The first novel in ten years from award-winning, million-copy bestselling author Leif Enger, Virgil Wander follows the inhabitants of a Midwestern town in their quest to revive its flagging heart.
Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is “cruising along at medium altitude” when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals—from Rune,
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For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking such questions as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim as a pet, he gradually realizes the enormous obligation he has to the bird and learns that the parrot is a lot more complex than he thought.
Simultaneously a biography of this singular bird and a history of bird/dinosaurs and the human relationship with birds, Tuco also explores how we “other” the world—abusing birds,
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In 1959 Florence Green, a kindhearted widow with a small inheritance, risks everything to open a bookshop—the only bookshop—in the seaside town of Hardborough. By making a success of a business so impractical, she invites the hostility of the town’s less prosperous shopkeepers. By daring to enlarge her neighbors’ lives, she crosses Mrs. Gamart, the local arts doyenne. Florence’s warehouse leaks, her cellar seeps, and the shop is apparently haunted. Only too late does she begin to suspect the truth: a town that lacks a bookshop isn’t always a town that wants one.
This new edition features an introduction by David Nicholls,
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Now a television miniseries, as seen on Masterpiece on PBS
Set in seventeenth century Amsterdam—a city ruled by glittering wealth and oppressive religion—a masterful debut steeped in atmosphere and shimmering with mystery, in the tradition of Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, and Sarah Dunant.
”There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed . . .“
On a brisk autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman arrives in Amsterdam to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt. But her new home, while splendorous, is not welcoming.
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When it was first published, Bernard MacLaverty’s masterpiece was hailed by Michael Gorra in the New York Times Book Review as “a marvel of technical perfection…a most moving novel whose emotional impact is grounded in a complete avoidance of sentimentality…[It] will become the Passage to India of the Troubles.” For Cal, a Northern Irish teenager who, against his will, is involved in the terrible war between Catholics and Protestants, some of the choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in the slaughterhouse that nauseates him or join the dole line; he can brood on his past or plan a future with the beautiful,
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“[A] wrenchingly intimate depiction of a couple in the chilly, hibernal years of their marriage.… [A book] with rare and unexpected beauty.”—Wall Street Journal
With Midwinter Break, a moving portrait of retired couple Gerry and Stella Gilmore’s marriage in crisis, Bernard MacLaverty reminds us why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers. Through accurate, compassionate observation and effortlessly elegant writing, MacLaverty reveals the long-unspoken insecurities that exist between Gerry and Stella over their four-day holiday in Amsterdam, crafting a profound examination of human love.
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