The Quickening Maze

The Quickening Maze
Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2010-06-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101442204

“It has been a while since I have read a book as richly sown with beauty . . . A remarkable work, remarkable for the precision and vitality of its perceptions and for the successful intricacy of its prose.” —James Wood, The New Yorker A visionary novel by "one of the most talented writers of his generation"—The Times Literary Supplement Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize Based on real events, The Quickening Maze won over UK critics and readers alike with its rapturous prose and vivid exploration of poetry and madness. Historically accurate yet brilliantly imagined, this is the debut publication of this elegant and riveting novel in the United States. In 1837, after years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, the great nature poet John Clare finds himself in High Beach—a mental institution located in Epping Forest on the outskirts of London. It is not long before another famed writer, the young Alfred Tennyson, moves nearby and grows entwined in the catastrophic schemes of the hospital's owner, the peculiar Dr. Matthew Allen, his lonely adolescent daughter, and a coterie of mysterious local characters. With lyrical grace, the cloistered world of High Beach and its residents are brought richly to life in this enchanting book.

In the Wolf's Mouth

In the Wolf's Mouth
Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2014-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1448181615

From the author of the Man Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the lives of four very different men, all of them navigating the chaos and horror brought about by the Second World War. Fighting for the Allies are Will Walker, an ambitious English Field Security Officer and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian-American infantryman who dreams of home and the movies. Meanwhile in Sicily, Angilù, a young shepherd caught up in corruption and Cirò Albanese, a sinister Mafioso, are fighting their own battles with devastating consequences.

Dream Sequence

Dream Sequence
Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374718768

Adam Foulds, the award-winning author of The Quickening Maze, pens a stunning and terrifying vision of the damage done between a fan and a celebrity in Dream Sequence—where the borders between inner and outer life have been made porous in a world full of flickering screens large and small. Henry became famous starring in The Grange, a television drama beloved by mothers and wives, and whose fans speak about the characters as though they were real people . . . yet Henry dreams of escaping the small screen. An audition for a movie directed by a highly respected Spanish auteur holds the promise of a way forward. Whether holed up in his apartment eating monkish meals of rice and steamed vegetables or snorting cocaine at desert parties in Doha, Henry’s awareness of his own image, of his relative place in the world, is acute and constant. But Henry has also—unwittingly—become an important part of the life of recently divorced Kristin. He appears repeatedly on the television in her beautiful, empty Philadelphia house, and her social media feeds bring news of his London home, his family. What Kristin wants is simply to get as close to him in real life as she has in her fandom.

The Broken Word

The Broken Word
Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2011-03-29
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1101513489

The stunning debut from "one of the best British writers to emerge in the past decade." (Julian Barnes) With a voice that is at once fierce and lyrical, Adam Foulds tells the story of the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule in 1950s Kenya. Tom, a young man who has returned to his family's farm, rapidly becomes caught up in the intensifying events of violence and brutality in a conflict Foulds illustrates as both utterly contemporary and yet deeply burdened by the history of race and empire in this region. The Broken Word was the recipient of the Costa (Whitbread) Poetry Award, and Foulds's The Quickening Maze was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

The Freedom Maze

The Freedom Maze
Author: Delia Sherman
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2014-01-07
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0763669806

"Multilayered, compassionate, and thought-provoking." — Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Thirteen-year-old Sophie isn’t happy about spending the summer of 1960 at her grandmother’s old house in the bayou. Bored and lonely, she can’t resist exploring the house’s maze, or making an impulsive wish for a fantasy-book adventure with herself as the heroine. What she gets instead is a real adventure: a trip back in time to 1860 and the race-haunted world of her family’s Louisiana sugar plantation. Here, President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation is still two years in the future and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment is almost four years away. And here, Sophie is mistaken, by her own ancestors, for a slave.

The Glass Room

The Glass Room
Author: Simon Mawer
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2009-10-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590513975

Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.

Love and Summer

Love and Summer
Author: William Trevor
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2009-09-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101148535

It?s summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn?t go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs. Connulty?s funeral. Florian Kilderry couldn?t know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt- out cinema. A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. Ellie leads a quiet, routine life, often alone while Dillahan runs the farm. Florian is planning to leave Ireland and start over. Ellie is settled in her new role as Dillahan?s wife. But Florian?s visit to Rathmoye introduces him to Ellie, and a dangerously reckless attachment begins. In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

White Jenna

White Jenna
Author: Jane Yolen
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2016-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 150403452X

Nebula Award Finalist: A long-awaited savior joins forces with her dark twin to confront the evil threatening their land in the second book of the acclaimed epic fantasy the Great Alta Saga Grown to young womanhood in the mountain region of the Dales and trained for combat by the all-female followers of the goddess Great Alta, Jenna reluctantly accepts the fact that she might well be the Anna, the warrior queen who has long been prophesied. Orphaned three times while still a small child, the now-teenage Jenna is compelled to lend her support and skills to the Dales’ rightful king and his brother, Carum, who holds her heart, for the reign of evil usurper Lord Kalas threatens the future of every worshipper of Alta. But Jenna does not ride alone. Whenever darkness falls, she and her companions—a young priestess in training and an aging warrior—are joined by Skada, white-haired Jenna’s dark sister, who shares her destiny and her soul. But even their combined powers may not be enough to defeat the entrenched malevolence that means to destroy everything and everyone they hold dear. A finalist for the Nebula Award for best novel, Jane Yolen’s White Jenna is a wondrous tale of duty, destiny, peril, romance, and fantasy. Interspersed with the myths and poetry the story engendered, it is a brilliantly imaginative creation of a world, a culture, and their enduring lore.

The Truth About These Strange Times

The Truth About These Strange Times
Author: Adam Foulds
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2014-03-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1780228724

From the author of the Man Booker shortlisted The Quickening Maze, a brilliant, touching and funny story about an extraordinary friendship. 'A novel bursting with incident, humour, humanity and literary promise' Sunday Times Saul Dawson-Smith is ten years old. He can memorise the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in under a minute and is in training for the World Memory Championships. Howard McNamee is twenty-eight: lonely, overweight, poorly educated, and on the run from his memories of a murky Glaswegian childhood. As Howard navigates a bewildering new life in London - including accidentally acquiring a Russian fiancée - he is taken under the wing of Saul's parents, and forms an unlikely friendship with the solitary boy. But as pressure mounts before the Championship, Howard realises he must act to save his small friend from a life of unbearable expectation. And so, he and Saul head out on the strangest road trip of all time - one that will turn both their lives upside down.

The Poet's Wife

The Poet's Wife
Author: Judith Allnatt
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2011-06-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 144648789X

It is 1841. Patty is married to John Clare: peasant poet, genius and madman. Travelling home one day, Patty finds her husband sitting, footsore, at the side of the road, having absconded from a lunatic asylum over eighty miles away. Hopeful that his condition has improved, she takes his hands in delight but he fails to recognize her. She is devastated to discover that he has not returned home to find her, but to search for his childhood sweetheart, Mary Joyce, to whom he believes he is married. Patty still loves John deeply, but he seems lost to her, obsessed with the idealised image of a woman that she cannot possibly match. Plagued by jealousy, she seeks strength in memories: their whirlwind courtship, the poems John wrote for her, their shared affinity for the land. She must try to heal John's turbulent, unhappy soul and restore him to the man she married. But as John descends further into delusion and his behaviour becomes increasingly volatile, hope seems to be fading. Will she ever be able to conquer her own anger and hurt and reconcile with this man she now barely knows?