray likes to think she’s on top everything - she has four bags-for-life in the boot of her car for heaven's sake. But after spectacularly embarrassing herself at work, she finally gives in to her sister’s pleas to take a much-needed break. But this is not the luxury spa holiday Alice hoped for - instead, she finds herself in Denmark, in the middle of nowhere, on a ‘How to be a Viking’ getaway. Can the two sisters finally learn to get along, or will learning to embrace their inner warriors just make them better at fighting?

Welcome to Paranormal City! There’s hospitality for all here, be you vampire, demon, walking dead, or one of the werepeople. We've something for everyone, no matter what your needs or tastes. Listen to some of the tales of those who live here. They’ll tell you this is the greatest city in the world. Oh, and mundanes are also welcome. Just try to fit in. A devil’s dozen tales from Paranormal City for your delight…and terror.

Nina does not have a drinking problem. She likes a drink, sure. But what 17-year-old doesn't? Nina's mum isn't so sure. But she's busy with her new husband and five-year-old Katie. Nina's almost an adult, after all. And if Nina sometimes wakes up with little memory of what happened the night before, then her friends are all too happy to fill in the blanks. Nina's drunken exploits are the stuff of college legend. But then one dark Sunday morning, even her friends can't help piece together Saturday night.

Ivy Edwards is 31 years old, funny, shameless and a bit of a romantic. She's also currently trying not to cry in the office toilet. Partly because she's just run out of money for fags. A bit because her mum continues to annoy her. Definitely not because she's just been dumped by her fiancé. With her London life in shambles and her family miles away in the Welsh valleys, Ivy doesn't actually feel like she belongs anywhere.

Strange things are afoot in the city of Lviv, western Ukraine. Seagulls are circling and the air smells salty, though Lviv is a long way from the sea. A ragtag group gathers round a mysterious grave in Lychakiv Cemetery - among them an ex-KGB officer and an ageing hippy he used to spy on. Before long, Captain Ryabtsev and Alik Olisevych are teaming up to discover the source of the "anomalies". Meanwhile, Taras ­- who makes a living driving kidney-stone patients over cobblestones in his Opel Vectra - is courting Darka, who works nights at a bureau de change despite being allergic to money.

A brutal murder. A young woman’s body is discovered with horrifying injuries, a recent newspaper cutting pinned to her clothing. A detective with everything to prove. This is her only chance to redeem herself. A serial killer with nothing to lose. He’s waited years, and his reign of terror has only just begun.... Introducing DI Eve Hunter, Hold Your Tongue is your new obsession.

Damani is tired. Every day she cares for her mom, drives ride shares to pay the bills and is angry at a world that promised her more before spitting her out. That is until the summer she meets Jolene and life opens up. Jolene seems like she could be the perfect girlfriend—attentive, attractive, liberal—and their chemistry feels genuine. So maybe Damani can look past the one thing that's holding her back: Jolene is white. But Jolene really doesn't seem like one of the bad ones—she's done the reading, she goes to every protest, she even listens.

Orchid & the Wasp brings to life the charged, compulsive voice of Gael Foess - daughter of a self-interested investment banker and a once-formidable orchestral conductor, and sister to a vulnerable younger brother - as she strives to build a life raft in the midst of economic and familial collapse. Moving by wits alone, Gael cuts a swathe through the leather-lined, coke-dusted social clubs of London, the New York gallery scene and birth-throes of the Occupy movement.

When 23-year-old Meggie meets distant and enigmatic Sabine, she recognises in her the person she would like to be. Giving up her daytime existence, her reliable boyfriend and the trappings of a normal life in favour of working the same nightshifts as Sabine could be the perfect escape for Meggie. She finds a liberating sense of freedom in indulging her growing preoccupation with Sabine and plunges herself into another existence, gradually immersing herself in the transient and uncertain world of the nightshift worker.

The dark, doomy humour of Care of Wooden Floors mixed with the fantastical, anarchic sense of possibility of The Way Inn, brought together in a fast moving story set in contemporary London. Jack Bick is an interview journalist at a glossy lifestyle magazine. From his office window he can see a black column of smoke in the sky, the result of an industrial accident on the edge of the city. When Bick goes from being a high-functioning alcoholic to being a non-functioning alcoholic, his life goes into freefall, the smoke a harbinger of truth, an omen of personal apocalypse.

Natasha has screwed up royally. Her mistake isn’t just embarrassing, it's a breach of journalistic ethics that makes headlines and costs her a plum job reporting from London. Back in New York at thirty-five and single, divorced from a kind man she loved, she finds herself at the bottom of the media food chain—a junior reporter at a clickbait factory, rewriting sensational tabloid stories to make them just different enough to avoid lawsuits.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

It was my father’s arrest that brought me here, although you could certainly say that I took the scenic route. Here is rehab, where Ben - the only son of a rich South Dublin banker - is piecing together the shattered remains of his life. Abruptly cut off, at the age of 27, from a life of heedless privilege, Ben flounders through a world of drugs and dead-end jobs, his self-esteem at rock bottom. Even his once-adoring girlfriend, Clio, is at the end of her tether. Then Ben runs into an old school friend who wants to cut him in on a scam.

As lykbesorger het Seb al talle lyke gebalsem, organe teruggepak in lyfholtes, beendere aanmekaargelas en doodsbleek gesigte gegrimeer vir roubeklaers om te besigtig. Wat help dit om te wens vir 'n ingryping wat hom sal losruk uit sy saai bestaan? Maar toe die sterwende seuntjie Gawie en sy ma by die begrafnisondernemers instap, kry Seb tog rede om in wense te glo.... En kom voor ’n dilemma te staan: Waarvoor wens jy as jy één wens het wat waar gaan word?

Helen Clapp is a physics professor. She doesn't believe in pseudoscience or time travel and especially not in ghosts. So when she gets a missed call from Charlie, her closest friend from university with whom she hasn't spoken in over a year, Helen thinks there must be some mistake. Because Charlie died two days ago. Then when her young son, Jack, claims to have seen Charlie in their house just the other day, Helen begins to have doubts.

On the eve of the Occupy Wall Street protests, C is flat broke. Once a renowned textile artist, she’s now the sole proprietor of an arts supply store in Lower Manhattan. Divorced, alone, at loose ends, C is stuck with a struggling business, a stack of bills, a new erotic interest in her oldest girlfriend, and a persistent hallucination in the form of a rogue garden gnome with a pointed interest in systems collapse. Replaying recent history through a distorting glass, The Visitors charts the last days of a broken status quo as the path is cleared for something new.