A Net for Small Fishes

A Net for Small Fishes PDF Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526616645
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 'What a ride!' India Knight, Sunday Times Summer reads 'Thrilling... a sumptuous feast of plotting and intrigue' Mail on Sunday 'A complete joy' Bettany Hughes 'Gloriously immersive' Guardian ------------------------------------------------- Frances Howard has beauty and a powerful family – and is the most unhappy creature in the world. Anne Turner has wit and talent – but no stage on which to display them. Little stands between her and the abyss of destitution. When these two very different women meet in strange circumstances, a powerful friendship is sparked. Frankie sweeps Anne into a world of splendour that exceeds all she imagined: a Court whose foreign king is a stranger to his own subjects; where ancient families fight for power, and where the sovereign's favourite may rise and rise – so long as he remains in favour. Anne and Frankie dare to seek a little happiness for themselves in this extravagant, savage hunting ground. But as they gain notice, they also gain enemies; what began as a search for love and safety leads to desperate acts that could cost them everything. Based on the true scandal that rocked the court of James I, A Net for Small Fishes is the most gripping novel you'll read this year: an exhilarating dive into the pitch-dark waters of the Jacobean court.

A Net for Small Fishes

A Net for Small Fishes PDF Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526616645
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AUTHORS' CLUB BEST FIRST NOVEL AWARD 'What a ride!' India Knight, Sunday Times Summer reads 'Thrilling... a sumptuous feast of plotting and intrigue' Mail on Sunday 'A complete joy' Bettany Hughes 'Gloriously immersive' Guardian ------------------------------------------------- Frances Howard has beauty and a powerful family – and is the most unhappy creature in the world. Anne Turner has wit and talent – but no stage on which to display them. Little stands between her and the abyss of destitution. When these two very different women meet in strange circumstances, a powerful friendship is sparked. Frankie sweeps Anne into a world of splendour that exceeds all she imagined: a Court whose foreign king is a stranger to his own subjects; where ancient families fight for power, and where the sovereign's favourite may rise and rise – so long as he remains in favour. Anne and Frankie dare to seek a little happiness for themselves in this extravagant, savage hunting ground. But as they gain notice, they also gain enemies; what began as a search for love and safety leads to desperate acts that could cost them everything. Based on the true scandal that rocked the court of James I, A Net for Small Fishes is the most gripping novel you'll read this year: an exhilarating dive into the pitch-dark waters of the Jacobean court.

The Founding Fish

The Founding Fish PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706344
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Get Book Here

Book Description
John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after--its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.

The Northern Lights

The Northern Lights PDF Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140290158
Category : Auroras
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Just over one hundred years ago Kristian Birkeland looked into the night sky of his native Norway and saw in the beautiful Northern Lights a mystery waiting to be solved. Determined to prove to the world his bold theory about the heavens above, this misunderstood genius began a quest that would take him from Norway's ice mountains to the deserts of Africa, and across a continent ravaged by war. It was a quest that alienated friends and family, ruined his health and sanity, and ended in his mysterious death in a Japanese hotel in 1917. Lucy Jago brilliantly tells the fascinating and tragic story of Kristian Birkeland, the man who saw in the night sky a secret that no one else could see, but who died trying to convince the world of his vision.

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes PDF Author: Dan Egan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393246442
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Award "Nimbly splices together history, science, reporting and personal experiences into a taut and cautiously hopeful narrative.… Egan’s book is bursting with life (and yes, death)." —Robert Moor, New York Times Book Review The Great Lakes—Erie, Huron, Michigan, Ontario, and Superior—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come.

The Judge Hunter

The Judge Hunter PDF Author: Christopher Buckley
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501192531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book Here

Book Description
The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, in which a hapless Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of two judges who helped murder a king. London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar “Balty” St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king’s navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execution of the last king, Charles I. When Balty’s ship arrives in Boston, he finds a strange country filled with fundamentalist Puritans, saintly Quakers, warring tribes of Indians, and rogues of every stripe. Helped by a man named Huncks, an agent of the Crown with a mysterious past, Balty travels colonial America in search of the missing judges. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Pepys prepares for a war with the Dutch that fears England has no chance of winning. Christopher Buckley’s enchanting new novel spins adventure, comedy, political intrigue, and romance against a historical backdrop with real-life characters like Charles II, John Winthrop, and Peter Stuyvesant. Buckley’s wit is as sharp as ever as he takes readers to seventeenth-century London and New England. We visit the bawdy court of Charles II, Boston under the strict Puritan rule, and New Amsterdam back when Manhattan was a half-wild outpost on the edge of an unmapped continent. The Judge Hunter is a smart and swiftly plotted novel that transports readers to a new world.

Montacute House

Montacute House PDF Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408803771
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Cess works caring for the chickens at Montacute House but on her thirteenth birthday everything changes. She finds a precious locket hidden in the chicken coop and is convinced someone has placed it there for her to find. But the day is overshadowed by fear as a boy's body is found by the river, and then when William disappears, Cess is accused by the villagers of bewitching her best friend. Cess is determined to find William and prove the villagers wrong, but is soon embroiled in a plot that threatens her world and forces Cess to draw on powers she never knew she possessed, powers that will place her life in danger if they are discovered by the villagers. Witchcraft, politics and religious ambition combine in this gripping and wonderfully realised novel set in the Somerset of the 1500s.

Striper Wars

Striper Wars PDF Author: Dick Russell
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911105
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
When populations of striped bass began plummeting in the early 1980s, author and fisherman Dick Russell was there to lead an Atlantic coast conservation campaign that resulted in one of the most remarkable wildlife comebacks in the history of fisheries. As any avid fisherman will tell you, the striped bass has long been a favorite at the American dinner table; in fact, we've been feasting on the fish from the time of the Pilgrims. By 1980 that feasting had turned to overfishing by commercial fishing interests. Striper Wars is Dick Russell's inspiring account of the people and events responsible for the successful preservation of one of America's favorite fish and of what has happened since. Striper Wars is a tale replete with heroes--and some villains--as the struggle to save the striper migrated down the coast from Massachusetts to Maryland. Russell introduces us to a postman at arms against a burly trap-net fisherman, a renowned state governor caving to special interests, and a fishing-tackle maker fighting alongside marine biologists. And he describes how champions of this singular fish blocked power plants and New York's Westway Project that would otherwise compromise its habitat. Unfortunately, those who cheered the triumphant ending to the campaign, as the coastal states enacted measures that enabled the striped bass to make its comeback, have found the peace transitory--there is now a new enemy emerging on the front. In recent years a chronic bacterial disease has struck more than seventy percent of the striped bass population in the primary spawning waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Malnutrition seems to be a significant factor, brought on by the same overfishing that plagued the bass in the first battle--only this time, the overfishing is devastating menhaden, the silvery little fish upon which the bass feed. Lessons learned during the first conservation battle are being applied here, highlighting a need for a whole new ecosystem-based approach to conserving species. Only with constant vigilance by concerned citizens, Dick Russell reminds us, can environmental victories be sustained. This particular fish story is a personal one for him, and he follows the striper's saga today all the way to California, where the fish was introduced in 1879 and where agribusiness now threatens its future. For his conservation work during the 1980s Russell received a citizen's Chevron Conservation Award.

Ismael and His Sisters

Ismael and His Sisters PDF Author: Louise Stern
Publisher: Granta Books
ISBN: 184708947X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
Siblings Ismael, Rosie and Cristina are deaf, and so are many in their Maya village. The deaf and hearing alike communicate in sign language, forming a tightly-knit community with an unsophisticated, simple lifestyle. But when Ismael gets into a fight at the local fiesta and flees the village, leaving Rosie and Cristina to fend for themselves, the daily rhythms of village life are disrupted, and all that they trust in comes under threat. Ismael and His Sisters is a remarkable debut novel from the acclaimed author of Chattering. It conjures up a world set apart, made visceral through its concentrated language, where sign language bridges exterior and interior worlds and gives a physical shape to the way we experience the world. It explores the interplay between the powerful forces within us and the dark elemental forces beyond our control, exposing the 'bottomless, hostile ocean' in which we all flounder. This is an extraordinary novel about the power of familial bonds, the barriers we build out of language, the dark elemental forces that threaten to overwhelm us, and above all, what it is like to be human.

Shaler's Fish

Shaler's Fish PDF Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802190707
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book Here

Book Description
“Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald’s gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.”—Publishers Weekly From the naturalist and author of the New York Times bestseller H is for Hawk, which appeared on more than twenty-five Best Books of the Year lists, Shaler’s Fish is a collection of poetry that roams both the outer and inner landscapes of the poet’s universe, seamlessly fusing reflections on language, science, and literature with the loamy environments of the natural worlds around her. Moving between the epic (war, history, art, myth, philosophy) and the specific (CNN, Ancient Rome, Auden, Merleau-Ponty), Helen Macdonald examines with humor and intellect what it means to be awake and watchful in the world. These are poems that probe and question, within whose nimble ecosystems we are as likely to encounter Schubert as we are “a hand of violets,” Isaac Newton as a “winged quail on turf.” Nothing escapes Macdonald’s eye and every creature herein—from the smallest bird to the loftiest thinker—holds a significant place in her poems. “Macdonald is a poet of vision and sound, oracular one moment and playful the next, whose first love and only loyalty is to the music of words.” –O, the Oprah Magazine

Why Fish Don't Exist

Why Fish Don't Exist PDF Author: Lulu Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501160346
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nineteenth-century scientist David Starr Jordan built one of the most important fish specimen collections ever seen, until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shattered his life's work.