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

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Jane Smith', a software manager in her late 40s who lives in the Pacific Northwest receives an envelope with a key to a storage unit inside. In the storage unit is a taxidermied hummingbird and salamander. Along with a list of five more animals, signed ‘Love, Silvina'. The hummingbird and salamander turn out to be among the most endangered species in the world, the taxidermy commissioned by a notorious wildlife trafficking criminal.

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.

Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife Eve have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple: Eve left behind an itinerant life riding the rails and singing in a western swing band.

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.

Brown Girls dives deep into the lives of a group of young women of colour growing up in Queens, New York. Here, streets echo with many languages, subways rumble above dollar stores and the briny scent of the ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Here, girls like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and many others, struggle to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture they come of age in. Here, they become friends for life. Or so they vow.

Identifying the meaning of life and where we are heading preoccupies all of us at some stage or another. Who better to help us articulate this sense of direction than the most articulate people among us? Writers and thinkers, Ben Hutchinson suggests in this sparkling new book, help us reflect on purpose.

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.

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.

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.

Michaela and her husband have moved to the starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape of New Mexico, to take up an academic residency. But when Gerard is struck by a fatal illness, their life begins to resemble a nightmare. At thirty-seven, Michaela must first face the terrifying prospect of widowhood, then the chaos of the days when Gerard is gone.

On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration, a young woman snoops through her boyfriend’s phone and makes a startling discovery: he’s an anonymous internet conspiracy theorist, and a popular one at that. Already fluent in internet fakery, irony and outrage, she’s not exactly shocked by the revelation. But this is only the first in a series of bizarre twists that expose a world whose truths are shaped by online lies. Suddenly left with no reason to stay in New York—or be anywhere in particular—she flees to Berlin....

This debut collection movingly explores how women and girls are looked at, look at one another and look at themselves, and how living as an object can shape their passions, fears and joys. With a clear eye and dark humour, Danielle Pender considers sex, parenting, grief and class as lenses for the ways in which the world watches women—and how women are always watching back.

When Jozef is commissioned to paint a portrait of the younger daughter of Krakow's grand Oderfeldt family, it is only his desperate need for money that drives him to accept. He has no wish to indulge a pampered child-princess or her haughty, condescending parents - and almost doesn't notice Alicia's bookish older sister, Karolina. But when he is ushered by a servant into their house on Krakow's fashionable Bernadynska street in the winter of 1937, he has no inkling of the way his life will become entangled with the Oderfelts.

Elise knows every inch of the house. She knows which boards will creak. She knows where the gaps are in the walls. She knows which parts can take her in, hide her away. It’s home, after all. The home her parents made for her. And home is where you stay, no matter what. Eddie calls the same house his home. Eddie is almost a teenager now. He must no longer believe in the girl he sometimes sees from the corner of his eye. He needs her to disappear. But when his older brother senses her, too, they are faced with a question: how do they get rid of someone they aren’t sure even exists?

Patrick Hamlin has come to Hollywood to see his novel be adapted for the screen, but why does he get the feeling that the film project is a smokescreen for something else? Does Cassidy Carter, the troubled starlet due to play the lead, know something he doesn’t? And what is the truth about WAT-R, the synthetic water everyone drinks in LA?