In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. In a generous vision that is at times funny and at others sad, Desai’s characters face numerous choices which majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
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Investigating an apparent paranormal incident, reporter Andrew Westley visits Lady Katherine Angier in England’s Peak District, only to learn that she has summoned him there on a pretext. Kate wishes to confirm that Andrew—born Nicholas Julius Borden, before his adoption—is the great-grandson of magician Alfred Borden, whose stage name was “Le Professeur de la Magie.” Tantalizingly, she reveals knowledge of a forgotten childhood meeting, and of the personal and professional feud between Borden and her great-grandfather Rupert Angier, “The Great Danton.”
The rivalry began in 1878, when Borden disrupted a fraudulent séance conducted by Angier and his wife,
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After a classified ad for an abandoned vacation cottage sparks Kate Whouley’s imagination, she becomes determined to attach the tiny building to her three-room house. Town politics and construction mishaps test her resolve, but Kate and her bossy gray cat exercise willful persistence in their single-minded pursuit of a place called home. Sometimes hilarious, often moving, this story of her year-long adventure is a also a meditation on friendship, family, commitment, creativity, and the possibility of making our dreams come true. <264783>
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Lucky Strike is the story of a young widow who is prospecting uranium with her children in Utah in 1954. Zafris’ characters, all mildly desperate, are searching less for ore than for themselves—for redemption, connection, even hope. Jean has sped west with her young children to give her seriously ill son one last adventure and to escape from the weight of too many failed relationships; camp neighbor, Jo, is struggling to endure marriage to a hateful man; and Harry, a salesman, is alienated from his Mormon heritage.
Only Jean’s daughter, Beth, recognizes the epic that is their common search for a thread of ore and riches in the desert Southwest.
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Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York. One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
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In The Fisherman’s Quilt, young Nora Hunter arrives in Alaska with her fisherman husband and infant daughter. She brings her first, fancy quilt to Alaska, along with an idealistic vision of life on America’s last frontier.
Soon after arriving in the town of Kodiak, Nora’s husband is off on a fishing boat, pursuing the “deadliest catch.” As she realizes she is the wife of a loner, Nora encounters the dark side of Kodiak culture – instability, alcoholism, greed, recklessness, disloyalty, loneliness, and drug-taking.
Nora doesn’t accept the culture she’s found and as she seeks another,
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