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Author: Andrew Fidel Fernando
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529036070
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Dense Green forests in Yala, white-sand coasts in Trincomalee, azure waters off the South Coast, Anuradhapura's ancient temples, and cricket. Civil war, political assassinations, internally displaced communities, industrial-scale corruption. All are Sri Lanka. As are smug bureaucrats, nosy neighbours, and stray dogs with serious axes to grind. Through the eyes of Andrew Fidel Fernando, cricket writer par excellence, both a local and a tourist in his home country, Sri Lanka comes alive as he hurtles down hills in Kandy, breathes in the history at the rock fortress of Sigiriya, grapples with the aftermath of war in Jaffna, and has himself evicted from restaurants near Galle. Weaving through all manner of villages, paddy fields, mountains, jungles and marshlands, and pausing for the pests at grimy guesthouses and the vacationers of luxury hotels, Fernando has the time for every genre of person and wildlife in this chaotic, exquisite, frustrating, bewitching, tumultuous and intoxicating land. Hilariously witty yet wistfully sombre, Upon a Sleepless Isle is the story of a country and a people caught between long historical traditions and global capitalism, resulting in this ingenious paradise.
Author: Andrew Fidel Fernando
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1529036070
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Get Book Here
Book Description
Dense Green forests in Yala, white-sand coasts in Trincomalee, azure waters off the South Coast, Anuradhapura's ancient temples, and cricket. Civil war, political assassinations, internally displaced communities, industrial-scale corruption. All are Sri Lanka. As are smug bureaucrats, nosy neighbours, and stray dogs with serious axes to grind. Through the eyes of Andrew Fidel Fernando, cricket writer par excellence, both a local and a tourist in his home country, Sri Lanka comes alive as he hurtles down hills in Kandy, breathes in the history at the rock fortress of Sigiriya, grapples with the aftermath of war in Jaffna, and has himself evicted from restaurants near Galle. Weaving through all manner of villages, paddy fields, mountains, jungles and marshlands, and pausing for the pests at grimy guesthouses and the vacationers of luxury hotels, Fernando has the time for every genre of person and wildlife in this chaotic, exquisite, frustrating, bewitching, tumultuous and intoxicating land. Hilariously witty yet wistfully sombre, Upon a Sleepless Isle is the story of a country and a people caught between long historical traditions and global capitalism, resulting in this ingenious paradise.
Author: Pam Elise Harris
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 380
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Book Description
A sixteen-year-old girl is on the run, banished from her family's noble fiefdom and resolute to save her father after the royal court exiled him to a faraway land of untamed magic. In this provocative and fast-paced fantasy adventure, Jade Sol must survive on her wits and determination while unraveling the secrets and lies of the royal court. She discovers that their machinations not only threaten her and her family, but the world itself.
Author: Luke Slattery
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
ISBN: 1460709012
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 237
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Book Description
From one of Australia's foremost journalists, Luke Slattery, comes a rich, intense novel of desire and dashed dreams, and one passionate, unforgettable woman - Elizabeth Macquarie. 'A richly evocative piece of historical fiction...beautifully written.' Good Weekend Elizabeth Macquarie, widow of the disgraced former Governor of New South Wales, Lachlan Macquarie, is in mourning - not only for her husband, but the loss of their shared dream to transform the penal colony into a bright new world. Over the course of one long sleepless night on the windswept isle of Mull, she remembers her life in that wild and strange country; a revolution of ideas as dramatic as any in history; and her dangerous alliance with the brilliant, mercurial Francis Greenway, the colony's maverick architect. A stirring, provocative and thrilling novel of passion, ideas, reforming zeal and desire. 'Moving, intricate novel ... Every love story has at its heart a vision of inherent human worth in the beloved; Slattery's achievement is to render, subtly and powerfully both a human love story, and a love story to the nation.' Anna Funder, author of All That I Am 'A remarkable early 19th century heroine comes alive for us in this story: we share Mrs M.'s thoughts and feelings in almost uncanny fashion. Luke Slattery's debut sets new standards for the Australian historical novel.' Nicolas Rothwell 'A richly evocative piece of historical fiction...beautifully written.' Good Weekend 'It is, at its core, the story of Slattery's most extraordinary creation: Mrs M, whose real-world counterpart was the wife of Lachlan Macquarie, fifth governor of the colony of New South Wales (1810-21). ... There is a kind of clarion certainty to her ... I think readers will be swept up by this creation. The narrative would grab me with moments of exquisite cadence and perfect emotional truth ... Told in Elizabeth's voice, and seen through her eyes, the sensuous descriptions of her Scotland and her Sydney - as well as her own inner world - rise off the page with a poet's perfect pitch.' The Australian 'Saul Bellow says somewhere that in fiction sentences should be 'charged' - something should quietly beat through them. When one begins reading this is what you should listen for - imaginative confidence, a sense of sureness. This applies to historical fiction as much as any other. You don't ask, 'Is this true to history?' You ask 'Is this true to itself?' Luke Slattery's Mrs M is imaginatively true from beginning to end.' Barry Oakley
Author: Hugh Raffles
Publisher: Verse Chorus Press
ISBN: 1891241745
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415
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Book Description
From the author of lnsectopedia, a powerful exploration of loss, grief, endurance, and the absences that permeate the present. Unconformities are gaps in the geological record, physical evidence of breaks in time. For Hugh Raffles, these holes in history are also fissures in feeling, knowledge, memory, and understanding. In this endlessly inventive, riveting book, Raffles enters these gaps, drawing together threads of geology, history, literature, philosophy, and ethnography to trace the intimate connections between personal loss and world historical events, and to reveal the force of absence at the core of contemporary life. Through deeply researched explorations of Neolithic stone circles, Icelandic lava, mica from a Nazi concentration camp, petrified whale blubber in Svalbard, the marble prized by Manhattan's Lenape, and a huge Greenlandic meteorite that arrived in New York City along with six Inuit adventurers in 1897, Raffles shows how unconformities unceasingly incite human imagination and investigation yet refuse to conform, heal, or disappear. A journey across eons and continents, The Book of Unconformities is also a journey through stone: this most solid, ancient, and enigmatic of materials, it turns out, is as lively, capricious, willful, and indifferent as time itself.
Author: Brad Leithauser
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525564128
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime. Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's most breathtaking architectural sites. Perhaps not surprisingly, Louie gets waylaid on his very first stop in Rome--ludicrously, spectacularly so--and fails to reach most of his other destinations. He embarks on a doomed romance with a jilted bride celebrating her ruined marriage plans alone in London. And in the Arctic he finds that turf houses and aluminum sheds don't amount to much of an architectural tradition. But it turns out that there's another sort of architecture there: icebergs the size of cathedrals, bobbing beside a strange and wondrous landscape. It soon becomes clear that Louie's grand journey is less about where his wanderings have taken him and more about where his past encounters with romance have not. Whether pursuing his first wife, or his estranged current wife, or the older woman he kissed just once a quarter-century ago, Louie reveals himself to be endearing, deeply touching, wonderfully ridiculous . . . and destined to find love in all the wrong places.
Author: Maeve Binchy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9780743457460
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
An anthology of sixteen short stories about family, friendship, and love features contributions from popular Irish women authors.
Author: Samanth Subramanian
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466878746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Samanth Subramanian has written about politics, culture, and history for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Now, Subramanian takes on a complex topic that touched millions of lives in This Divided Island. In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to an end the civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere, leaving few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he tells the story of Sri Lanka today. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.
Author: Jessica Brockmole
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448164583
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
_______________________________________ A sweeping love story told through letters, spanning two continents and two world wars. For fans of My Dear, I Wanted to Tell You, The Postmistress and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. UNITED BY LETTERS. SEPARATED BY AN OCEAN. DEVASTATED BY WAR. A letter isn't always just a letter. Words on the page can drench the soul. Elspeth Dunn, a published poet living on the Isle of Skye, answers her first fan letter from Davey Graham, an impetuous young man in Illinois. Without having to worry about appearances or expectations, Elspeth and Davey confess their hopes, dreams and fears, things they've never told another soul. Even without meeting, they know one another. But as World War I engulfs Europe and Davey volunteers as an ambulance driver on the Western front, Elspeth can only wait on Skye, anxious for his return; wondering if they'll ever get a chance to meet.
Author: Jonathan Friesen
Publisher: Blink
ISBN: 0310731844
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276
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Book Description
Only He Can Bring What They Need to Survive. In the year 2250, water is scarce, and those who control it control everything. Sixteen-year-old Luca has struggled with this truth, and what it means, his entire life. As the son of the Deliverer, he will one day have to descend to the underground Aquifer each year and negotiate with the reportedly ratlike miners who harvest the world’s fresh water. But he has learned the true control rests with the Council aboveground, a group that has people following without hesitation, and which has forbidden all emotion and art in the name of keeping the peace. And this Council has broken his father’s spirit, while also forcing Luca to hide every feeling that rules his heart. But when Luca’s father goes missing, everything shifts. Luca is forced underground, and discovers secrets, lies, and mysteries that cause him to reevaluate who he is and the world he serves. Together with his friends and a very alluring girl, Luca seeks to free his people and the Rats from the Council’s control. But Luca’s mission is not without struggle and loss, as his desire to uncover the truth could have greater consequences than he ever imagined.
Author: Kenneth Calhoun
Publisher: Hogarth
ISBN: 0804137153
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
For fans of The Age of Miracles and The Dog Stars, Black Moon is a hallucinatory and stunning debut that Charles Yu calls “Gripping and expertly constructed.” Insomnia has claimed everyone Biggs knows. Even his beloved wife, Carolyn, has succumbed to the telltale red-rimmed eyes, slurred speech and cloudy mind before disappearing into the quickly collapsing world. Yet Biggs can still sleep, and dream, so he sets out to find her. He ventures out into a world ransacked by mass confusion and desperation, where he meets others struggling against the tide of sleeplessness. Chase and his buddy Jordan are devising a scheme to live off their drug-store lootings; Lila is a high school student wandering the streets in an owl mask, no longer safe with her insomniac parents; Felicia abandons the sanctuary of a sleep research center to try to protect her family and perhaps reunite with Chase, an ex-boyfriend. All around, sleep has become an infinitely precious commodity. Money can’t buy it, no drug can touch it, and there are those who would kill to have it. However, Biggs persists in his quest for Carolyn, finding a resolve and inner strength that he never knew he had. Kenneth Calhoun has written a brilliantly realized and utterly riveting depiction of a world gripped by madness, one that is vivid, strange, and profoundly moving.
