Daddy's Gone A-Hunting


Book Description

Hannah Connelly, a twenty-eight-year old designer and rising star in the fashion world, is plunged into a web of horror and grief when she learns that Connelly Fine Reproductions, the family-owned furniture business founded by her grandfather, has been levelled by an explosion in the middle of the night. Everything has been destroyed - the warehouse, the showrooms, and the mansion where priceless antiques have been on permanent display. Worse, to escape the flames, Hannah's older sister, Kate, had jumped from a window and is now hospitalized in a medically induced coma, suffering from life-threatening injuries. The fire marshal on the scene is openly suspicious that someone, maybe even Kate, intentionally planned the explosion. Agonized with worry, Hannah can't understand why Kate would be in the warehouse at that hour of the night. What Hannah does not know is that Kate is most at risk from the people who have access to her in the hospital room. One of them is determined not to let her regain consciousness. That person is out to thwart Hannah, too, as she pursues her quest for the truth.




Mother Goose


Book Description

A collection of 108 illustrated Mother Goose rhymes.




White Out


Book Description

White Out




The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing


Book Description

Generous-hearted and wickedly insightful, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing is the New York Times bestselling novel by Melissa Bank The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing maps the progress of Jane Rosenal as she sets out on a personal and spirited expedition through the perilous terrain of sex, love, relationships, and the treacherous waters of the workplace. Soon Jane is swept off her feet by an older man and into a Fitzgeraldesque whirl of cocktail parties, country houses, and rules that were made to be broken, but comes to realise that it's a world where the stakes are much too high for comfort. With an unforgettable comic touch, Bank skilfully teases out universal issues, puts a clever new spin on the mating dance, and captures in perfect pitch what it's like to come of age as a young woman. 'This chronicle of a New Yorker's relationships has a wit and perceptiveness that singles it out from the crowd' Guardian 'As hilarious as Girls' Guide is, there's a wise, serious core here' Wall Street Journal 'A sexy, pour-your-heart-out, champagne tingle of a read-thoughtful, wise, and tell-all honest. Bank's is a voice that you'll remember' Cosmopolitan




The Pumpkin Eater


Book Description

In this extraordinary, semi-autobiographical novel, Penelope Mortimer depicts a married woman's breakdown in 1960s London. With three husbands in her past, one in her present and a numberless army of children, Mrs Mortimer is astonished to find herself collapsing one day in Harrods. This strange, unsettling novel, shot through with black comedy, is a moving account of one woman's realisation that marriage and family life may not, after all, offer all the answers to the problems of living. 'Beautiful ... almost every woman I can think of will want to read this book' Edna O'Brien




The Girls


Book Description

A wry, macabre tale of simple living, brutal murder, and a reasonably happy couple. In their lovely old Cotswolds village, Janet and Susan are known to all the other villagers as “the girls”—a fixture. Partners in love and work, co-proprietors of a picturesque shop specializing in the work of local artisans and farmers, they lead an enviable, enviably settled life. So it’s no catastrophe when Sue, the younger of the two, feels the need to take a month to travel on her own, leaving Jan alone to run their stall at the Inland Waterways Rally Craft Fair. Nor is it any real threat when a kindly gay man named Alan lends Jan a hand in Sue’s absence, or when the two wind up sharing some wine and even a bunk for the night. If Jan turns out to be pregnant some weeks after Sue’s return to the nest, what’s that but cause for joy? And when Alan happens to come visiting, by and by, finding the delighted girls raising a beautiful baby boy, who can blame him for wanting to share in a small part of their bliss? Yes, theirs is an enviable, enviably settled life. And the girls will defend it with every tool at their disposal.




The Stepdaughter


Book Description

A wicked stepmother finds her ideal prey in Carlone Blackwood's “quite brilliant” (The Times) debut. A lavish Upper West Side apartment is the site of a familial cold war about to enter a phase of dangerous escalation. J is a lonely woman without even the luxury of being alone. Her husband has fled to Paris with his latest flame, but he’s left J not only with their own four-year-old daughter, Sally Ann, but with the sulky cake-mix addicted, thirteen-year-old Renata, a leftover from his previous marriage. The presence of a pert au pair, Monique, serves only to make J feel more isolated and self-conscious. What she’d like is someone to blame. Writing letters in her head to imaginary friends, J delights in dwelling on the hapless Renata, who “invites a kind of cruelty.” This is an invitation J fully intends to take up—and like so many stepmothers before her, she will find that wickedness, once indulged, is a difficult habit to kick. A mordant black splinter of a book, Caroline Blackwood’s first novel stands as proof positive of her eternal mastery—and mockery—of the darkest depths of human feeling.




Rent Boy


Book Description

A noir tour-de-force set in a world of hustlers from "one of America's darkest and funniest chroniclers." (The Guardian)




Daddy's Gone A-Hunting


Book Description

A breakthrough novel of suburban loneliness and subversion—“her style, spare and singular, cuts through the decades like a scalpel” (Rachel Cooke, The Observer) Bourgeois housewife Ruth Whiting is “paralysed by triviality,” measuring out her days in coffee mornings, glasses of sherry, and bridge parties—routines that barely disturb the solitude of her existence. Her husband spends his weeknights in town; their daughter, eighteen-year-old Angela, is at Oxford; and their sons are at boarding school. Then Angela accidentally falls pregnant, and Ruth must keep her own past from repeating itself. First published in 1958, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting shocked critics with its “feminine rage” (New York Times). It captures the suffocation of a repressive marriage and the desperate longing for connection between a mother and daughter who must join forces in a man’s world.




Rattlebone


Book Description

Interconnected tales set in a black Kansas City community. “Strong, melodic, and honest . . . We need stories like these to replenish us.” —Terry McMillan In Rattlebone, a “fictional” black community north of Kansas City, the smell of manure and bacon from Armour’s Packing House is everywhere; Shady Maurice’s roadhouse plays the latest jazz; the best eggs are sold by the Red Quanders; and gospel rules at the Strangers Rest Baptist Church. This is the black Midwest of the 1950s, when towns could count their white folks on one hand—the years before the Civil Rights movement came along and changed everything. In perfectly cadenced vernacular, Maxine Clair speaks to us through the voices of Rattlebone’s citizens: October Brown, the new schoolteacher with a camel’s walk and shoulder-padded, to-the-nines dresses; Irene Wilson, naive and wise, who must grapple with her parent’s failing marriage as she steps eagerly into adulthood; and Thomas Pemberton, owner of the local rooming house, an old man with a young heart. Sparkling with lyricism, Clair’s interconnected stories celebrate the natural beauty of the Midwest and the dignity and vitality of these most ordinary lives. Rattlebone, winner of the Heartland Prize for fiction, is a tremendous work by a supremely talented writer. “Extraordinary . . . Each skillful plot twist, each new wonderful character has the effect of a sip of literary love potion.” —The New York Times Book Review “Told in a style that is memorable for its ability to shift tones and to capture, in rich and controlled language, new levels of consciousness.” —The Washington Post