Playing in the Light


Book Description

By the Windham Campbell Prize winner Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Zo Wicomb's celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, "Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory--denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear--and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic." Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family's past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. "Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute" (Kirkus), Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion's personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa's bizarre, brutal history.




Playing in the Light


Book Description

“In her ambitious third novel, Wicomb explores South Africa’s history through a woman’s attempt to answer questions surrounding her past” (The New Yorker). Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Windham Campbell Prize winner Zoë Wicomb’s celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, “Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory—denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear—and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic.” Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family’s past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. “Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute,” Playing in the Light is as powerful in its depiction of Marion’s personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa’s bizarre, brutal history (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “Post-apartheid South Africa is indeed a new world . . . With this novel, Wicomb proves a keen guide.” —The New York Times “Delectable . . . Wicomb’s prose is as delightful and satisfying in its culmination as watching the sun set over the Atlantic Ocean.” —The Christian Science Monitor “[A] thoughtful, poetic novel.” —The Times (London)




Playing in the Light


Book Description

From the acclaimed South African novelist, a lyrical tale of self-discovery in post-apartheid cape town. Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, Playing in the Light revolves around Marion, a woman of Afrikaner background, who hates traveling but nonetheless runs a travel agency, and her complex relationship with Brenda, the first black woman she has ever employed. In writing as finely detailed and attuned to psychological nuance as Anita Brookner's, Wicomb depicts the life of a complicated, single woman in a changing and complicated place. Caught up in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the exposures of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission lead to the discovery of a skeleton in the family cupboard. While her aging father is unable and unwilling to supply the truth, Marion's young employee becomes implicated in the piecing together of Marion's past, leading to a defining transformation and widening of Marion's world. In this impeccably wrought new work, the acclaimed author of You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town provides wisdom and insight about the new South Africa and about people everywhere.




Playing with Light and Shadows


Book Description

Audisee® eBooks with Audio combine professional narration and text highlighting for an engaging read aloud experience! Young readers will learn how shadows are made with light in this accessible, photo-filled book. Simple text explains different kinds of shadows and teaches students how they can make their own shadows. Vibrant photos bring basic science concepts to life and encourage kids to explore the shadows they see every day.




Playing With Light


Book Description

When Rebecca, a well-to-do Cuban-American woman, decides that sheÍd like to revive the old Cuban tradition of the tertulia, or womenÍs get-together, her best friend dashes her hopes, explaining that in todayÍs career-driven world even her friends require a compelling reason to come from all over Miami to casually meet and chat. At last, the ingenious Becky hits upon the idea of a reading group, and the book selected is a historical novel about nineteenth-century Cuba: the saga of an aristocratic dress-manufacturing clan, the Santa Cruz family. The novel is called . . . Playing with Light. Oddly, as they get ever deeper into the story of the Santa Cruzes„especially Tico and Lolo„strange things begin to happen to the reading group. Everyone seems to be . . . sucked in . . . and affected (not necessarily pleasantly) by the saga. (ñWhatÍs for dinner, Mommy?î ñGet a slice of salami out of the refrigerator, dear. CanÍt you see IÍm reading?î) As two worlds, from two different centuries, begin to intertwine in odd ways, and her friends begin to . . . well, to disappear, actually . . . Rebecca canÍt help but wonder what sheÍs gotten herself into. Beatriz Rivera has written an entrancing and wonderfully ambitious novel that places her in the first rank of writers of her generation.




Embraced by the Light


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The groundbreaking account of life after death that has become a source of comfort, inspiration, and solace to millions “I felt a surge of energy, and my spirit was suddenly drawn through my chest and pulled upward. My first impression is that I was free. . . .” On the night of November 19, 1973, following surgery, thirty-one-year-old wife and mother Betty J. Eadie died. This is her extraordinary story of the events that followed, her astonishing proof of life after physical death. She saw more, perhaps than any other person has seen before and shares her almost photographic recollections of the remarkable details. Compelling, inspiring, and infinitely reassuring, her vivid account gives us a glimpse of the peace and unconditional love that awaits us all. More important, Betty's journey offers a simple message that can transform our lives today, showing us our purpose and guiding us to live the way we were meant to—joyously, abundantly, and with love. Praise for Embraced by the Light “The most detailed and spellbinding near-death experience I have ever heard.”—Kimberly Clark-Sharp, president, Seattle International Association of Near-Death Studies




October


Book Description

A South African academic returns to her homeland in this novel by the award-winning author of You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town—“an extraordinary writer” (Toni Morrison). Winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, Zoë Wicomb is an essential voice of the South African diaspora, hailed by fellow writers—such as Toni Morrison and J. M. Coetzee, among others—and by reviewers as “a writer of rare brilliance” (The Scotsman). In October, Wicomb tells the story of Mercia Murray, a South African woman of color in the midst of a difficult homecoming. Abandoned by her partner in Scotland, where she has been living for twenty-six years, Mercia returns to South Africa to find her family overwhelmed by alcoholism and buried secrets. Poised between her new life in Scotland and her South African roots, Mercia recollects the past and assesses the present with a keen sense of irony. October is a stark and utterly compelling novel about the contemporary experience of a woman caught between cultures, adrift in middle age with her memories and an uncertain future.




On a Beam of Light


Book Description

A boy rides a bicycle down a dusty road. But in his mind, he envisions himself traveling at a speed beyond imagining, on a beam of light. This brilliant mind will one day offer up some of the most revolutionary ideas ever conceived. From a boy endlessly fascinated by the wonders around him, Albert Einstein ultimately grows into a man of genius recognized the world over for profoundly illuminating our understanding of the universe. Jennifer Berne and Vladimir Radunsky invite the reader to travel along with Einstein on a journey full of curiosity, laughter, and scientific discovery. Parents and children alike will appreciate this moving story of the powerful difference imagination can make in any life.




Heaven on Earth, Just for Being


Book Description

This is an ascension manual heralding the golden age of enlightenment, activating the divinely intended plan of heaven on earth and restoring each being’s intended birthrights as divinely powerful, loving, and peace-conscious cocreators of heaven on earth, magically and easily, just for being. Only love is real.




All the Light We Cannot See


Book Description

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).