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A guest at the feast : essays / by Tóibín, Colm,1955-author.;
From the melancholy and amusement within the work of the writer John McGahern to an extraordinary essay on his own cancer diagnosis, Tóibín delineates the bleakness and strangeness of life and also its richness and its complexity. As he reveals the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists and the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as the intricacies of Marilynne Robinson's fiction. The imprint of the written word on the private self, as Tóibín himself remarks, is extraordinarily powerful. In this collection, that power is gloriously alive, illuminating history and literature, politics and power, family and the self.
Subjects: Biographies.; Essays.; Personal narratives.; Tóibín, Colm, 1955-; Families.; Identity (Psychology); Religion.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Walk the Blue Fields [electronic resource] : by Keegan, Claire.aut; CloudLibrary;
AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY 'Exquisite . so intricately wrought, so strange and beguiling as to entirely bewitch.'GUARDIAN 'Pure magic.' COLM TÓIBÍN 'Lyrical, thoughtful, but with a thick, dark strain of melancholy running through.' INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture. That Christmas, the electricity goes out. A forester mortgages his land and goes off to a seaside town looking for a wife. He finds a woman eating alone in the hotel. A farmer wakes half-naked and realises the money is almost gone. And in the title story, a priest waits on the altar for a bride and battles, all that wedding day, with his memories of a love affair. In her long-awaited second collection, Claire Keegan observes an Ireland wrestling with its past.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Short Stories (single author);
© 2013., Faber & Faber,
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Katerina / by Frey, James,1969-author.;
"A kiss, a touch. A smile and a beating heart. Love and sex and dreams, art and drugs and the madness of youth. Betrayal and heartbreak, regret and pain, the melancholy of age. Katerina, the explosive new novel by America's most controversial writer, is a sweeping love story alternating between 1992 Paris and Los Angeles in 2018. At its center are a young writer and a young model on the verge of fame, both reckless, impulsive, addicted, and deeply in love. Twenty-five years later, the writer is rich, famous, and numb, and he wants to drive his car into a tree, when he receives an anonymous message that draws him back to the life, and possibly the love, he abandoned years prior. Written in the same percussive, propulsive, dazzling, breathtaking style as A million little pieces, Katerina echoes and complements that most controversial of memoirs, and plays with the same issues of fiction and reality that created, nearly destroyed, and then recreated James Frey in the American imagination"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Authors; Models (Persons); Man-woman relationships;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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Big time / by Winters, Ben H.,author.;
What if time could be taken from us--the minutes, the hours, the years of our lives, extracted like organs taken for transplant? What would it mean for the world? And what would it do to the person from whom it's taken? Grace Berney is a mid-level bureaucrat in the Food and Drug Administration, a woman who once brimmed with purpose but somehow turned into a middle-aged single mom with a dull government job and a melancholy sense that life has passed her by. Until the night a strange photo comes across her desk, of a young woman in a hospital bed who has been subjected to a mysterious procedure. Against orders and against common sense, Grace sets out to bring the girl to safety, and finds herself risking her job, her future, and her life on whether she can find the missing girl before an obsessive and violent mercenary who's also looking. Big Time is a fast-paced thriller and a metaphysical mystery about the very nature of our lives.
Subjects: Science fiction.; Novels.; United States. Food and Drug Administration; Memory; Mercenary troops; Missing persons; Single mothers; Time; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The Lost Lights of St Kilda [electronic resource] : by Gifford, Elisabeth.aut; cloudLibrary;
'Desperately romantic, lyrically written and with a fascinating plot' Katie Fforde1927: When Fred Lawson takes a summer job on St Kilda, little does he realise that he has joined the last community to ever live on that beautiful, isolated island. Only three years later, St Kilda will be evacuated, the islanders near dead from starvation. But for Fred, memories of that summer - and the island woman, Chrissie, with whom he falls in love - will never leave him.1940: Fred has been captured behind enemy lines in France and finds himself in a prisoner-of-war camp. Beaten and exhausted, his thoughts return to the island of his youth and the woman he loved and lost. When Fred makes his daring escape, prompting a desperate journey across occupied territory, he is sustained by one thought only: finding his way back to Chrissie.The Lost Lights of St Kilda is a sweeping love story that crosses oceans and decades. It is a moving and deeply vivid portrait of two lovers, a desolate island and the extraordinary power of hope in the face of darkness.'A gorgeous, melancholy love story.' The Times'An undeniably haunting love story.' Sunday TimesGeneral adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Cultural Heritage; Family Life;
© 2020., Atlantic Books,
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Entry Island [electronic resource] : by May, Peter.aut; cloudLibrary;
Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times raved: "Peter May is a writer I'd follow to the ends of the earth." Now Peter May takes us to a small island off the coast of Québec with an emotionally charged new mystery. When a murder rocks the isolated community of Entry Island, insomniac homicide detective Sime Mackenzie boards a light aircraft at St. Hubert airfield bound for the small, scattered chain of Madeline Islands, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as part of an eight-officer investigation team from Montréal. Only two kilometers wide and three long, Entry Island is home to a population of just more than 100 inhabitants, the wealthiest of whom has just been discovered murdered in his home. Covered in her husband's blood, the dead man's melancholy wife spins a tale for the police about a masked intruder armed with a knife. The investigation appears to be little more than a formality--the evidence points to a crime of passion, implicating the wife. But Sime is electrified by the widow during his interview, convinced that he has met her before, even though this is clearly impossible. Haunted by this strange certainty, Sime's insomnia is punctuated by vivid, hallucinatory dreams of a distant past on a Scottish island 3,000 miles away, dreams in which he and the widow play leading roles. Sime's conviction soon becomes an obsession. And despite mounting evidence of the woman's guilt, he finds himself convinced of her innocence, leading to a conflict between the professional duty he must fulfill and the personal destiny he is increasingly sure awaits him.General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; International Mystery & Crime; Crime;
© 2015., Quercus,
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Mozart : the reign of love / by Swafford, Jan,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozart's singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun. Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in life's tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art. Like Jan Swafford's biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, Mozart is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, it's nearly impossible to understand classical music's origins and indeed its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.
Subjects: Biographies.; Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791.; Composers;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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A good measure : a novel / by Rossiter, Nan Parson,author.;
"It has been eight months since Libby Tennyson's husband, Jack, passed away, and now every afternoon when the fiery sun sinks below the horizon, she finds herself wandering through the empty old farmhouse in which they raised their six sons. Melancholy hour, she calls it--the time of day that was once a flurry of dinner, homework, and chores, but with her sons grown and on their own, she grieves for all she has lost--and worries about what the future holds for her youngest son, twenty-eight-year-old Chase. All the Tennyson boys are handsome--but there's something about Chase that has always made women swoon. Growing up in the shadow of his older brothers, Chase was different--gentler, kinder, a boy with a big heart who looked after those most vulnerable. Though his family loves him deeply, Chase never felt he could truly be himself until he met Liam Evans, his partner in business and love. After six years, Chase and Liam are ready to make a lifetime commitment ... yet both feel apprehensive including their very traditional families in their wedding planning. But life is full of surprises, and Libby finds unexpected hope in her new stage of life when she connects with The Guild, a group of widows who get together every Thursday evening for wine, laughter, and companionship. Here, Libby not only discovers a safe space, but a place of honesty, and ... growth. And while Chase and Libby may not see eye to eye every time, they can both always agree that love truly does win"--Back cover.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Recipes.; Novels.; Empty nesters; Families; Gay men; Same-sex weddings; Widows; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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The dollhouse : a novel / by Davis, Fiona,1966-author.;
"Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side-by-side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success in the 1950s, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past. When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong--a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance. Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist--not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed"--
Subjects: Thrillers (Fiction); Historical fiction.; Housekeepers; Older women; Women journalists;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The girl who reads on the métro / by Féret-Fleury, Christine,author.; Schwartz, Ros,translator.; translation of:Féret-Fleury, Christine.Fille qui lisait dans le métro.English.;
Includes bibliographical references."In the vein of Amélie and The Little Paris Bookshop, a modern fairytale about a French woman whose life is turned upside down when she meets a reclusive bookseller and his young daughter. Juliette leads a perfectly ordinary life in Paris, working a slow office job, dating a string of not-quite-right men, and fighting off melancholy. The only bright spots in her day are her métro rides across the city and the stories she dreams up about the strangers reading books across from her: the old lady, the math student, the amateur ornithologist, the woman in love, the girl who always tears up at page 247. One morning, avoiding the office for as long as she can, Juliette finds herself on a new block, in front of a rusty gate wedged open with a book. Unable to resist, Juliette walks through, into the bizarre and enchanting lives of Soliman and his young daughter, Zaide. Before she realizes entirely what is happening, Juliette agrees to become a passeur, Soliman's name for the booksellers he hires to take stacks of used books out of his store and into the world, using their imagination and intuition to match books with readers. Suddenly, Juliette's daydreaming becomes her reality, and when Soliman asks her to move in to their store to take care of Zaide while he goes away, she has to decide if she is ready to throw herself headfirst into this new life. Big-hearted, funny, and gloriously zany, The Girl Who Reads on the Métro is a delayed coming-of-age story about a young woman who dares to change her life, and a celebration of the power of books to unite us all"--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Books and reading; Booksellers and bookselling;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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