The Most Precious Substance on Earth

The Most Precious Substance on Earth PDF Author: Shashi Bhat
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1538707934
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Journey Prize winner Shashi Bhat’s "powerful, surprising and terrifying" (Rufi Thorpe) story about a high school student's traumatic experience and how it irrevocably alters her life, for fans of 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, Girlhood, and Pen15. Bright, hilarious, and sensitive fourteen-year-old Nina spends her spare time reading Beowulf and flirting with an internet predator. She has a vicious crush on her English teacher, and her best friend Amy is slowly drifting away. Meanwhile, Nina’s mother tries to match her up with local Indian boys unfamiliar with her Saved by the Bell references, and Nina’s worried father has started reciting Hindu prayers outside her bedroom door. Beginning with a disturbing incident at her high school, The Most Precious Substance on Earth tells stories of Nina’s life from the ‘90s to present day, when she returns to the classroom as a high school teacher with a haunting secret and discovers that the past is never far behind her. Darkly funny, deeply affecting, unsettling, and at times even shocking, Shashi Bhat’s irresistible novel-in-stories examines the relationships between those who take and those who have something taken. The Most Precious Substance on Earth is a sharp-edged and devastating look at how women are conditioned to hide their trauma and suppress their fear, loneliness, and anger, and an unforgettable portrait of how silence can shape a life.

Shut Up You're Pretty

Shut Up You're Pretty PDF Author: Téa Mutonji
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527561
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
Winner, Trillium Book Award In Téa Mutonji’s disarming debut story collection, a woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding, a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes, a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides on shaving her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator’s experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humor, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed. Shut Up You’re Pretty is the first book to be published under VS. Books, a series of books curated and edited by writer-musician Vivek Shraya featuring work by new and emerging Indigenous or Black writers, or writers of color. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The Conditions of Love

The Conditions of Love PDF Author: Dale M. Kushner
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
ISBN: 1455519766
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
“A teenage girl endures fire, flood and the loss of her parents in this bracing, oddly uplifting debut” set in the American Midwest of the mid-20th century (Kirkus). Dale M. Kushner’s acclaimed debut novel traces the journey of a girl from childhood to adulthood as she reckons with her parents’ abandonment, her need to break from society’s limitations, and her overwhelming desire for love both spiritual and erotic. In 1953, ten-year-old Eunice lives in the backwaters of Wisconsin with her outrageously narcissistic mother, a manicureeste and movie star worshipper. Abandoned by her father as an infant, Eunice worries that she will become a misfit like her mother. But when a freak storm sends Eunice away from all things familiar, a strange odyssey begins. Through her capacity to redefine herself, reject bitterness and keep her heart open, Eunice survives and even flourishes despite hardship, heartbreak and loss.

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau

The Lost Book of Adana Moreau PDF Author: Michael Zapata
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1488055734
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
*Winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction* A Heartland Booksellers Award Nominee An NPR Best Book of the Year A BookPage Best Book of the Year A Library Journal Best Winter/Spring Debut of 2020 A Most Anticipated Book of 2020 from the Boston Globe and The Millions A Best Book of February 2020 at Salon, The Millions, LitHub and Vol 1. Brooklyn “A stunner—equal parts epic and intimate, thrilling and elegiac.”—Laura Van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel The mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans In 1929 in New Orleans, a Dominican immigrant named Adana Moreau writes a science fiction novel. The novel earns rave reviews, and Adana begins a sequel. Then she falls gravely ill. Just before she dies, she destroys the only copy of the manuscript. Decades later in Chicago, Saul Drower is cleaning out his dead grandfather’s home when he discovers a mysterious manuscript written by none other than Adana Moreau. With the help of his friend Javier, Saul tracks down an address for Adana’s son in New Orleans, but as Hurricane Katrina strikes they must head to the storm-ravaged city for answers. What results is a brilliantly layered masterpiece—an ode to home, storytelling and the possibility of parallel worlds.

Stuff Matters

Stuff Matters PDF Author: Mark Miodownik
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544236041
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
An eye-opening adventure deep inside the everyday materials that surround us, from concrete and steel to denim and chocolate, packed with surprising stories and fascinating science.

Technicolor Pulp

Technicolor Pulp PDF Author: Arty Nelson
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 0446565881
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
Twenty-three-year-old Jimmi struggles for a sense of identity and an understanding of the world as he travels to London and Paris while under the influence of drugs, alcohol, and tumultuous sex. With a pocket full of borrowed money and a head full of rain, Jimi sits in a pub in London, where he has traveled for no reason except that London isn't Boston, or Manhattan, or the college where Jimi wasted four years, or the brick alleyways where he's puked and made love and crawled and laughed at the night. Jimi Banks is 23: went to school as a hockey player and now just skates: diseased and innocent, criminal and pure. His summer love that started on a posh island crashed on the dusty mainland. And his best friend is dead. From London in a cloud of hashish and tobacco, booze and beer...to Paris to stay with the daughter of a banker who wants to be a patron of the arts...back to London, broke again, where a man named Rosie declares his undying love and it's all right with Jimi if it just comes with a meal....Jimi Banks is dodging shadows. There's his friend, Ray, who hung himself in a gorge outside Aspen; his family who won't return his phone calls anymore; and the vast quantities of booze he has to drink to call them. Out of money, out of favors, Jimi is just not out of places to run.

Saturn's Return to New York

Saturn's Return to New York PDF Author: Sara Gran
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1569473056
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
When Mary Forrest receives the gift of an astrological reading for her birthday, she doesn't expect it to be the harbinger of her life's imminent upheaval. But this is Mary's Saturn Return year, her twenty-ninth; the year that the planet Saturn returns to the exact spot it was in when she was born. According to astrology, the return of Saturn brings major life challenges that, if not met, will cycle back again 29 year later. While skeptical of the reading at first, Mary can't help but find some truth in it as her mother becomes seriously ill, her job in New York City is at a dead end, and memories of past relationships haunt her. To make it through the year, Mary must overcome intimacy and abandonment issues, resurrect her relationship with her ailing mother, and learn to trust the man she loves. A novel of flawed but believable characters, Sara Gran's debut, Saturn's Return to New York, is an introspective story of the relationships and setbacks that shape us.

The Book of the Most Precious Substance

The Book of the Most Precious Substance PDF Author: Sara Gran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578947099
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
The highly anticipated new thriller from internationally renowned author Sara Gran, author of Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt series. A mysterious book that promises unlimited power and unrivaled sexual pleasure. A down-on-her-luck book dealer hoping for the sale of a lifetime. And a twist so shocking, no one will come out unscathed. After a tragedy too painful to bear, former novelist Lily Albrecht has resigned herself to a dull, sexless life as a rare book dealer. Until she gets a lead on a book that just might turn everything around. The Book of the Most Precious Substance is a 17th century manual on sex magic, rumored to be the most powerful occult book ever written--if it really exists at all. And some of the wealthiest people in the world are willing to pay Lily a fortune to find it-if she can. Her search for the book takes her from New York to New Orleans to Munich to Paris, searching the dark corners of power where the world's wealthiest people use black magic to fulfill their desires. Will Lily fulfill her own desires, and join them? Or will she lose it all searching for a ghost? The Book of the Most Precious Substance is an addictive erotic thriller about the lengths we'll go to get what we need-and what we want.

No Man's Land

No Man's Land PDF Author: John Vigna
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551528673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
In this powerful, panoramic novel set in the late 1890s, in a sliver of rugged western wilderness, a fourteen-year-old girl named Davey—too young to be given a chance at creating her own life—finds herself raised by a group of eccentrics, hostile misfits who rescued her as an infant on a bloody battlefield. She roams the countryside with them, led by Reverend Brown, a charismatic false prophet, hosting revivals for unsuspecting believers while lingering on the cusp of unimaginable events. Davey tries to locate a semblance of peace in this harrowing, beautiful place, but what she finds instead is an astonishing panoply of falsehoods and depravity, a vicious world comprised of murderers, thieves, and dancing bears. And in this unforgiving landscape of craggy beauty and singular resoluteness, she wages a fight against truth while traversing the delicate line between destiny and fate as she comes to understand the role Reverend Brown plays in her life. No Man’s Land is part classic coming-of-age story, part unwavering portrait of the bloody price of power, a raw and bold novel about the search for family, and a grand story about an education in the pull of predestination and the responsibility of freewill. Haunting on every page, filled with sorrow and awe, and stunning in the tonality of its vision, No Man’s Land is an unflinching meditation on the legacy of violence, its senseless destructiveness, and the fearless dignity and tenderness required to rise above it. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

Two Across

Two Across PDF Author: Jeffrey Bartsch
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 145555460X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Highly awkward teenager Stanley Owens meets his match in beautiful, brainy Vera Baxter when they tie for first place in the annual National Spelling Bee-and the two form a bond that will change both of their lives. Though their mothers have big plans for them-Stanley will become a senator, Vera a mathematics professor-neither wants to follow these pre-determined paths. So Stanley hatches a scheme to marry Vera in a sham wedding for the cash gifts, hoping they will enable him to pursue his one true love: crossword puzzle construction. In enlisting Vera to marry him, though, he neglects one variable: she's secretly in love with him, which makes their counterfeit ceremony an exercise in misery for her. Realizing the truth only after she's moved away and cut him out of her life, Stanley tries to atone for his mistakes and win her back. But he's unable to find her, until one day he comes across a puzzle whose clues make him think it could only have been created by Vera. Intrigued, he plays along, communicating back to her via his own gridded clues. But will they connect again before it's all too late?