After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille, the ageing Doctor Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There the lives of the two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil roads of London, they are drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror, and they soon fall under the lethal shadow of the guillotine.
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Considered by many critics to be Charles Dickens’s most psychologically acute self-portrait, Great Expectations is without a doubt one of Dickens’s most fully-realized literary creations.
Work on Great Expectations commenced in late September of 1860 at what proved to be a peak of emotional intensity for its author. Two years before, Dickens had separated from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years, and several weeks prior to the beginning of this novel, Dickens had burned all his papers and correspondence of the past twenty years at his Gad’s Hill estate. This action, in retrospect, can be viewed as a sort of spiritual purge (think of Pip’s burnt hands/Miss Havisham on fire)—an attempt to break decisively from the past in order (paradoxically) to fully embrace it,
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Sebastian Prendergast lives with his eccentric grandmother in a geodesic dome. His homeschooling has taught him much-but he’s learned little about girls, junk food, or loud, angry music. Then fate casts Sebastian out of the dome, and he finds a different kind of tutor in Jared Whitcomb: a chain-smoking sixteen-year-old heart transplant recipient who teaches him the ways of rebellion. Together they form a punk band and plan to take the local church talent show by storm. But when his grandmother calls him back to the futurist life she has planned for him, he must decide whether to answer the call-or start a future of his own.
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A memoir sharing a lifetime’s worth of lessons from a generation female cooks.
Somewhere between the lessons her mother taught her and the ones she is now trying to teach her own daughter, Kim Severson stumbled. She lost sight of what mattered, of who she was and who she wanted to be, and of how she needed to live her life. It took a series of encounters with female cooks-including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan-to reteach her the life lessons she had forgotten, and many she had never learned in the first place.
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Bandy Dorner, home from Vietnam, awakes with his car mired in a canal, his cabin reduced to ashes, and his pregnant wife preparing to leave town with her lover. Within moments, a cop lies bleeding in the road. Eighteen years later, Bandy’s son — a stranger bearing his name — returns to the town, where the memory of his father’s crime still hangs thick. When an accident brings the family — paroled father, widowed mother, injured son — back together, the three must confront their past, and struggle against their fate.
Like a traditional Greek tragedy,
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When Paula Butturini’s husband was shot and nearly killed, it marked the abrupt end of what the couple had known together and the beginning of a phase of life neither had planned for.
A story of food and love, trauma and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple’s nourishment and restoration after a period of tragedy, and the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, and friendship.
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