Hitting Trees with Sticks

Hitting Trees with Sticks
Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Comma Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2013-12-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

**Long-listed for the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize** **Short-listed for the 2013 Edge Hill Short Story Prize** A young textile designer quits Britain to work for a Nigerian women’s refuge, confident that this is her one chance to make a difference… A sixteen-year-old uses his first job, as a window-cleaner, to peer into other people’s lives and carefully plan his own… A leading scientist spends an evening trying to explain his latest theory to a man who could destroy him... The characters in Jane Rogers’ first short story collection are each blessed with an unwavering conviction. Buoyed up on self-belief, they enthuse, take calculated risks, and refuse to be deterred by the odds stacked against them. But just as Rogers’ compassion as a writer endears us to their cause, her keen eye shows how fine the balance can be between conviction and self-delusion. At times, her subject seems to be the fallibility of any point of view, the persistence of blind spots no matter how careful or intelligent the viewer. Hers are not unreliable narrators, merely human ones – diverse, contradictory, imperfect. Indeed it is often their flaws that beguile us. ‘There is nothing predictable about a Jane Rogers story. She has the confidence and skill to inhabit many different voices and different worlds. She slides the reader, in imagination, to a snow-bound France, to Africa, to the Caribbean: she takes us into offices and libraries, under the sea and into the forest, and also into the vast untrodden country of memory that we carry around inside. Her observation of our species is tender, precise, illuminating.’ – Hilary Mantel 'Thrilling, ambitious stories that cross continents and soar from cells to stars.' – Maggie Gee ‘Warm, wise, insightful, sharply observed and beautifully written – each story is a world in microcosm.’ – Marina Lewycka 'This is her first collection of short stories, and it is beautiful.' - The Independent on Sunday

Promised Lands

Promised Lands
Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Abacus
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2012-01-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1405512628

Winner of the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book Award, 1996 The year is 1788, the place New South Wales. Marine Lieutenant William Dawes has arrived in the Antipodes to build an observatory, reform the convicts and understand the Aborigines. He is a good man who will be subject to many temptations. In England, now, a child is born. His mother knows he has extraordinary powers; his father knows he is a helpless cripple. Olla, defending and nurturing her miraculous son, emerges as one of the strangest and most compelling characters of contemporary fiction. Jane Rogers intertwines the powerful dramas of the first year of the convict-colony with these present-day lives to make a rich and gripping novel.

Inside Out & Back Again

Inside Out & Back Again
Author: Thanhha Lai
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2013-03-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0702251178

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.

Getting Air

Getting Air
Author: Dan Gutman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2008-07-29
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1416979476

They can rule the half-pipe, but can they survive this? Jimmy, David, and Henry are psyched. It's summer, school's out, and they are on their way to California, where they will be able to do some major skating. But on the plane, the unthinkable happens: They are hijacked by terrorists. As frightened as they may be, they take action and they succeed. Sort of. They may have beaten the terrorists, but now their plane has crashed in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden, their summer vacation is about finding food, shelter, and a rescue. Can three normal twelve-year-old boys find a way to get by without fast food and skate parks?

Verity

Verity
Author: Colleen Hoover
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2021-10-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 153872474X

Whose truth is the lie? Stay up all night reading the sensational psychological thriller that has readers obsessed, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Too Late and It Ends With Us. #1 New York Times Bestseller · USA Today Bestseller · Globe and Mail Bestseller · Publishers Weekly Bestseller Lowen Ashleigh is a struggling writer on the brink of financial ruin when she accepts the job offer of a lifetime. Jeremy Crawford, husband of bestselling author Verity Crawford, has hired Lowen to complete the remaining books in a successful series his injured wife is unable to finish. Lowen arrives at the Crawford home, ready to sort through years of Verity’s notes and outlines, hoping to find enough material to get her started. What Lowen doesn’t expect to uncover in the chaotic office is an unfinished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read. Page after page of bone-chilling admissions, including Verity's recollection of the night her family was forever altered. Lowen decides to keep the manuscript hidden from Jeremy, knowing its contents could devastate the already grieving father. But as Lowen’s feelings for Jeremy begin to intensify, she recognizes all the ways she could benefit if he were to read his wife’s words. After all, no matter how devoted Jeremy is to his injured wife, a truth this horrifying would make it impossible for him to continue loving her.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Author: Julian Jaynes
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 580
Release: 2000-08-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0547527543

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

Hiroshima

Hiroshima
Author: John Hersey
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2020-06-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593082362

Hiroshima is the story of six people—a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a young surgeon, and a German Catholic priest—who lived through the greatest single manmade disaster in history. In vivid and indelible prose, Pulitzer Prize–winner John Hersey traces the stories of these half-dozen individuals from 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, when Hiroshima was destroyed by the first atomic bomb ever dropped on a city, through the hours and days that followed. Almost four decades after the original publication of this celebrated book, Hersey went back to Hiroshima in search of the people whose stories he had told, and his account of what he discovered is now the eloquent and moving final chapter of Hiroshima.

Where the Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing
Author: Delia Owens
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2021-03-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0735219109

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE—The #1 New York Times bestselling worldwide sensation with more than 18 million copies sold, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature.” For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life—until the unthinkable happens. Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb

The Testament of Jessie Lamb
Author: Jane Rogers
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2012-05-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062130811

In a chilling future, one 16-year-old girl is driven to the ultimate act of heroism. The Testament of Jessie Lamb, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is the breakout novel from award-winning author Jane Rogers. Its cunningly drawn characters and riveting vision of a dystopic future fraught with difficult moral choices will make The Testament of Jessie Lamb an instant favorite for fans of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, and Brian K. Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man. “The novel does not set up an elaborate apocalypse, but astringently strips away the smears hiding the apocalypses we really face. Like Jessie’s, it is a small, calm voice of reason in a nonsensical world.” —The Independent

Into the Trees

Into the Trees
Author: Robert Williams
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0571308198

Harriet Norton won't stop crying. Her parents, Ann and Thomas, are being driven close to insanity and only one thing will help. Mysteriously, their infant daughter will only calm when she's under the ancient trees of Bleasdale forest.The Nortons sell their town-house and set up home in an isolated barn. Secluded deep in the forest, they are finally approaching peace - until one night a group of men comes through the trees, ready to upend their lives and threaten everything they've built. Into the Trees is the story of four dispossessed people, drawn to the forest in search of something they lack and finding their lives intertwining in ways they could never have imagined. In hugely evocative and lyrical writing, Robert Williams lays bare their emotional lives, set against the intense and mysterious backdrop of the forest. Compelling and haunting, Into the Trees is a magisterial novel.