According To Queeney

According To Queeney PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748125248
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
'A stellar literary event . . . written with panache and an enviable economy . . . the biggest risk of her literary life' Margaret Atwood According to Queeney is a masterly evocation of the last years of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain's greatest Man of Letters. The time is the 1770s and 1780s and Johnson, having completed his life's major work (he compiled the first ever Dictionary of the English Language) is running an increasingly chaotic life. Torn between his strict morality and his undeclared passion for Mrs Thrale, the wife of an old friend, According to Queeney reveals one of Britain's most wonderful characters in all his wit and glory. Above all, though, this is a story of love and friendship and brilliantly narrated by Queeney, Mrs Thrale's daughter, looking back over her life.

According To Queeney

According To Queeney PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748125248
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
'A stellar literary event . . . written with panache and an enviable economy . . . the biggest risk of her literary life' Margaret Atwood According to Queeney is a masterly evocation of the last years of Dr Johnson, arguably Britain's greatest Man of Letters. The time is the 1770s and 1780s and Johnson, having completed his life's major work (he compiled the first ever Dictionary of the English Language) is running an increasingly chaotic life. Torn between his strict morality and his undeclared passion for Mrs Thrale, the wife of an old friend, According to Queeney reveals one of Britain's most wonderful characters in all his wit and glory. Above all, though, this is a story of love and friendship and brilliantly narrated by Queeney, Mrs Thrale's daughter, looking back over her life.

A Quiet Life

A Quiet Life PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504039912
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 130

Get Book Here

Book Description
The tragicomic tale of a dysfunctional middle-class family in postwar England from the award-winning author of Injury Time. Though the Second World War has ended, times are anything but peaceful for seventeen-year-old Alan. His father, an entrepreneur who was once able to provide the family with a comfortable life, is now struggling to put food on the table. Meanwhile, Alan’s mother dresses as if money is plentiful and spends all her time avoiding her husband, indulging in the escapism of romance novels, and engaging in real-world love affairs. And as if a household struck by poverty and marital trouble isn’t enough, Alan’s bohemian sister, Madge, has been sneaking off into the sand dunes for lusty rendezvous with a German POW. All Alan wants is for his sister to stop cavorting around and driving their father mad—and for a pretty choir girl named Janet to notice him. But the more he wishes for a normal life, the more chaotic it becomes. Everyone in his family is hiding something, not only from one another but also from themselves. And they’re all desperately clinging to something that is inevitably falling apart. Award-winning British author Beryl Bainbridge has a keen eye for the dark humor that lurks in misery and a knack for illuminating the emotional rubble of postwar England. A Quiet Life is an entertaining family drama that is at once a quick read and a lasting portrait of twentieth-century life.

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century

Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Tiffany Potter
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442641819
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Get Book Here

Book Description
Top scholars in eighteenth-century studies examine the significance of the parallel devaluations of women's culture and popular culture by looking at theatres and actresses; novels, magazines, and cookbooks; and populist politics, dress, and portraiture.

The World According to Color

The World According to Color PDF Author: James Fox
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 125027852X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

Get Book Here

Book Description
A kaleidoscopic exploration that traverses history, literature, art, and science to reveal humans' unique and vibrant relationship with color. We have an extraordinary connection to color—we give it meanings, associations, and properties that last millennia and span cultures, continents, and languages. In The World According to Color, James Fox takes seven elemental colors—black, red, yellow, blue, white, purple, and green—and uncovers behind each a root idea, based on visual resemblances and common symbolism throughout history. Through a series of stories and vignettes, the book then traces these meanings to show how they morphed and multiplied and, ultimately, how they reveal a great deal about the societies that produced them: reflecting and shaping their hopes, fears, prejudices, and preoccupations. Fox also examines the science of how our eyes and brains interpret light and color, and shows how this is inherently linked with the meanings we give to hue. And using his background as an art historian, he explores many of the milestones in the history of art—from Bronze Age gold-work to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein—in a fresh way. Fox also weaves in literature, philosophy, cinema, archaeology, and art—moving from Monet to Marco Polo, early Japanese ink artists to Shakespeare and Goethe to James Bond. By creating a new history of color, Fox reveals a new story about humans and our place in the universe: second only to language, color is the greatest carrier of cultural meaning in our world.

Master Georgie

Master Georgie PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Little Brown
ISBN: 9780349111698
Category : British
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 1998 SHORTLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FICTION PRIZE WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE WH SMITH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD When Master Georgie - George Hardy, surgeon and photographer - sets off from the cold squalor of Victorian Liverpool for the heat and glitter of the Bosphorus to offer his services in the Crimea, there straggles behind him a small caravan of devoted followers; Myrtle, his adoring adoptive sister; lapsed geologist Dr Potter; and photographer's assistant and sometime fire-eater Pompey Jones, all of them driven onwards through a rising tide of death and disease by a shared and mysterious guilt. Combining a breathtaking eye for beauty with a visceral understanding of mortality, Beryl Bainbridge exposes her enigmatic hero as tenderly and unsparingly as she reveals the filth and misery of war, and creates a novel of luminous depth and extraordinary intensity.

Perfect

Perfect PDF Author: Rachel Joyce
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679645128
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry comes “a poignant, searing tale” (O: The Oprah Magazine) about a young boy who is thrown into the murky, difficult realities of the adult world. “A powerful book, rich with empathy and charged with beautiful, atmospheric writing.”—Tana French A nice house in a tony neighborhood. A hardworking husband. A private school for the children. From the outside, Diana has a perfect life. But her sensitive and observant young son notices that the other kids’ mothers are not like his own. They dress differently. Byron’s father prefers that his wife dress formally, in slim skirts and pointy heels. He gives Diana a Jaguar so neighbors will sit up and take notice. And they do. Then, one morning, during a shortcut to school through a poor neighborhood, something happens that Byron cannot shake and his mother refuses to acknowledge. Until she has no choice. In the weeks that follow, the façade of a happy family shows signs of distress. Diana makes a questionable friend, and an increasingly tense dance begins—between guilt and resentment, envy and regret—all leading to a tragedy and a shattering revelation.

Writing with Intent

Writing with Intent PDF Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786747765
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book Here

Book Description
From one of the world's most passionately engaged and acclaimed literary citizens comes Writing with Intent, the largest collection to date of Margaret Atwood's nonfiction, ranging from 1983 to 2005. Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces to great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize -- winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

Every Man for Himself

Every Man for Himself PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Abacus Software
ISBN: 9780349108704
Category : Sea stories
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Get Book Here

Book Description
For the four fraught, mysterious days of her doomed maiden voyage in 1912, the Titanic sails towards New York, glittering with luxury, freighted with millionaires and hopefuls. In her labyrinthine passageways are played out the last, secret hours of a small group of passengers, their fate sealed in prose of startling, sublime beauty, as Beryl Bainbridge's haunting masterpiece moves inexorably to its known and terrible end.

Injury Time

Injury Time PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504039408
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Whitbread Literary Award: A darkly humorous tale about a 1970s dinner party gone terribly wrong by one of Britain’s most renowned authors. Edward is normally a cautious man, especially when it comes to his mistress, Binny. But he feels bad that his lover never gets to enjoy the small intimacies of marriage, like sorting his socks or picking out gifts for his family. It is out of this guilt that Edward agrees to throw a dinner party with his “real friends” so Binny can feel more involved in his life and play hostess for a night. But there’s one catch: Edward has to be home no later than eleven to keep his wife from discovering his infidelity. The invitees to the secret soiree are a discreet couple: Simpson, an aspiring adulterer himself, and Muriel, a simultaneously disapproving and open-minded housewife. But as Binny haphazardly prepares the food, shoos her children out for the night, and frets about the aesthetics of her front lawn, the guests take an unintended detour through her run-down neighborhood. Edward, meanwhile, is silently panicking—and drinking. Simpson and Muriel finally arrive, and when everyone sits down to eat, it’s already a quarter past nine. Things get off to a decent, if awkward, start, until there’s a loud knock at the door. It’s Binny’s scandalously drunk old friend, Alma, who proceeds to vomit and pass out. But what should be the end of the evening is only the beginning. More unexpected guests arrive—this time it’s bank robbers with sawed-off shotguns. What follows is a chaotic and hilarious series of events, replete with a fake ping-pong match, a baby carriage full of cash, and a delirious getaway. Edward soon begins to worry less about getting home on time, and more about making it home at all. Equal parts dark comedy and thriller, Injury Time is a witty take on 1970s social mores by one of the most celebrated British authors, Beryl Bainbridge, who was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize five times. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Beryl Bainbridge including rare images from the author’s estate.

The Dressmaker

The Dressmaker PDF Author: Beryl Bainbridge
Publisher: Abacus
ISBN: 0748125736
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 105

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The book I wish I'd written . . . Witty, chilling, every word in place' Hilary Mantel, Guardian Wartime Liverpool is a place of ration books and jobs in munitions factories. Rita, living with her two aunts Nellie and Margo, is emotionally naïve and withdrawn. When she meets Ira, a GI, at a neighbour's party she falls in love as much with the idea of life as a GI bride as with the man himself. But Nellie and Margo are not so blind...