Bleak Expectations: A Tantalizing Taster PDF Download

Author: Mark Evans
Publisher: Corsair
ISBN: 1472106466
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Book Description
Hearing Bleak Expectations on the radio is a splendidly satisfying experience, but now you can get even more thrills, spills, words and added paper! Bleak Expectations the novel will shortly be available for purchase in all literature emporiums of good repute. Bleak Expectations recounts the remarkable adventures of young Pip Bin as he tries to make his way in a world made all horrible by the machinations of his cruel guardian, Mr. Gently Benevolent. WEEP! As Pip is sent to Britain's nastiest boarding school, St Bastard's. GASP! As our hero suffers misfortunes such as prison, poverty, the workhouse and at least one close relative dying. SIGH! As Pip finds love with London's most eligible frail beauty, Miss Flora Dies-Early. FIND A TENTERHOOK AND SIT ON IT! As everything climaxes in a massive fight-and-wedding-filled finale. Grim circumstances, mistaken identities, nightmarish court-cases, ridiculous names, convenient coincidences to resolve plot problems, over-sentimental death scenes and lots and lots of adjectives: Bleak Expectations is a novel like Charles Dickens might have written after far too much gin.

Author: Mark Evans
Publisher: Corsair
ISBN: 1472103416
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Now a major West End play! From 3rd May 2023, see Bleak Expectations on stage at the Criterion theatre, with guest stars Stephen Fry, Dermot O'Leary, Sue Perkins and more! Based on the beloved Radio 4 series, BLEAK EXPECTATIONS recounts the remarkable adventures of young Pip Bin as he tries to make his way in a world made all horrible by the machinations of his cruel guardian, Mr Gently Benevolent. Grim circumstances, mistaken identities, nightmarish court-cases, ridiculous names, convenient coincidences to resolve plot problems, over-sentimental death scenes and lots and lots of adjectives: Bleak Expectations is a novel like Charles Dickens might have written after far too much gin.

Author: Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
ISBN: 3849650731
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This book may not be, Chesterton says, important as a contribution to history, but it is important as a contribution to biography; as a contribution to the character and the career of the man who wrote it, a typical man of his time. That Dickens made no personal historical researches, that he had no special historical learning, that he had not had, in truth, even anything that could be called a good education, all this accentuates not the merit but at least the importance of the book. For here, thinks Mr. Chesterton, may be read in plain popular language, written by a man whose genius for popular exposition has never been surpassed among men, a brief account of the origin and meaning of England as it seemed to the average Englishman of that age. This book will always remain as a bright and brisk summary of the cock-sure, healthy-minded, essentially manly and essentially ungentlemanly view of history which characterises the Radicals of that particular Radical era.

Author: Jonathan Franzen
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Notable Book “So funny, so sage and above all so incandescently intelligent” (The Chicago Tribune), the New York Times bestseller Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder, a daring and penetrating book from “the most intelligent novelist of [his] generation” (The New Republic), Jonathan Franzen Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother chose to live as a recluse with an invented name, or how she'll ever have a normal life. Enter the Germans. A glancing encounter with a German peace activist leads Pip to an internship in South America with The Sunlight Project, an organization that traffics in all the secrets of the world--including, Pip hopes, the secret of her origins. TSP is the brainchild of Andreas Wolf, a charismatic provocateur who rose to fame in the chaos following the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now on the lam in Bolivia, Andreas is drawn to Pip for reasons she doesn't understand, and the intensity of her response to him upends her conventional ideas of right and wrong. Purity is a grand story of youthful idealism, extreme fidelity, and murder. The author of The Corrections and Freedom has imagined a world of vividly original characters--Californians and East Germans, good parents and bad parents, journalists and leakers--and he follows their intertwining paths through landscapes as contemporary as the omnipresent Internet and as ancient as the war between the sexes. Purity is the most daring and penetrating book yet by one of the major writers of our time.

Author: Robin Hobb
Publisher: Spectra
ISBN: 0553900250
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 834

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The first book in a seafaring fantasy trilogy that George R. R. Martin has described as “even better than the Farseer Trilogy—I didn’t think that was possible.” Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships—rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown’s oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia. For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea’s young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard the Vivacia, the ship is a life sentence. But the fate of the ship—and the Vestrits—may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider: the ruthless buccaneer captain Kennit, who plans to seize power over the Pirate Isles by capturing a liveship and bending it to his will. Don’t miss the magic of the Liveship Traders Trilogy: SHIP OF MAGIC • MAD SHIP • SHIP OF DESTINY

Author: Lynda Barry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743212177
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
On a September night in 1971, a few days after getting busted for dropping two of the 127 hits of acid found in a friend's shoe, a sixteen-year-old who is grounded for a year curls up in the corner of her ratty bedroom, picks up a pen, and begins to write. Once upon a cruddy time on a cruddy street on the side of a cruddy hill in the cruddiest part of a crudded-out town in a cruddy state, country, world, solar system, universe. The cruddy girl named Roberta was writing the cruddy book of her cruddy life and the name of the book was called Cruddy. Now the truth can finally be revealed about the mysterious day long ago when the authorities found a child, calmly walking in the boiling desert, covered with blood. She could not give the authorities any information about why she was the only survivor and everyone else was lying around in hacked-up pieces. Roberta Rohbeson, 1971. Her overblown, drug-induced teenage rant against a world bounded by "the cruddy top bedroom of a cruddy rental house on a very cruddy mud road behind cruddy Black Cat Lumber" soon becomes a detailed account of another story. It is a story about which Roberta has kept silent for five years, until, under the influence of a pale hippie called the Turtle and a drug called Creeper, her tale giddily unspools... Roberta Rohbeson, 1967. The world of Roberta, age eleven, is terrifyingly unbounded, a one-way cross-country road trip fueled by revenge and by greed, a violent, hallucinatory, sometimes funny, more often horrific year of killings, betrayals, arson, and a sinister set of butcher knives, each with its own name. Welcome to Cruddy, Lynda Barry's masterful tale of the two intertwined narratives set five years -- an eternity -- apart, which form the backbone of Roberta's life. Cruddy is a wild ride indeed, a fairy tale-cum-low-budget horror movie populated by a cast of characters that will remain vivid in the reader's mind long after the final page: Roberta's father, a dangerous alcoholic and out-of-work meat cutter in search of his swindled inheritance; the frightening owners of the Knocking Hammer Bar and sometime slaughterhouse; and two charming but quite mad escapees from the Barbara V. Herrmann Home for Adolescent Rest. Written with a teenager's eye for freakish detail and a nervous ability to make the most horrible scenes seem hilarious, Roberta's two stories -- part Easy Rider and part bipolar Wizard of Oz -- painfully but inevitably converge in a surprising denouement in a nightmarish Dreamland in the Nevada desert. By turns terrifying, darkly funny, and resonant with humanity, propelled by all the narrative power of a superior thriller and burnished by the author's pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, Cruddy is a stunning achievement.

Author: Mary Higgins Clark
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847395473
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Topping her bestselling success with Alvirah and Willy, in The Lottery Winner,America's Queen of Suspense introduces a new sleuthing couple , Henry and Sunday, an ex-president and his young congresswoman bride. Henry Parker Britland IV is wealthy and worldly -- a beloved former president who, still youthful, is enjoying early retirement. His new wife, Sunday, is beautiful, smart and seventeen years younger than he, and has just been elected to Congress in a stunning upset victory that has made her the darling of the media. Henry and Sunday make a formidable team of sleuths -- and never more so than when they set out to solve crimes occurring among their friends in political high society. When Henry's former secretary of state is indicted for the murder of his mistress, Henry and Sunday suspect he is taking the fall for a crime of passion he did not commit. With cases ranging from a crime on the presidential yacht to a kidnapping that brings Henry back to the White House as he races against time to unravel the plot, there is never a dull moment for the ex-president and his bride -- or the reader. With her wit and gift for characterization, the creator of the popular Alvirah and Willy stories brings us another marvelously endearing sleuthing duo, destined to return again and again

Author: Elan Mastai
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101985151
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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“Entertainingly mixes thrills and humor.”—Entertainment Weekly “[An] amazing debut novel....Dazzling and complex....Fearlessly funny storytelling.”—The Washington Post “Instantly engaging....A timeless, if mind-bending, story about the journeys we take, populated by friends, family, lovers, and others, that show us who we might be, could be—and maybe never should be—that eventually leads us to who we are.”—USA Today Elan Mastai's acclaimed debut novel is a story of friendship and family, of unexpected journeys and alternate paths, and of love in its multitude of forms. It's 2016, and in Tom Barren's world, technology has solved all of humanity's problems—there's no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn't happy. He's lost the girl of his dreams. And what do you do when you're heartbroken and have a time machine? Something stupid. Finding himself stranded in a terrible alternate reality—which we immediately recognize as our 2016—Tom is desperate to fix his mistake and go home. Right up until the moment he discovers wonderfully unexpected versions of his family, his career, and the woman who may just be the love of his life. Now Tom faces an impossible choice. Go back to his perfect but loveless life. Or stay in our messy reality with a soulmate by his side. His search for the answer takes him across continents and timelines in a quest to figure out, finally, who he really is and what his future—our future—is supposed to be. Filled with humor and heart and packed with insight, intelligence, and mind-bending invention, All Our Wrong Todays is a powerful and moving story of life, loss, and love.

Author: Dan Rhodes
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1847678114
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives in Old Man. Caretaker by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken only by the occasional crunch of a spider between his teeth. Little Hands Clapping brings the Old Man together with the respectable Doctor Ernst Fröhlicher, his dog Hans and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk who find themselves involved in a crime so outrageous it will shock the world. From its sinister opening to its explosive denouement, Little Hands Clapping blends lavishly entertaining storytelling with Rhodes’s macabre imagination, entrancing originality and magical touch.

Author: Irini Spanidou
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307482081
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
From the author of God's Snake, and Fear comes a stunning novel that shines light on what it means to be beautiful, and to be possessed—by oneself, and by others. The setting is 1970s New York City, a time and place of creativity, sexual freedom, and unforeseen dangers. At its center is Beatrice, who is twenty-five, mesmerizingly lovely, intelligent, and married to Ned, a volatile painter whose obsession with her has turned to hatred. Beatrice is desired by everyone around her: by Faye, her seductive, bawdy childhood friend; by Cyril, a lonely, charismatic Vietnam veteran; by Chris, a young heroin addict. And then there is Perkins, the oddly threatening man next door. An intoxicating mix of desire, longing, and menace, Before captures a dizzying time in America.