Showing results for "Skin" in Literary Fiction

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.

Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.

O avesso da pele é a história de Pedro, que, após a morte do pai, assassinado numa desastrosa abordagem policial, sai em busca de resgatar o passado da família e refazer os caminhos paternos. Com uma narrativa sensível e por vezes brutal, Jeferson Tenório traz à superfície um país marcado pelo racismo e por um sistema educacional falido, e um denso relato sobre as relações entre pais e filhos.

"The possession of power, no matter how enormous, does not bring the knowledge how to use it." Raphael, a failed writer, deep in debt, and unrequited in love, is about to take a suicidal plunge into the Seine River. Just in time, he discovers the "Magic Skin" in an antiquity shop. Its supernatural powers grant every wish but it extracts a terrible toll! This parable depicts the malaise of 19th century France.

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliances--sometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth, these age-old characters shed their antiquated cloaks to travel a seductive new landscape, radiantly transformed.

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.

Mark Chadwick is cycling home from work, eager to get back to his pregnant wife, Katy, and two children, when he sees the police calling at his house. He knows exactly why they are there, and he knows that the world he has carefully constructed over 20 deliberately uneventful years is about to fall apart. He could lose everything.... A story of a toxic love gone wrong, with a setting that moves between present-day London and 1990s Cambridge, Stronger Than Skin is utterly compelling, combining a gripping narrative with a keen eye for the absurdities of the way we live now.

"Mamá, ¿allá atrás se acaba el mundo?" Esta frase abre camino a una historia fascinante: la de un hombre de enorme talento destinado a desentrañar los misterios de la astronomía. Lorenzo de Tena, inconformista y rebelde, deberá luchar contra las desigualdades sociales, las trampas burocráticas y las tentaciones políticas para ver realizada su vocación. Pero los mayores retos de su búsqueda no vendrán de la ciencia sino de la cara más oculta de las personas, la que esconde las pasiones y los sentimientos.

Myles Carver is dead. But his estate, Watermere, lives on, waiting for a new Carver to move in. Myles’s wife, Annabel, is dead too, but she is also waiting, lying in her grave in the woods. For nearly half a century she was responsible for a nightmarish reign of terror, and she’s not prepared to stop now. She is hungry to live again...and her unsuspecting nephew, Paul, will be the key. Julia Merrow has a secret almost as dark as Watermere’s. But when she and Paul fall in love they think their problems might be over.

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.

The Serpent's Skin is a gripping, literary crime novel about male power and the secrets that can haunt a family. Most of all, it's about the many ways we prove our love. It's a cold and wintery night in 1968 and 10-year-old JJ's mother isn't home. The cows are milked, the pigs fed and her dad won't answer any questions. The four children survive as best they can in a cloud of their father's lies and clear misery, dealing with their mother's absence in their own ways. But it's always been JJ's job to cause trouble, and her sleuthing wreaks havoc in their tight-knit community.