Showing results by publisher "Fourth Estate" in Literature & Fiction

On an island off Ireland’s west coast strange things are afoot: two teenage boys set fires while their worlds fall apart, a couple drive out to the hills in a last-ditch effort to save their marriage, a widow seeks a stranger’s help to bury her grief and a horse crashes a house party. Adrift in the treacherous waters of small-town boredom, the residents reach out with love and cruelty, desperation and hope, in their pursuit of connection.

The bonds of family are tested in the wake of a profound tragedy, providing a look at the darker side of our society. Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all.

Emily should be happy. She has a nice husband (even if they rarely speak to each other, let alone sleep in the same bed), two little boys she loves (even if a full night’s sleep is a distant memory)—and now, a brand-new house in which they can live out all of the bourgeois fantasies she knows she should be ashamed of. But still she aches for something more. Enter Alathea and Elliott, their new neighbours, and also parents of two young boys. Alathea is intimidatingly confident and beautiful, but also disarmingly open and friendly.

Merryn grew up on the wilds of Bodmin moor, raised by her mother and her aunt in an old farmhouse. Here, the locals never leave the village, fear for the future of their farms and cling desperately to the folkloric tales that are woven into their history. Except Merryn, who has escaped to Manchester for university, briefly untethering herself from her past. When Merryn returns home for the memorial service of her ex-girlfriend Claud, she finds her childhood home stranger and more secretive than ever. She’s sure that her mother is hiding something.

When a young couple accidentally comes into possession of a playful kitten, their daily routine (and cramped apartment) is turned upside down. Soon they find their existence forever altered. Charting the couple’s ever-evolving relationship with cats – some they live with, others who exist only in their imagination – Invisible Kitties is a meditation on the quiet moments of everyday life and a celebration of cats in all their many forms.

Knowing that he will soon die, Albert 'Poppy' Gondiwindi has one final task he must fulfill. A member of the indigenous Wiradjuri tribe, he has spent his adult life in Prosperous House and the town of Massacre Plains, a small enclave on the banks of the Murrumby River. Before he takes his last breath, Poppy is determined to pass on the language of his people, the traditions of his ancestors and everything that was ever remembered by those who came before him. The land itself aids him; he finds the words on the wind.

This is an audiobook about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This an audiobook about a poet, W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

A writer takes residence in the illustrious but decaying Grand Hotel Europa, to think about where things went wrong with Clio, with whom he fell in love in Genoa and moved to Venice. He reconstructs a compelling story of love in times of mass tourism, about their trips to Malta, Palmaria, Portovenere and the Cinque Terre and their thrilling search for the last painting of Caravaggio. Meanwhile, he becomes fascinated by the mysteries of Grand Hotel Europe and gets more and more involved with the memorable characters who inhabit it, and who seem to come from a more elegant time.

Meet the women of the Valiat family. In Iran, they were somebodies. In America, they're nobodies. First there is Elizabeth, the regal matriarch with the famously large nose, who remained in Tehran despite the revolution. She lives alone in a shabby apartment except when she is visited by Niaz, her young, Islamic-law-breaking granddaughter, who takes her partying with a side of purpose, and somehow manages to survive. Across the ocean in America, Elizabeth’s daughters have built new lives for themselves.

Joan Didion was a writer’s writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life’s telling details. Her insights continue to influence creatives and admirers, encouraging them to become close observers of the world. The World According to Joan Didion is a meditation on the people, places, and objects that propelled Didion’s prose and an invitation to journalists, storytellers, and life adventurers to “throw themselves into the convulsions of the world,” as she once said.

A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a woman stalked by a would-be killer may be confiding in the wrong former lover; a young woman is morbidly obsessed by her unfamiliar new role as “mother.” In the collection’s longest story, a much-praised cutting-edge writer cruelly experiments with “drafts” of his own suicide.

Eley Williams returns with a subversive and essential collection of short stories exploring the nature of relationships both intimate and transient – from the easy gamesmanship of contagious yawns to the horror of a smile fixed for just a second too long. Whether jostling for attention or ducking to evade it, her characters seek connections not only with each other but also to versions of themselves.

Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s lush backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools, Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful prudence. Her mother can be as brittle as she can be loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one fateful summer, everything changes. A line is crossed and in the wake of that betrayal the simple pleasures of girlhood slip away.

An unnamed young trans woman grows up in a working class suburb that has no place for her. She discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this thrilling and yet often terrifying world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death.

AD 500. An island in the Thames. Isla has a secret: she has learned her father’s sophisticated sword-making skills at a time when even entering a forge is forbidden to women. Her sister, Blue, has a secret, too: at low tide on the night of each new moon, she visits the bones of the mud woman, drowned by the elders of her tribe who wanted to make a lesson of someone who wouldn’t hold her tongue. When the local Seax overlord discovers Isla's secret, there is nowhere for the sisters to hide, except across the water to the walled ghost city Londinium.

April 5th, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, troubled husband and wife, are both a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, has created a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house – and whose departure threatens to break the family apart.

Dylan Read, the legendary country pop star, has spent fifteen years learning to craft the perfect good girl image. But Dylan is privately haunted by the loss of her best friend Kelsey, who went missing the year before Dylan’s meteoric rise to fame. When Kelsey’s body is found at the bottom of a New England lake where they grew up, Dylan is drawn back to her hometown where she must revisit their ill-fated teenage friendship and reckon with secrets that have stayed hidden for decades…

What does it mean to take action? To bear witness? What does it cost? These stories take us into the heart of contemporary New York City and its residents’ lives. We meet children, grandmothers and even ghosts as they strive to connect, to stand up for, and to really see each other. Their relationships shape not only their own futures but those of their families and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships, Witness enacts its own testimony.

Ambitious and hardworking Tracy Flick feels underappreciated and stuck. Her job as a high school assistant principal isn’t the political career she dreamed of as an over-achieving teen, so when the longtime principal abruptly announces his retirement, offering a rare chance of promotion, Tracy is filled with zeal at the prospect of success. But nothing ever comes easily to Tracy Flick, no matter how diligent or qualified she happens to be.

Cecelia Watson used to be obsessive about grammar rules. But then she began teaching. And that was when she realised that strict rules aren’t always the best way of teaching people how to make words say what they want them to; that they are even, sometimes, best ignored. One punctuation mark encapsulates this thorny issue more clearly than any other. The semicolon. Hated by Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut and Orwell, and loved by Herman Melville, Henry James and Rebecca Solnit, it is the most divisive punctuation mark in the English language, and many are too scared to go near it.