Showing results for "Frank" in Literary Fiction

John Grady Cole is the last bewildered survivor of long generations of Texas ranchers. Finding himself cut off from the only life he has ever wanted, he sets out for Mexico with his friend, Lacey Rawlins. Befriending a third boy on the way, they find a country beyond their imagining: barren and beautiful, rugged yet cruelly civilised.... A place where dreams are paid for in blood.

A fictional portrayal of an aging revolutionary, this novel is a powerful commentary on the nightmare politics of the troubled 20th century. Born in Hungary in 1905, a defector from the Communist Party in 1938, and then arrested in both Spain and France for his political views, Arthur Koestler writes from a wealth of personal experience.

Richard Ford returns with four deftly linked Christmas stories narrated by the iconic Frank Bascombe. Now 68, Frank resides again in the New Jersey suburb of Haddam and has thrived - seemingly but not utterly - amidst the devastations of Hurricane Sandy. The desolations of Sandy, which left countless lives unmoored, are the perfect backdrop for Ford - and Bascombe.

Over the course of four celebrated works of fiction and almost forty years, Richard Ford has crafted an ambitious, incisive and singular view of American life as lived. Unconstrained, astute, provocative, often laugh-out-loud funny, Frank Bascombe is, here, once more our guide to the great American midway. Now in the twilight of life, a man who has occupied many colourful lives — sportswriter, father, husband, ex-husband, friend, real estate agent — Bascombe finds himself in the most sorrowing role of all; caregiver to his son, Paul, diagnosed with ALS.

For some boys fitting in means standing out. Meet Frank - he isn't like other kids. Intrepid explorer, sartorial connoisseur; he's as strange as he is brilliant. But Frank discovers the hard way that people don't like brilliant, and they hate strange. What Frank longs for - aside from a father - is a friend.

Set in the in the atmospheric and squalid streets of Paris, Maigret sets out to prove the innocence of a man condemned to death for a brutal murder. In another one of Maigret's unconventional and audacious plans, he arranges the escape of the condemned man in an attempt to prove his theory. The presumed murderer goes on the run across Paris and its suburbs, dropping misleading clues along the way and leading Maigret into the labyrinthine twists of the mystery.

This true modern masterpiece is built around the two fateful words that make up the title and herald the end - “Alas, Babylon.” When a nuclear holocaust ravages the United States, a thousand years of civilization are stripped away overnight, and tens of millions of people are killed instantly. But for one small town in Florida, miraculously spared, the struggle is just beginning, as men and women of all backgrounds join together to confront the darkness....

Stacy Keach stars in this shocking tale of a Polk Street dentist and his wife in 1899 San Francisco. Frank Norris’ powerful insights into the depths of the human soul make this a story of compelling narrative force. This seminal novel about murder, obsession and the destructive effects of greed features an all-star cast including Stacy Keach, Edward Asner, Ed Begley Jr., Bud Cort, Hector Elizondo, Teri Garr, Katherine Helmond, Helen Hunt, Amy Irving, Carol Kane, Marsha Mason, Richard Masur, Judge Reinhold, and more.

In the summer of 1922, Robert Shannon, a young American hero of the Great War, lands in Ireland. A Marine chaplain, he was present at the frightful Battle of Belleau Wood, and he still suffers from shell shock. His mentor hopes that a journey Robert had always wanted to make to find his family roots will restore his equilibrium and his vocation. But there is more to the story: On his return from the war, Robert Shannon witnessed startling and lethal corruption in the Archdiocese of Boston. As a consequence, he has also been sent to Ireland to secure his silence permanently.

Three soldiers, bound together by a single terrible event in the final days of the First World War, and a scheme to stun an entire country. Wounded and traumatised by their wartime experience, Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt return from the fighting on the Western Front and find themselves struggling in a society where reverence for the dead can never erase the revulsion for those who survived.

The Last Dream brings together for the first time twelve unpublished stories from Almodóvar’s personal archive, written between the late sixties and the present day. Both a tantalising glimpse into Almodóvar’s creative mind and a masterclass in how to tell a story, this intimate and mischievous collection reflects Almodóvar’s obsessions and many of the themes of his cinematic work, spanning genres from autofiction to comedy, parody, pastiche and gothic.

A year has passed, and in this third novel of the Pop Larkin series, Pop Larkin is preparing to build the bungalow he promised Charley and Mariette upon their engagement. He buys a country home slated for demolition, intending to convert it for the two, but it is not long before a London couple persuade him to sell it. Pop, ever the trickster, sells it for an extortionate price, as the two social climbers know little about country life.

Who is Vernon Subutex? An urban legend. A fall from grace. The mirror who reflects us all. Vernon Subutex was once the proprietor of Revolver, an infamous music shop in Bastille. His legend spread throughout Paris. But by the 2000s his shop is struggling. With his savings gone, his unemployment benefit cut and the friend who had been covering his rent suddenly dead, Vernon Subutex finds himself down and out on the Paris streets. He has one final card up his sleeve.

"If you, too, feel like wandering, come along and help me unravel this odd tale - a tale full of half-truths, whole-truths, and no-truths at all." So begins Frank Capra's never published, and often speculated about novel of his favorite place - Silver Lake, nestled in the jagged cliffs of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Capra casts the fictional Frank Capra in the lead roll of this novel of environmental and humanitarian preservation.

It's been years since the woman in "Biting the Moon" has seen her former lover, Felix, a famous, Oscar-winning composer. But upon hearing the news of his sudden death, she mourns his loss by revisiting moments of their former life. Jumping in time from the pair's first encounter at an artists' colony to their rendezvous in cities across the US, the path the narrator takes toward acceptance is much like the jazz the couple loved so much: winding, unexpected, and beautiful.

Two men marked by the boyhood adventures of All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing now stand together to confront a country changing beyond recognition. In the fall of 1952, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are cowboys on a New Mexico ranch, encroached upon from the north by the military. On the southern horizon are the mountains of Mexico, where one of the men is drawn incessantly in this story of friendships and passion to a love as dangerous as it is inevitable.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." So begins this classic, one of the most beloved novels of all time. Charles Dickens brings the French Revolution to life through such vivid characters as Charles Darnay, the Old Doctor, Sydney Carton and Lucy Manette. The action peaks with the storming of the Bastille, the dreaded symbol of government authority. And the blade of La Guillotine falls again...

Frank Derrick is 81. And he's just been run over by a milk float. It was tough enough to fill the hours of the day when he was active. But now he's broken his arm and fractured his foot, it looks set to be a very long few weeks ahead. Frank lives with his cat Bill (which made more sense before Ben died) in the typically British town of Fullwind-on-Sea.

The Korticos are from a well-endowed pygmy tribe in West Africa; the Mandingas are descended from a tribe of tall Ghanaians. Both families have been brought to Cuba as slaves. Oscar Kortico and Jose Mandinga, inseparable friends, marry a pair of sisters, and in the tiny hamlet of Pig's Foot (Pata de Puerco), five generations of these families will live out their colorful lives through the tumultuous sweep of Cuban history.

Colm Tóibín's Mothers and Sons is a sensitive and beautifully written meditation on the dramas surrounding this most elemental of relationships. Psychologically intricate and emotionally incisive, each finely wrought story teases out the delicate and difficult strands woven between mothers and sons. This is an acute, masterful and moving collection that confirms Tóibín as a great prose stylist of our time.