The Sky Unwashed PDF Download

Author: Irene Zabytko
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1565122461
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Early on an April Saturday in 1986 in a farm village in Ukraine, widow Marusia Petrenko and her family awake to a day of traditional wedding preparations. Marusia bakes her famous wedding bread-a korovai-in the communal village oven to take to her neighbor's granddaughter's reception. Late that night, after all the dancing and drinking, Marusia's son Yurko leaves for his shift at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl. In the morning, the air has a strange metallic taste. The cat is oddly listless. The priest doesn't show up for services. Yurko doesn't come home from work. Nobody know what's happened (and they won't for many days), but things have changed for the Petrenkos-forever. Inspired by true events, this unusual, unexpected novel tells how-and why-Marusia defies the Soviet government's permanent evacuation of her deeply contaminated village and returns to live out her days in the only home she's ever known. Alone in the deserted town, she struggles up into the church bell tower to ring the bells twice every day just in case someone else has returned. And they have, one by one/ In the end, five intrepid old women-the village babysi-band together for survival and to confront the Soviet officials responsible for their fate. And, in the midst of desolation, a tenacious hold on life chimes forth. Poignant and truthful and triumphant, this timeless story is about ordinary people who do more than simply "survive."

Author: Irene Zabytko
Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Searching for her own identity apart from her poverty-stricken Ukranian family in Chicago, Luba attends a local college where the tumult of 1968 envelops her, but she soon finds she cannot leave her family completely behind.

Author: A. S. Byatt
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307426637
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
An unforgettable collection of fairy tales for grownups—from the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession. • “A delight.... provoking and alarming, richly yet tautly rendered.... [She] has the sheer narrative skill to raise the hairs on the back of your neck and make your pulse race.” —The New York Times Book Review Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for adults. And in this ravishing collection she breathes new life into the form. Little Black Book of Stories offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw–or thought they saw–something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying, the Little Black Book of Stories is Byatt at the height of her craft.

Author: Hillary Jordan
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 9781565125698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississipi Delta.

Author: Dori Sanders
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616203412
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
“An honest and refreshing novel that makes an important statement about the barriers between blacks and whites” by the author of Her Own Place (San Francisco Chronicle). Clover Hill is ten years old when her father, the principal of the local elementary school, marries a white woman, Sara Kate. Just hours later, an automobile accident compels Clover to forge a relationship with the new stepmother she hardly knows in this beautiful, enduring novel about a family lost and found. First published by Algonquin in 1990 and winner of the Lillian Smith Award for Southern literature that enhances racial awareness, Clover is a national bestseller and has been recommended reading for classrooms across the country. Now on our thirtieth anniversary we have the pleasure of republishing this Algonquin classic in trade paperback, with an original essay by the author. In the spirit of Cold Sassy Tree and The Secret Life of Bees, Clover is a witty, insightful classic for readers of all ages. “Striking . . . The author has staked out an impressive new territory here, replete with peach farmers, textile workers, drunks and crazy people, with the newly middle class as well as the terminally poor . . . Clover is very much the genuine item.” —The New York Times Book Review “Warmly engrossing . . . Sanders writes with wit and authority in this unusual gem of a love story.” —Chicago Tribune “Black vernacular as convincing as Alice Walker’s, imaginative metaphors that rival Maya Angelou’s and humor as delicious as Zora Neale Hurston’s.” —Publishers Weekly

Author: Lee Mandelo
Publisher: Tordotcom
ISBN: 1250790301
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Lee Mandelo's debut Summer Sons is a sweltering, queer Southern Gothic that crosses Appalachian street racing with academic intrigue, all haunted by a hungry ghost. Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of an apparent suicide. He leaves Andrew a horrible inheritance: a roommate he doesn’t know, friends he never asked for, and a gruesome phantom that hungers for him. As Andrew searches for the truth of Eddie’s death, he uncovers the lies and secrets left behind by the person he trusted most, discovering a family history soaked in blood and death. Whirling between the backstabbing academic world where Eddie spent his days and the circle of hot boys, fast cars, and hard drugs that ruled Eddie’s nights, the walls Andrew has built against the world begin to crumble. And there is something awful lurking, waiting for those walls to fall. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author: Karen Rivers
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN: 0374302472
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Two best friends. The boy who loves them both. What happens when there is only one girl left? Piper and Sloane are best friends. They grew up together, dress alike, and never do anything without each other. To Sloane, Piper has always been extraordinary: fierce and pretty and powerful. The only thing that makes Sloane special is that Piper chose her for a sisterhood that was supposed to last forever. That is, until Piper caught Sloane kissing Piper’s boyfriend, Soup—and the next day, Piper is found dead, washed ashore on a beach. As Sloane and Soup relive their deep, sometimes painful histories with Piper and face a future without her, they are racked by questions: Who is to blame for Piper’s death? How do you make amends for hurting someone you love if that person is no longer around? And how can you ever move on and love again? Told from alternating perspectives in Karen Rivers's signature lyrical prose, All That Was is a story about the complexity of friendships, forgiveness, and growing up.

Author: Kaye Gibbons
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616203080
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
"Filled with lively humor, compassion, and intimacy." —Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review "When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." With that opening sentence we enter the childhood world of one of the most appealing young heroines in contemporary fiction. Her courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable as she tells her own story with stunning honesty and insight. An Oprah Book Club selection, this powerful novel has become an American classic. Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Ernest Hemingway Foundation's Citation for Fiction.

Author: Matt Thomas
Publisher: Unbound Publishing
ISBN: 1789651484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
Deadbeat Kevin Jones finds himself kidnapped to an alternative reality where Wales is the single global superpower. Abducted from his mundane existence by the mysterious Gwen, she tells him there are forces seeking his destruction – he has to run or die. It turns out Kevin’s story holds the key to why all worlds but ours turn out the way they do – Pax Cambria. Featuring a host of mysterious characters, cheese-on-toast based fast food, alt-right druids and the deadly all-knowing Taffia, Anthracite begins the battle to address the woeful lack of Welsh themed comedy cyberpunk. The fearsome Jones-Corporation might run the world but they have a dirty little secret they don't want to get out. Swansea has never looked more like near-future LA. It's already got the rain.

Author: Xinran
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307366278
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In 2002 Xinran’s Good Women of China became an international bestseller, revealing startling new truths about Chinese life to the West. Now she returns with an epic story of love, friendship, courage and sacrifice set in Chinese-occupied Tibet. Based on a true story, Xinran’s extraordinary second book takes the reader right to the hidden heart of one of the world’s most mysterious and inaccessible countries. In March 1958, Shu Wen learns that her husband, an idealistic army doctor, has died while serving in Tibet. Determined to find out what happened to him, she courageously sets off to join his regiment. But to her horror, instead of finding a Tibetan people happily welcoming their Chinese “liberators” as she expected, she walks into a bloody conflict, with the Chinese subject to terrifying attacks from Tibetan guerrillas. It seems that her husband may have died as a result of this clash of cultures, this disastrous misunderstanding. But before she can know his fate, she is taken hostage and embarks on a life-changing journey through the Tibetan countryside — a journey that will last twenty years and lead her to a deep appreciation of Tibet in all its beauty and brutality. Sadly, when she finally discovers the truth about her husband, she must carry her knowledge back to a China that, in her absence, has experienced the Cultural Revolution and changed beyond recognition. . .