Showing results for "Skin" in Family Life

London, 1985. Joe, father to 11-year-old Matty, has disappeared, and nobody will explain where he's gone or why. In the long, hot summer that follows, Matty's hunt for Joe leads to the ponds at Hampstead Heath. Beneath the water, there is a new kind of freedom. Above the water, a welcoming community of men offer refuge from an increasingly rocky home life. Fourteen years later, a new revelation sees Matty set off alone in a campervan, driving westwards through Ireland, swimming its wild loughs and following the scant clues left behind about Joe.

The last time Esther Wilding's beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura's disappearance, Esther's family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister's death, Esther reluctantly travels from Tasmania to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands. On her journey, Esther is guided by the stories Aura left behind in her treasured journal; seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body.

For Pumkin Patterson, family is complicated. There’s her mother Paulette, who only sees Pumkin as a nuisance. There’s her beloved Auntie Sophie, who has always talked of she and Pumkin travelling to new horizons. And there’s her grandmother, who has always favoured Sophie over Paulette. When Sophie moves to France for work, she promises to send for her niece in one year’s time. All Pumkin has to do is pass her French entrance exam. But when Pumkin’s mother finds out, she’s determined that her sister won’t get her own way this time.

Inside his home in Derry, Joe Logan's life is ruled by his tormented father; outside, by the tension and violence of the Troubles. Sometimes his father makes him run errands despite the nearby reports of gunfire. Other times his mother, afraid to be alone with her volatile and war-wounded husband, confines Joe to the home. A bright and sensitive young man, Joe finds solace and freedom in writing - a pursuit encouraged by Kathleen Doherty, a young teacher at a nearby school whom he meets and befriends.

No-one remembers your past. But you do. 'Antonia, Antonia. My name is Antonia....' It's been her name for many years. But sometimes, like tonight, she forgets. Antonia has a secret. A secret so dark and so deep that she can barely admit it to herself. Instead, she treats herself to Friday night sessions of self-harm while her husband, David, is at the pub and her best friend, Sophie, is drinking too much wine a few doors down.

Ruth is a 74-year-old woman. Rowan is a 23-year-old man. They’re in love. And Ruth’s 43-year-old son is freaking the hell out.

Josh Moore lives with his family on the "wrong side" of Hamilton, a gritty industrial city in Southwestern Ontario. As a young boy, Josh plots an escape for a better life far from the steel mills that lined the bay. But fate has other plans and Josh discovers his adult life in Toronto is just as fraught with as many insecurities and missteps as his youth, and he soon learns that no matter how far away he might run, he will never be able to leave his hometown behind.

Virginia and Joe Thorndike have been married for 22 years, and now she's in love with a surgeon 13 years her junior. She leaves her husband and flies to Miami to start living with Rich Villamano, but there he tells her he has changed his mind and they must go their own ways. She takes off in his car, heading north with no luggage, no hope, no destination. She buys a bottle of gin and drinks it straight. Afraid that she’ll kill herself or someone else on the road, she abandons the car, flies to New York and takes an airport hotel room. She has no home and nowhere to go.

On the advice of a five-dollar psychic, Tina Martin, a zany, overworked mother of two, quits her high-powered job and moves her family to Shanghai. Tina yearns for this new setting to bring her the zen-like inner peace she’s always heard about on infomercials. Instead, she becomes a totally exasperated fish out of water. Fish Heads and Duck Skin will resonate with anyone who has ever wondered who they are, why they were put here, and how they ever lived before eating pan-fried pork buns.