The Life to Come


Book Description

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisted for the Stella Prize Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award “For a novel concerned with dislocation, there's a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser's observations are so spot on, you'll forgive her even as you cringe.”—Amelia Lester, New York Times Book Review Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict. Pippa is a writer who longs for success and eventually comes to fear that she “missed everything important.” Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Sri Lankan Christabel endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, and sank back,” while she neglects the love close at hand. The stand–alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.




The Life of the World to Come


Book Description

In a weaving together of contradictory realms—past and present, rustbelt city and rural/urban South, old-world Catholicism and backwoods Protestantism—Joseph Bathanti draws readers into the 1970s as protagonist George Dolce faces major upheaval in The Life of the World to Come. George aspires to leave his blue collar, Catholic neighborhood of East Liberty in Pittsburgh. He is on the cusp of graduation from college and headed for law school when he becomes entangled in a local gambling ring. After his father gets laid off at the steel mill, George dramatically increases his wagering to help his parents with finances. What's more, he allows his boss at his real job and love interest's father, a pharmacist named Phil Rosechild, to place bets through him with the gambling ring's volatile kingpin. As his parents' financial situation deteriorates, George delves deeper into gambling, and he even goes so far as to set up Phil by using the pharmacist's unschooled and ever-growing betting practices to his own end—cheating the father of the woman he loves. When Phil welches on a large bet that George has placed for him, George finds himself in life-threatening trouble and must abandon his law school dreams. He robs the pharmacy, steals the delivery car, and flees south. After his stolen car breaks down in Queen, North Carolina, he meets a young, mysterious woman known as Crow. The two form a bond and eventually take to the road in an attempt to reconcile their harrowing, often surreal destiny and to escape George's inevitable punishment.




The Life of the World to Come


Book Description

From idea to flesh to myth, this is the story of Alec Checkerfield: Seventh Earl of Finsbury, pirate, renegade, hero, anomaly, Mendoza's once and future love. Mendoza is a Preserver, which means that she's sent back from the twenty-fourth century by Dr. Zeus, Incorporated - the Company - to recover things from the past which would otherwise be lost. She's a botanist, a good one. She's an immortal, indestructible cyborg. And she's a woman in love. In sixteenth century England, Mendoza fell for a native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. He died a martyr's death, burned at the stake. In nineteenth century America, Mendoza fell for an eerily identical native, a renegade, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiated determination and sexuality. When he died, she killed six men to avenge him. The Company didn't like that - bad for business. But she's immortal and indestructible, so they couldn't hurt her. Instead, they dumped her in the Back Way Back. Meanwhile, back in the future, three eccentric geniuses sit in a parlor at Oxford University and play at being the new Inklings, the heirs of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Working for Dr. Zeus, they create heroic stories and give them flesh, myths in blood and DNA to protect the future from the World to Come, the fearsome Silence that will fall on the world in 2355. They create a hero, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. "Now," stranded 150,000 years in the past, there are no natives for Mendoza to fall in love with. She tends a garden of maize, and she pines for the man she lost, twice. For Three. Thousand. Years. Then, one day, out of the sky and out of the future comes a renegade, a timefaring pirate, a tall, dark, not handsome man who radiates determination and sexuality. This is the beginning of the end. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




The Life to Come


Book Description

Featuring fourteen short stories, most previously unpublished, The Life to Come spans six decades of E.M. Forsters writing, from approximately 1903 to 1958, and shows Forster at every phase of his writing career. Forster, feeling his career would suffer, never sought publication for most of the stories, hiding these away along with Maurice, his novel of homosexual love. With stories that are lively and amusing (What Does It Matter; The Obelisk), as well as more somber and deft portrayals of love, truth, and society (Dr Woolacott; Arthur Snatchfold), The Life to Come sheds a light on Forsters powerful but suppressed explorations beyond the strictures of conventional society.




The Lost Dog


Book Description

Tom Loxley, an Indian-Australian professor, is less concerned with finishing his book on Henry James than with finding his dog, who is lost in the Australian bush. Joining his daily hunt is Nelly Zhang, an artist whose husband disappeared mysteriously years before Tom met her. Although Nelly helps him search for his beloved pet, Tom isn't sure if he should trust this new friend. Tom has preoccupations other than his book and Nelly and his missing dog, mainly concerning his mother, who is suffering from the various indignities of old age. He is constantly drawn from the cerebral to the primitive -- by his mother's infirmities, as well as by Nelly's attractions. The Lost Dog makes brilliant use of the conventions of suspense and atmosphere while leading us to see anew the ever-present conflicts between our bodies and our minds, the present and the past, the primal and the civilized.




I Can't Believe My Life Has Come to This


Book Description

This is a self-help book designed for men and women who find that the life they are living does not match up with the life that they hoped and dreamed they would be living. This book helps the reader understand how and why their psychology encourages them towards dysfunctional thoughts, feelings and behaviors and then provides a roadmap towards self-actualization and realizing one's dreams.




The Life to Come


Book Description

Representing every phase of E. M. Forster's career as a writer, the fourteen stories in this book span six decades--from 1903 to 1957 or even later.




The Life to Come


Book Description




The Celestial Telegraph, Or, Secrets of the Life to Come, Revealed Through Magnetism, Wherein the Existence, the Form and the Occupations, of the Soul After Its Separation from the Body are Proved by Many Years' Experiments, by the Means of Eight Ecstatic Somnambulists, who Had Eighty Perceptions of Thirty-six Deceased Persons of Various Conditions: a Description of Them, Their Conversation, Etc., with Proofs of Their Existence in the Spiritual World


Book Description




The Life of the World to Come


Book Description

In this newest novel of the Company series, a time-traveling botanist is stranded 150,000 years in the past. Grieving for the lover she lost twice, Mendoza meets a reincarnation of her love again.