Search Results: Returned 18 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 18
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[2016], Adult, Penguin Press Call No: Fic Bet Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "From the extraordinary Colombian French politician and activist Ingrid Betancourt, a stunning debut novel about freedom and fate. Set against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking story of love and betrayal by one of the world's most renowned writers and activists. Ingrid Betancourt, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Even Silence Has an End, draws on history and personal experience in this deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos. Buenos Aires, the 1970s. Julia inherits from her grandmother a gift, precious and burdensome. Sometimes visions appear before her eyes, mysterious and terrible apparitions from the future, seen from the perspective of others. From the age of five, Julia must intervene to prevent horrific events. In fact, as her grandmother tells her, it is her duty to do so--otherwise she will lose her gift. At fifteen, Julia falls in love with Theo, a handsome revolutionary four years her senior. Their lives are turned upside down when Juan Peron, the former president and military dictator, returns to Argentina. Confronted by the realities of military dictatorship, Julia and Theo become Montoneros sympathizers and radical idealists, equally fascinated by Jesus Christ and Che Guevara. Captured by death squadrons, they somehow manage to escape. In this remarkable novel, Betancourt, an activist who spent more than six years held hostage by the FARC in the depths of Colombian jungle, returns to many of the themes of Even Silence Has an End. The Blue Line is a story centered on the consequences of oppression, collective subservience, and individual courage, and, most of all, the notion that belief in the future of humanity is an act of faith most beautiful and deserving. "--Publisher.
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2023., The Overlook Press Call No: NEW BLK Fic Eme Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Treasure and her mother lost everything when Treasure's father died. Haggling for scraps in the market, Treasure meets a man who promises to change their fortunes, but his feet are hovering just a few inches above the ground. He's a spirit, and he promises to bring Treasure's beloved father back to life if she'll do one terrible thing for him first. Ozoemena has an itch in the middle of her back. It's an itch that speaks to her patrilineal destiny, an honor never before bestowed upon a girl, to defend the land and protect its people by becoming a Leopard. Her father impressed upon her what an honor this was before he vanished, but it's one she couldn't want less--she has enough to worry about as she tries to fit in at a new boarding school. But as the two girls reckon with their burgeoning wildness and the legacy of their missing fathers, Ozoemena's fellow students start to vanish. Treasure's obligations to the spirit escalate, and Ozoemena's duty of protection as a Leopard grows. Soon the girls' destinies and choices alike set them on a dangerous collision course. Ultimately, they must ask in a world that always says no to women, what must two young girls sacrifice to get what is theirs?"--
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2017., Adult, Riverhead Books Call No: Fic Ham Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet--sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors--doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through... Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time."--From publisher.
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2018., Adult, Bond Street Books Call No: Fic Mur Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: An unnamed thirty-something portrait painter, abandoned by his wife, becomes caretaker of the home of an aging famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When the younger man discovers an unknown painting in the attic, entitled "Killing Commendatore"--a painting that takes its cues from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni--he also discovers clues about Amada, his family and their involvement in a violent and failed plot to kill a Nazi leader in Vienna. As the painter slowly learns the truth, he is equally consumed by the story of a wealthy and mysterious neighbor, Menshiki, in what is, according to the author, a clear homage to The Great Gatsby. The painter becomes obsessed with Menshiki's doomed love affair, the young girl who might be his child and a stone-lined underground space in the nearby woods where Buddhist priests were once buried alive. This pit becomes a portal into another world, a surreal place where the figures from "Killing Commendatore" take form to guide our narrator on an epic journey.
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By Neale, Jen2018., Adult, ECW Press Connect to this eBook title Summary Note: Almost immediately upon Julie Bird's return to the small port town where she was raised, everyday life is turned upside down. Julie's Gulf War vet father, Marty, has been on the losing side of a battle with PTSD for too long. A day of boating takes a dramatic turn when a majestic blue whale beaches itself and dies. A blond stranger sets up camp oceanside: she's an agitator, musician-impersonator, and armchair philosopher named Jennie Lee Lewis - and Julie discovers she's connected to her father's mysterious trip to New Mexico 25 years earlier. As the blue whale decays on the beach, more wildlife turns up dead - apparently by suicide - echoing Marty's deepest desire. But Julie isn't ready for a world without her father. A stunning exploration of love and grief, Land Mammals and Sea Creatures is magic realism on the seaside, a novel about living life to the fullest and coming to your own terms with its end.
![Land mammals and sea creatures [eBook] : a novel](/Library/images/~imageCT100170.JPG "Land mammals and sea creatures [eBook] : a novel")
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2017., Adult, Random House Call No: Fic Sau Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln<U+2019>s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. 'My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,' the president says at the time. 'God has called him home.' Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy<U+2019>s body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie<U+2019>s soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction<U+2019>s ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?"--From publisher.
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2017., Adult, Random House Edition: eBook ed. Summary Note: "February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. 'My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,' the president says at the time. 'God has called him home.' Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy's body. From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state--called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo--a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie's soul. Lincoln in the Bardo is an astonishing feat of imagination and a bold step forward from one of the most important and influential writers of his generation. Formally daring, generous in spirit, deeply concerned with matters of the heart, it is a testament to fiction's ability to speak honestly and powerfully to the things that really matter to us. Saunders has invented a thrilling new form that deploys a kaleidoscopic, theatrical panorama of voices to ask a timeless, profound question: How do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?"--From publisher.
![Lincoln in the bardo [eBook] : a novel](/Library/images/~imageCT83145.JPG "Lincoln in the bardo [eBook] : a novel")
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2017., Adult, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. Call No: QWF Fic One Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Set in Montreal and New York between the wars, a spellbinding story about two gifted orphans - in love with each other since childhood - whose unusual magnetism and talent allow them to imagine a sensational future.
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c2013., General, ECW Press Call No: Fic Led Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: This is the story of two unlikely dreamers: Sam, a man who wakes up one day to find himself growing wings, and Lilah, a woman who has lost her brother to the streets of Vancouver. Sam finds himself falling away from the world as he grows feathers from his back, while Lilah makes her own subtle and terrifying transformation as she seeks sexual penance under the harsh hand of her boss. Sam and Lilah fall deeper into their separate spiritual paths, and the two hurtle closer and closer to a dark, unknown destiny, one that changes all that they know about life and pain, love and God, and how to find light in the most unforeseen places. Re-examining the traditional roles of priest and prophet, damned and divine, and creating something monstrous and exquisite, this well-crafted novel investigates the so-called truths behind religion and explores the intersection of pleasure and pain.
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-- Mister Chartwell.2011, c2010., Adult, HarperCollins Call No: Fic Hun Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In 1964, while in his bed, Winston Churchill is visited by Mr. Chartwell. In her home in Battersea, Esther Hammerhans, young and alone, answers her door to her new lodger. It's Mr. Chartwell. Mr. Chartwell is a huge, black dog - charismatic and seductive. Can Esther and Winston withstand his strange powerful charms and strong hold as their lives are slowly drawn together? In this utterly original, moving, funny and exuberant novel, Rebecca Hunt explores how two unlikely lives collide as Mr. Chartwell's motives are revealed to be far darker and deeper than they seem."--Publisher.
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2007., Warner Books Call No: BLK Fic Hop Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A mainstream magical realism novel set in the Caribbean on the fictional island of Dolorosse. It tells the story of a 50-something grandmother whose mother disappeared when she was a teenager and whose father has just passed away as she begins menopause. With this physical change of life comes a return of a special power for finding lost things, something she hasn't been able to do since childhood"--Provided by publisher.
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-- 100 years of solitude1970., Adult, Harper & Row Call No: Fic Gar Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Oprah's book clubSummary Note: "Novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility -- the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth -- these universal themes dominate the novel. Whether he is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Gabriel García Márquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an accounting of the history of the human race."--Harper & Row.
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2018., Adult, HarperCollins Publishers Ltd Call No: Fic Tur Edition: First Canadian edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden -- one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party -- can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath.
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C2013., Adult, Grand Central Pub. Call No: Fic Hop Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: As the only one in the family without magic, Makeda has decided to move out on her own and make a life for herself among the humans. But when her father goes missing, Makeda will have to find her own power, and reconcile with her twin sister Abby, if she's to have a hope of saving him.
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2017., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Canada Call No: IND Fic Rob Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Everyone knows a guy like Jared: the burnout kid in high school who sells weed cookies and has a scary mom who's often wasted and wielding some kind of weapon. Jared does smoke and drink too much, and he does make the best cookies in town, and his mom is a mess, but he's also a kid who has an immense capacity for compassion and an impulse to watch over people more than twice his age, and he can't rely on anyone for consistent love and support, except for his flatulent pit bull, Baby Killer (he calls her Baby)--and now she's dead. Jared can't count on his mom to stay sober and stick around to take care of him. He can't rely on his dad to pay the bills and support his new wife and step-daughter. Jared is only sixteen but feels like he is the one who must stabilize his family's life, even look out for his elderly neighbours. But he struggles to keep everything afloat... and sometimes he blacks out. And he puzzles over why his maternal grandmother has never liked him, why she says he's the son of a trickster, that he isn't human. Mind you, ravens speak to him--even when he's not stoned. You think you know Jared, but you don't."--From publisher.
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By Hosking, Jay2016., Adult, Penguin Canada Call No: Fic Hos Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "After several years of drifting between school and go-nowhere jobs, a young man is drawn back into the big city of his youth. The magnet is his beloved older sister, Grace: always smart and charismatic even when she was rebelling, and always his hero. Now she is a promising graduate student in psychophysics and the centre of a group of friends who take 'Little Brother' into their fold, where he finds camaraderie, romance, and even a decent job. But it soon becomes clear that things are not well with Grace. Always acerbic, she now veers into sudden rages that are increasingly directed at her adoring boyfriend, John, who is also her fellow researcher. When Grace disappears, and John shortly thereafter, the narrator makes an astonishing discovery in their apartment: a box big enough to crawl inside, a lab rat, and a note that says This is the only way back for us. Soon he embarks on a mission to discover the truth, a pursuit that forces him to question time and space itself, and ultimately toward a perilous confrontation at the very limits of imagination. This kinetic novel catapults the classic noir plot of a woman gone missing into the 21st century city, where so-called reality crashes into speculative science in a novel reminiscent of Danielewski's House of Leaves. Three Years with the Rat is simultaneously a mind-twisting mystery that plays with the very nature of time and the story of a young man who must face the dangerously destructive forces we all carry within ourselves."--From publisher.
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2016., Adult, Doubleday Call No: BLK Fic Whi Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood--where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned--Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor--engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city's placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. Like the protagonist of Gulliver's Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey--hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share."--From publisher.
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2016., Adult, Hamish Hamilton Call No: BLK Fic Oye Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is cleverly built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret--Oyeyemi's keys not only unlock elements of her characters' lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side. In 'Books and Roses' one special key opens a library, a garden, and clues to at least two lovers' fates. 'Sorry Doesn't Sweeten Her Tea' involves a 'house of locks,' where doors can be closed only with a key--with surprising, unobservable developments. And in 'If a Book Is Locked There's Probably a Good Reason for That Don't You Think,' a key keeps a mystical diary locked (for good reason). As ever, Oyeyemi's creative vision and storytelling are effervescent, wise, and insightful, and her tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers."--From publisher.
