Search Results: Returned 12 Results, Displaying Titles 1 - 12
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2009, c2008., Plume Call No: Fic Ben Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A writer visits his retired grandparents in Florida to document their experience during the infamous siege of Leningrad. His grandmother won't talk about it, but his grandfather reluctantly consents. The result is the captivating odyssey of two young men trying to survive against desperate odds.
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2021., Adult, Scribner Call No: Fic Doe Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of perhaps the most bestselling and beloved literary fiction of our time comes a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring novel about children on the cusp of adulthood in a broken world, who find resilience, hope, and story. The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport, Idaho, today, and on a spaceship bound for a distant exoplanet decades from now, an ancient text provides solace and the most profound human connection to characters in peril. They all learn the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a better world. Twelve-year-old Anna lives in a convent where women toil all day embroidering the robes of priests. She learns to read from an old Greek tutor she encounters on her errands in the city. In an abandoned priory, she finds a stash of old books. One is Aethon's story, which she reads to her sister as the walls of Constantinople are bombarded by armies of Saracens. Anna escapes, carrying only a small sack with bread, salt fish-and the book. Outside the city walls, Anna meets Omeir, a village boy who was conscripted, along with his beloved pair of oxen, to fight in the Sultan's conquest. His oxen have died; he has deserted. In Lakeport, Idaho, in 2020, Seymour, a young activist bent on saving the earth, sits in the public library with two homemade bombs in pressure cookers-another siege. Upstairs, eighty-five-year old Zeno, a former prisoner-of-war, and an amateur translator, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon's adventures. On an interstellar ark called The Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault with sacks of Nourish powder and access to all the information in the world-or so she is told. She knows Aethon's story through her father, who has sequestered her to protect her. Konstance, encased on a spaceship decades from now, has never lived on our beloved Earth. Alone in a vault with sacks of Nourish powder and access to "all the information in the world," she knows Aethon's storythrough her father. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Konstance, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, the young Zeno, the children in the library are dreamers and misfits on the cusp of adulthood in a world the grown-ups have broken. They through their own resilience and resourcefulness, and through story. Dedicated to "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come," Anthony Doerr's Cloud Cuckoo Land is about the power of story and the astonishing survival of the physical book when for thousands of years they were so rare and so feared, dying, as one character says, "in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants." It is a hauntingly beautiful and redemptive novel about stewardship-of the book, of the Earth, of the human heart.
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2012, c2011., Adult, HarperCollins Call No: Fic Qui Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "June 1941: Nazi troops surround the city of Leningrad, planning to shell and starve its people into submission. Most of the cultural elite escape, but the famous composer Shostakovich stays behind to defend his city. That winter, the bleakest in Russian history, the Party orders Karl Eliasberg, the shy, difficult conductor of a second-rate orchestra, to prepare for the task of a lifetime: he is to organize a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, a haunting, defiant new piece that will be relayed by loudspeakers to the front lines. Eliasberg's musicians are starving and scarcely have the strength to carry their instruments, but for five freezing months, the conductor stubbornly drives them on, depriving those who falter of their bread rations. Slowly the music begins to dissolve the nagging hunger, the exploding streets, the slow deaths . . . but at what cost? Eliasberg's relationships are strained, obsession takes hold and his orchestra grows weaker. Soon, they are struggling not just to perform but to stay alive."--Publisher.
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-- Dove keepers.2011., Scribner Call No: Fic Hof Edition: 1st Scribner hardcover ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: A tale inspired by the tragic first-century massacre of hundreds of Jewish people at Masada presents the stories of a hated daughter, a baker's wife, a girl disguised as a warrior, and a medicine woman who keep doves and secrets while Roman soldiers drawnear.
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2021., Adult, Simon & Schuster Canada Call No: Fic Gra Edition: Simon & Schuster Canada edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Inspired by a little-known chapter of World War II history, a young Protestant girl and her Jewish neighbour are caught up in the terrible wave of hate sweeping the globe on the eve of war.
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c2008., Headline Call No: Fic His Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Sonia is in Granada to celebrate a friend's birthday with a dance class. She knows nothing of the city's shocking past, but ordering a simple cup of coffee in a quiet cafe will lead her into the extraordinary tale of a family's fight to survive the horror of Spain' s civil war.
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c1998., Gallimard Call No: FR Fic Ruf Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: Collection Folio Volume: 3394.
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1990,c1981., Dalkey Archive Press Call No: Fic Mos Edition: 1st American ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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-- Siege thirteenc2012., Adult, Thomas Allen Publishers Call No: Fic Dob Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In December of 1944, the Red Army entered Budapest to begin one of the bloodiest sieges of the Second World War. By February, the siege was over, but its effects were to be felt for decades afterward. Siege 13 is a collection of thirteen linked stories about this terrible time in history, both its historical moment, but also later, as a legacy of silence, haunting, and trauma that shadows the survivors. Set in both Budapest before and after the siege, and in the present day -- in Canada, the U.S., and parts of Europe -- Siege 13 traces the ripple effect of this time on characters directly involved, and on their friends, associates, sons, daughters, grandchildren, and adoptive countries.
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2004., New York Review Books Call No: Fic Far Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Series Title: New York Review Books classics.
