Mo Said She Was Quirky

Mo Said She Was Quirky
Author: James Kelman
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590516001

James Kelman, the Man Booker Prize–winning author of How Late It Was, How Late, tells the story of Helen—a sister, a mother, a daughter—a very ordinary young woman. Her boyfriend said she was quirky but she is much more than that. Trust, love, relationships; parents, children, lovers; death, wealth, home: these are the ordinary parts of the everyday that become extraordinary when you think of them as Helen does, each waking hour. Mo Said She Was Quirky begins on Helen’s way home from work, with the strangest of moments when a skinny, down-at-heel man crosses the road in front of her and appears to be her lost brother. What follows is an inspired and absorbing story of twenty-four hours in the life of a young woman.

Three Times Lucky

Three Times Lucky
Author: Sheila Turnage
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2012-05-10
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 110157559X

Newbery honor winner, New York Times bestseller, Edgar Award Finalist, and E.B. White Read-Aloud Honor book. A hilarious Southern debut with the kind of characters you meet once in a lifetime Rising sixth grader Miss Moses LoBeau lives in the small town of Tupelo Landing, NC, where everyone's business is fair game and no secret is sacred. She washed ashore in a hurricane eleven years ago, and she's been making waves ever since. Although Mo hopes someday to find her "upstream mother," she's found a home with the Colonel--a café owner with a forgotten past of his own--and Miss Lana, the fabulous café hostess. She will protect those she loves with every bit of her strong will and tough attitude. So when a lawman comes to town asking about a murder, Mo and her best friend, Dale Earnhardt Johnson III, set out to uncover the truth in hopes of saving the only family Mo has ever known. Full of wisdom, humor, and grit, this timeless yarn will melt the heart of even the sternest Yankee.

Bettyville

Bettyville
Author: George Hodgman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2015-03-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0698158458

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD “A beautifully crafted memoir, rich with humor and wisdom.” —Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club “The idea of a cultured gay man leaving New York City to care for his aging mother in Paris, Missouri, is already funny, and George Hodgman reaps that humor with great charm. But then he plunges deep, examining the warm yet fraught relationship between mother and son with profound insight and understanding.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure—the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay. As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town—crumbling but still colorful—to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman’s New York Times bestselling debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son’s return.

Pigeon English

Pigeon English
Author: Stephen Kelman
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2012-01-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1408826143

Newly arrived from Ghana with his mother and older sister, eleven-year-old Harrison Opoku lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats on a London housing estate. The second best runner in the whole of Year 7, Harri races through his new life in his personalised trainers - the Adidas stripes drawn on with marker pen - blissfully unaware of the very real threat all around him. With equal fascination for the local gang - the Dell Farm Crew - and the pigeon who visits his balcony, Harri absorbs the many strange elements of his new life in England: watching, listening, and learning the tricks of inner-city survival. But when a boy is knifed to death on the high street and a police appeal for witnesses draws only silence, Harri decides to start a murder investigation of his own. In doing so, he unwittingly endangers the fragile web his mother has spun around her family to try and keep them safe. A story of innocence and experience, hope and harsh reality, Pigeon English is a spellbinding portrayal of a boy balancing on the edge of manhood and of the forces around him that try to shape the way he falls.

No One Is Talking About This

No One Is Talking About This
Author: Patricia Lockwood
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-02-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593189604

FINALIST FOR THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE & A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2021 WINNER OF THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE “A book that reads like a prose poem, at once sublime, profane, intimate, philosophical, witty and, eventually, deeply moving.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “Wow. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much reading a book. What an inventive and startling writer…I’m so glad I read this. I really think this book is remarkable.” —David Sedaris From "a formidably gifted writer" (The New York Times Book Review), a book that asks: Is there life after the internet? As this urgent, genre-defying book opens, a woman who has recently been elevated to prominence for her social media posts travels around the world to meet her adoring fans. She is overwhelmed by navigating the new language and etiquette of what she terms "the portal," where she grapples with an unshakable conviction that a vast chorus of voices is now dictating her thoughts. When existential threats--from climate change and economic precariousness to the rise of an unnamed dictator and an epidemic of loneliness--begin to loom, she posts her way deeper into the portal's void. An avalanche of images, details, and references accumulate to form a landscape that is post-sense, post-irony, post-everything. "Are we in hell?" the people of the portal ask themselves. "Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?" Suddenly, two texts from her mother pierce the fray: "Something has gone wrong," and "How soon can you get here?" As real life and its stakes collide with the increasingly absurd antics of the portal, the woman confronts a world that seems to contain both an abundance of proof that there is goodness, empathy, and justice in the universe, and a deluge of evidence to the contrary. Fragmentary and omniscient, incisive and sincere, No One Is Talking About This is at once a love letter to the endless scroll and a profound, modern meditation on love, language, and human connection from a singular voice in American literature.

Dirt Road

Dirt Road
Author: James Kelman
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-07-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1782118241

Murdo, a teenager obsessed with music, dreams of a life beyond his Scottish island home. His dad Tom has recently lost his wife and stumbles towards the future, terrified of losing control of what remains of his family life Both are in search of something as they set out on an expedition into the American South. As they travel they encounter a new world and we discover whether the hopes of youth can conquer the fears of age. Dirt Road is a major novel exploring the brevity of life, the agonising demands of love and the lure of the open road. It is also a beautiful book about the power of music and all that it can offer.

Frog

Frog
Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2015-01-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0698182669

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF 2015 WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK The author of Red Sorghum and China’s most revered and controversial novelist returns with his first major publication since winning the Nobel Prize In 2012, the Nobel committee confirmed Mo Yan’s position as one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. In his much-anticipated new novel, Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation’s controversial one-child policy. Frog opens with a playwright nicknamed Tadpole who plans to write about his aunt. In her youth, Gugu—the beautiful daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist—is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu’s own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She decides to prove her allegiance by strictly enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant. In sharply personal prose, Mo Yan depicts a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy. At once illuminating and devastating, it shines a light into the heart of communist China.

The Whole Town's Talking

The Whole Town's Talking
Author: Fannie Flagg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2016
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 140006595X

Elmwood Springs, Missouri, is a small town like any other, but something strange is happening out at the cemetery. 'Still Meadows, ' as it's called, is anything but still. Tells a surprising story of life, afterlife, and the mysterious goings-on of ordinary people"--Amazon.com.

Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End
Author: Joshua Ferris
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2007-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780759572287

The National Book Award finalist and debut novel by the bestselling author of The Dinner Party: "A readymade classic of the office-novel genre. . . . A truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness." --Seattle Times No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

The Lawgiver

The Lawgiver
Author: Herman Wouk
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1451699409

"A lighthearted and delightful tour de force" (The Washington Times). A romantic and suspenseful epistolary novel about a group of people trying to make a movie about Moses in the present day, The Lawgiver is a story that emerges from letters, memos, e-mails, journals, news articles, Skype transcripts, and text messages. At the center of The Lawgiver is Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director who has rejected her rabbinical father’s strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multibillionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including reunite with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business. Two other key characters in the novel are Herman Wouk himself and his wife of more than sixty years, Betty Sarah, who, almost against their will, find themselves entangled in the movie. As Wouk and his characters contend with Moses and marriage, the force of tradition, rebellion and reunion, The Lawgiver reflects the wisdom of a lifetime. Inspired by the great nineteenth-century novelists, one of America’s most beloved twentieth-century authors has now written a remarkable twenty-first-century work of fiction.