I WANT IT (now that, should win me the Booker)


Book Description

I WANT IT (now that, should win me the Booker) is a story which is told because it needs to be told, there is no other choice. The premise of the story is the idea that the easiest way to get something is to ask for it. Having a will to do something unique and not having a fear of rejection drives Raju, a confused Indian teenager, to fulfill his dreams. Challenging the Man Booker Prize committee in a hilariously pungent way, the protagonist sets foot in an unfamiliar territory. Equipped with hope, simplicity and brilliance, this story points out subtly to the unique manner in which any "want" is to be fulfilled. Asking profound questions in the likes of: what does a person do when he wants something so badly that he is willing to do anything for it? What happens when one loses and regains faith intermittently in his journey? Does destiny overrule human will? Spanning two and a half decades, three cities and two countries, this story could possibly point to the answers of some of these profound questions that each person comes across in the journey of life. Provocative yet honest, contemporary yet carrying the ingredients of deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes , the story of Raju is every Indian teenager's story. A story of want, a story of unrelenting faith in human will. Blunt and bold, the narrative's pungently hilarious character reveals the indignation rooted in people.




Ember


Book Description

FROM EXCITING ROMANCE AUTHOR ELLEN MINT Book four in the Happily Ever Austen series Ember had devoted her life to building love for others. She never counted on Booker knocking her over. Constructing Love is the first reality show to combine home improvement with romance. Ember Woodhouse can't wait to cast her matchmaking magic while charming America as she designs the interior of an abandoned autumn resort. Harriet Smith is an adorable country bumpkin in desperate need of Ember's help to win the entire show. Everything goes perfectly to plan... until Ember finds herself partnered with the infuriating deadweight that is Mr. Knightley. Booker Knightley is exhausted with the show, with the producers, with life and particularly with his partner. He thought his construction background would make winning this easy. No one told him he was also expected to woo a woman who drives him mad. Miss Woodhouse is flighty and stubborn, ignoring reality in favor of her delusions of romance. He couldn't care less about love, much less the impossibility of finding it while cameras document his every breath. Booker has his own reasons for being on this show, reasons that are in jeopardy thanks to Miss Woodhouse and the scheming producers. As the autumn leaves fall and the days grow shorter, Booker and Ember have a choice to make. If Booker doesn't learn to work with her, he'll lose his last opportunity to bring justice to his family. If Ember can't figure out how to agree with him, her fledgling design business will crash before it takes wing. One thing is certain—Miss Woodhouse will never, ever care for Mr. Knightley.







The Rehearsal


Book Description

The sensational first novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries. Set in the aftermath of a sex scandal at an all-girls’ high school, Eleanor Catton’s internationally acclaimed award-winning debut is a provocative and darkly funny novel about the elusiveness of truth, the slipperiness of identity, and the emotional compromises we make to belong. When news spreads of a high school teacher’s relationship with one of his students, the teenage girls at Abbey Grange are jolted into a new awareness of their own potency and power. Although no one knows the whole truth, the girls have their own ideas about what happened. As they obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity and jealousy native to any adolescent girl, they confide in their saxophone teacher, an enigmatic woman who is only too happy to play both confidante and stage manager to her students. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a play, the boundaries between fact and fantasy soon break down as dramas both real and imagined begin to unfold. Sharply observed, brilliantly crafted, and infused with a deliciously subversive wit, The Rehearsal is at once a vibrant portrait of teenage longing and adult regret, and a shrewd exposé of how we are all performers in life, from one of the most bold and exciting voices in contemporary fiction.




My Symphony


Book Description

A Chicago public school offers an outing to their junior high students called Symphony Day. A preteen female student, Grace, plans to attend. Grace has enjoyed the music of an orchestra many times; though, only before and after featured films or special television performances. The student experiences firsthand the power of music as she sits during the symphony orchestra performance on the outing to the symphony center. The music stays with Grace, reminding her of passed unpleasant and undesirable events, as well as her daily struggles with abuse at home. Grace's abusive stepdad, abused mother, and stepbrothers live in agitation and fright daily. Grace experiences mental and sexual abuse from her stepdad, but she develops a significant relationship with Ian, her boyfriend, and God. A close friendship later in life influences significant change. Grace's journey brings her happiness after a period of grief, two marriages, and three children. Finally, she is caught off guard when she learns that the father of her first born was not who she thought it was.




Standing at the Scratch Line


Book Description

Raised in the steamy bayous of New Orleans in the early 1900s, LeRoi "King" Tremain, caught up in his family's ongoing feud with the rival DuMont family, learns to fight. But when the teenage King mistakenly kills two white deputies during a botched raid on the DuMonts, the Tremains' fear of reprisal forces King to flee Louisiana. King thus embarks on an adventure that first takes him to France, where he fights in World War I as a member of the segregated 369th Battalion—in the bigoted army he finds himself locked in combat with American soldiers as well as with Germans. When he returns to America, he battles the Mob in Jazz Age Harlem, the KKK in Louisiana, and crooked politicians trying to destroy a black township in Oklahoma. King Tremain is driven by two principal forces: He wants to be treated with respect, and he wants to create a family dynasty much like the one he left behind in Louisiana. This is a stunning debut by novelist Guy Johnson that provides a true depiction of the lives of African-Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century.




Conversations with John Banville


Book Description

John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although he ultimately decided he lacked the talent for it, his passion for painting continues to influence and inform his work. Banville conceives the novel as a work of art aimed not at the present, but for the ages. He aspires to create narratives that offer readers a sense of what it is to be conscious, human, and feeling, and aims to convey his conviction that “the familiar is always unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary.” Conversations with John Banville is the first interview collection with this esteemed writer and includes eighteen interviews that reflect on nearly five decades of work, from his first book, Long Lankin, to his novel Mrs. Osmond and memoir, Time Pieces. The collection also includes discussions about—and with, in the case of James Gleick’s 2014 interview—Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, who writes crime novels. Highly engaging and insightful, Banville’s interviews offer a variety of writerly autobiography regarding what he has aimed to do in his work and how he continues to pursue perfection, which he has known from the beginning must be impossible.




The Origins of Dislike


Book Description

'Strategic thinking for a writer articulates itself as dislike and as allegiance.' In this wonderfully rich and diverse collection of essays, Amit Chaudhuri explores the way in which writers understand and promote their own work in antithesis to writers and movements that have gone before. Chaudhuri's criticism disproves and questions several assumptions—that a serious and original artist cannot think critically in a way that matters; that criticism can't be imaginative, and creative work contain radical argumentation; that a writer reflecting on their own position and practice cannot be more than a testimony of their work, but open up how we think of literary history and reading. Illuminating new ways of thinking about Western and non-Western traditions, prejudices, and preconceptions, Chaudhuri shows us again that he takes nothing as a given: literary tradition, the prevalent definitions of writing and culture; and the way the market determines the way culture and language express themselves. He asks us to look again at what we mean by the modern, and how it might be possible to think of the literary today.




The Spy Who Totally Had a Crush on Me


Book Description

With a traitor in her midst, Rachel faces losing her life and her heart—all in one semester At Blackthorn Academy, a peculiar prep school in the mountains of Pennsylvania, students are concerned with all the usual things: homework, hookups, and how to save the world. For Rachel, studying has taken a backseat to a little problem she’s having with a supervillain named Simon Blankenship, who is convinced that he’s an ancient Roman god and she’s a reincarnated goddess whom he must destroy. They’ve tangled twice before, and Rachel has beaten him narrowly both times, but now Blankenship has done something completely unexpected: He’s stolen an important ancient artifact from Blackthorn Academy . . . and disappeared. She and her fellow spies in training wait for Blankenship to show himself while contemplating the possibility of a turncoat in their midst. And as if that weren’t enough, Rachel must tangle with a different kind of problem: a totally cute new student, whose eyes are just a little too pretty, and who seems to know just a little too much about Rachel and her past. She must decide quickly—is he boyfriend material, or a traitor?




Crime and Punishment


Book Description

In 1951 the Festival of Britain marks a new golden age of hope and prosperity for the country. Things are certainly looking up for the criminal elite who run the East End. For Jack, a draft-dodger with aspirations to be a champion boxer, there's easy money to be made for providing a bit of muscle. Meanwhile his sister Kath must keep secret the fact that she killed their father to protect her son, Brian, from the abuse she experienced as a child. Brian is so traumatised by witnessing this event that the complex union of violence and sexuality will shape his character for life. As the years go by and disillusion sets in, successive Labour and Tory governments aren't able to stop the rot. Younger, nastier criminals like the Kray twins and the Richardson brothers begin to carve out their own criminal empires and crush all resistance. Brutalised and embittered by years of failure and imprisonment, Jack decides to make a stand. The stage is set for one big war. Crime and Punishment is the first volume in a two-part epic, and follows the characters' lives up until the accession of Thatcher. The second volume will trace the dramatic changes in criminal society that reflected the wider social upheaval of the times, right up until the present day.