Showing results by publisher "Bloomsbury Publishing Plc" in Literature & Fiction

On Friday, May 1st, 2015 a bomb detonates in the infamous Positano Luxury Resort and Casino, a mammoth hotel (and exact replica of the Amalfi coast) on the Las Vegas Strip. Six months prior, a crop of strivers converge on the desert city, attempting to make a home amidst the dizzying lights. By chance and by design, they find themselves caught up in backroom schemes for personal and political power, and are thrown into the deep end of an even bigger fight for the soul of the paradoxical town.

Lottie Kristin is independent from the start. Born in the middle of the century to a middle-class family in the very middle of America, Lottie is set apart by her smarts and sensuality. A girl who'd rather carry out dissections on a snowy back porch than join her family for Christmas dinner is a strange and exotic artifact in the town of Sleeping Bay. But by her early 20s, Lottie finds herself trapped in a marriage gone stale, with a daughter she adores but whose existence jeopardises her place in the lab and her dream of becoming a scientist.

As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material.

A Method, A Path is a product of deep engagement with the poetics of Old English with an awareness and interrogation of the ways iconography from this period has been co-opted for political ends. There is a balance here between an arcane lyricism and an awareness of when to let the style and perspective of the present inflect that of the long past.

David Moloney’s Barker House follows the story of nine unforgettable New Hampshire Correctional Officers over the course of one year on the job. While veteran guards get by on what they consider survival strategies - including sadistic power-mongering and obsessive voyeurism - two rookies, including the only female Officer on her shift, develop their own tactics for facing “the system”.

Anna was the perfect wife. Perfect mother. Perfect woman. And now she's dead. Leaving behind her husband, David, and two young children their lives will never be the same. But Vicky will make sure life goes on. These two women have been best friends forever, a lifetime of secrets lies between them and now Vicky is ready to step up into Anna's perfect shoes. But not everything is as it seems and as David begins to question Vicky's motives for walking into his life things might just get a little murderous.

Ava Wells is perfect. She has the boyfriend, the career, the looks. But one night changes everything and her life suddenly isn't so seamless. Jade Fernleigh is ambitious. She's worked hard to get where she is. And she's not about to let Ava take the job she rightly deserves. Both women share a secret that could destroy them, but who will crumble first?

It is 1953, the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II. Sidney Chambers, vicar of Grantchester and honorary canon of Ely Cathedral, is a thirty-two-year-old bachelor. Tall, with dark brown hair, eyes the color of hazelnuts, and a reassuringly gentle manner, Sidney is an unconventional clerical detective. He can go where the police cannot. Sidney discovers that being a detective, like being a clergyman, means that you are never off duty, but he nonetheless manages to find time for a keen interest in cricket, warm beer, and hot jazz.

Becky Morgan's family were the victims of the 'crimes of the decade'. The lone survivor of a ritualistic killing, Becky's been forever haunted by the memories of that night. Twenty years later, with the killer never found, Becky is ready to hunt them down and exact revenge. But the path to find the murderer is a slippery slope and she finds herself opening up some old wounds that should have been left sealed.

Abbas has never told anyone about his past—before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty-three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have to.

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict—the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into dishevelled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change.

Evanston, Illinois, 1982. A group of students at a magnet high school meet to audition for the spring play. They are eager for the chance to escape their difficult everyday lives. Declan, an experienced senior, is confident he’ll get his first-choice role, but when the capricious, charismatic drama director casts Franklin, an unknown underclassman—and the two are seen alone at the director’s house—a series of events that will haunt the cast for years begins to unfold.

In 1887 young Nellie Bly sets out for New York and a career in journalism, determined to make her way as a serious reporter, whatever that may take. But life in the city is tougher than she imagined. Down to her last dime and desperate to prove her worth, she comes up with a dangerous plan: to fake insanity and have herself committed to the asylum that looms on Blackwell's Island. There, she will work undercover to document—and expose—the wretched conditions faced by the patients. But when the asylum door swings shut behind her, she finds herself in a place of horrors.

In 1727, Stefan Silbermann is a grief-stricken 13-year-old, struggling with the death of his mother and his removal to a school in distant Leipzig. Despite his father’s insistence that he try not to think of his mother too much, Stefan is haunted by her absence, and, to make matters worse, he’s bullied by his new classmates. But when the school’s cantor, Johann Sebastian Bach, takes notice of his new pupil’s beautiful singing voice and draws him from the choir to be a soloist, Stefan’s life is permanently changed.

Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint and the opportunity to apply for a green card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.

Marta and her twin brother, Nick, have always been haunted and fascinated by an ancestral legend that holds that members of their family are doomed to various types of falls. And when their own family collapses in the wake of a revelation and a resulting devastating fight with their Catholic mother, the twins move to Prague, the city in which their 'falling curse' began.

The unforgettable narrator of this compelling, thought-provoking debut goes by two names in his two worlds. At the university he attends, he’s Gabriel, a seemingly ordinary, partying student learning about morality at a distance. But in his life outside the classroom, he’s Snoopz, a hard-living member of London’s gangs, well-acquainted with drugs, guns, stabbings, and robbery. Navigating these sides of himself, dealing with loving parents at the same time as treacherous, endangering friends and the looming threat of prison, he is forced to come to terms with who he really is.

On the glittering shores of the Mediterranean in 1928, a dying author in exile races to complete his final novel. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a sexually bold love story, a searing indictment of class distinctions and a study in sensuality. But the author, D. H. Lawrence, knows it will be censored. He publishes it privately, loses his copies to customs and dies bereft. Booker Prize-longlisted author Alison MacLeod brilliantly recreates the novel’s origins and boldly imagines its journey to freedom through the story of Jackie Kennedy, who was known to be an admirer.

From her many well-loved novels, Hilma Wolitzer - now 91 years old and at the top of her game - has gained a reputation as one of our best fiction writers. These collected short stories - most of them originally published in magazines including Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a new story that brings her early characters into the present - are evocative of an era that still resonates deeply today.

Lucas Pereyra, an unemployed writer in his 40s, embarks on a day trip from Buenos Aires to Montevideo to pick up 15,000 dollars in cash. An advance due to him on his upcoming novel, the small fortune might mean the solution to his problems, most importantly, the tension he has with his wife. While she spends her days at work and her nights out on the town - with a lover, perhaps, he doesn’t know for sure - Lucas is stuck at home all day staring at the blank page, caring for his son, Maiko, and fantasizing about the one thing that keeps him going: the woman from Uruguay.