Search Results: Authors starting with N from Petes Loved Books

Vintage, 1998. Used. A psychological novel that is a coming-to-terms with the ghosts, corpses and repressed nightmares of Europe's recent past. It is made up of three first-person narratives integrated into a work of tragic intensity.

New York: Pan Macmillan, 2013. Used. Hilly Wise is the son of one of the most powerful and wealthy lawyers in the United States. When Hilly meets Savannah, a young black girl on the beach at Cape Cod during the summer of 1952, his affection for her collides with his father's secrets. The result shatters his family, and hers.Years later, Hilly sets out to find Savannah, and to right the wrongs he helped set in motion. But can his sense of guilt, and his good intentions, overcome the forces of history, family, and identity? A multi-generational story about love and regret, the evolving struggle for racial dignity, and the crushing weight of familial obligation, WISE MEN confirms that Stuart Nadler is one of the most exciting young writers at work today.

Text Publishing, 2013. Used. The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. Brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly funny, it portrays a close-knit group of knockabout SAS fighters: their mateship, homesickness and fears; their practical jokes, drinking and fighting. The enemy is not just the Vietcong they???ve been sent to fight, but their superiors, the mud and torrential rain, and boredom. In 1975 it won the National Book Council Award and was made into an iconic Australian film starring Graham Kennedy, Bryan Brown, John Jarrett, John Hargreaves and Graeme Blundell. This edition comes with a new introduction by the renowned military historian Paul Ham, who writes: ???The Odd Angry Shot reveals...how war damages and destroys not only life and limb, but also the brains, hopes and dreams of everyone involved...It is an Australian Dispatches and???like Michael Herr???s classic, which came out two years later???it rips the scales from our eyes.???

S. l: Knopf, Alfred A. Incorporated, 1998. Used. In a narrative that moves with dreamlike swiftness from India to England to Africa, Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul has produced his finest novel to date, a bleakly resonant study of the fraudulent bargains that make up an identity.The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran grows up sensing the hollowness at the core of his father's self-denial and vowing to live more authentically. That search takes him to the immigrant and literary bohemias of 1950s London, to a facile and unsatisfying career as a writer, and at last to a decaying Portugese colony in East Africa, where he finds a happiness he will then be compelled to betray. Brilliantly orchestrated, at once elegiac and devastating in its portraits of colonial grandeur and pretension, Half a Life represents the pinnacle of Naipaul's career.

Carlton, Vic: Pan Macmillan, 2003. Used. A House for Mr Biswas is V.S. Naipaul's unforgettable third novel. Born the "wrong way" and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence to another after the drowning of his father, Mr Biswas yearns for a place he can call home. He marries into the domineering Tulsi family, on whom he becomes indignantly dependent, but rebels and takes on a succession of occupations in an arduous struggle to weaken their hold over him and purchase a house of his own. Heartrending and darkly comic, A House for Mr Biswas masterfully evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad. 'A marvellous prose epic that matches the best 19th century novels' Newsweek

London: Pan Macmillan, 2001. Used. The Mystic Masseur tells the story of Ganesh, who at the beginning of the novel is a struggling masseur at a time when, as the narrator puts it, 'masseurs were ten a penny in Trinidad'. From failed primary school teacher and masseur to author, revered mystic and MBE, his is a journey memorable for its hilarious and bewildering success. Naipaul's clarity of style, humorous touch and powerful characterisation are all in evidence in this, his first book. Funny, touching and perceptive, this novel is a wonderful introduction for readers new to Naipaul's writing.

Hawthorn, Vic: Vintage, 1994. Used. Billed by the publisher as Naipaul's first novel since The Enigma of Arrival in 1987, this can really be regarded as fiction only by the most extremely elastic definition. It is in fact a series of extended essays, meditations and dramatized historical reconstructions that originally carried the perhaps more fitting subtitle ``A Sequence.'' Naipaul ruminates, with all his acute intelligence, on how history shapes personality--and vice versa. The book begins and ends with unexpectedly personal autobiographical sketches of Naipaul: as a boy in Trinidad; as a bright young clerk with a scholarship and a future; as a fledgling writer struggling in London; and, finally, in a later period, in an unnamed East African country where he reencounters a character from his youth.

London: Insight Publications, 2008. Used. The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif traces the extraordinary story of an Afghani refugees journey from shepherd boy in the mountains of northern Afghanistan and his flight from torture and certain death by the Taliban, to owner of a successful traditional rug shop in Melbourne. His story begins in the infamous Woomera Detention Centre in the remote desert country of central Australia. This is the first book-length account of an asylum seeker in Australia to be exquisitely captured in his own voice. From the compelling opening sentence to the beautiful final chapter, Najafs integrity, his extraordinary optimism and his generosity of spirit will win the hearts and minds of all readers.

Not Listed: HarperCollins, Not recorded. Used.PAPERBACK EDITION. CREASES TO SPINE AND COVERFrom a remote Scottish mountain, Dr. Oliver Webb--one of the world's great physicists--is whisked away by a military helicopter and routed to the Mexican border. Along with the leading men of physics and one sexy atom smasher, Webb is given an impossible task: identify the asteroid--codename Nemesis--that is on course to collide with and destroy America. They have five days to stop it. If they can't, the President will retaliate first by ordering the U.S. military to pull the nuclear trigger...IS THE ONLY SALVATION?But when one of Webb's colleagues is found dead, he has every reason to suspect that there is more to Nemesis than he knows. Then, he makes a staggering discovery: That the secret to saving the world is hidden in a 17th Latin century manuscript that has gone mysteriously missing.FOR THE SURVIVAL OF THE U.S.An electrifying race against time, NEMESIS spans centuries and the globe in a white hot journey… Read More

Headline, 2002. Used. A planetary monitoring station in Eastern Europe is suddenly bombarded with rhythmic bursts of light particles from beyond earth - a pattern so regular and complex that they can only have emanated from a highly evolved intelligence. As the scientists begin to decode the messages, they are amazed by the information they reveal: secrets of a technology far in advance of our own, suggesting that a benign civilisation wishes to share its knowledge with humankind. Surely, the scientists argue, the signals should be acknowledged and contact established. But the world's superpowers have other ideas, and suddenly the scientists find themselves at the heart of a global conspiracy - on the run from forces determined to claim the benefits of the alien messages for themselves. And what will be the effect on a world suddenly faced with unimaginable technological breakthrough...'

London, England: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Used. Novel by Cole Lavalais. Lavalais received her MFA in Creative Writing from Chicago State University. She has been awarded writer?s residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Noepe Center for the Literary Arts. An Inaugural Fellow of the Kimbilio Center for Fiction, Cole?s short stories have appeared in several print and online literary journals. Cole hosts the Voices of Chicago?s Literati Salon and teaches community-based writing workshops on the south side of Chicago. She is currently at work on her second novel.

Millers Point, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin, 2006. Used. Beautiful, smart, talented, impatient, dissatisfied, critical, Ursula was many things to many people. In a life filled with love and drama, hope and disappointment, she had to reinvent herself again and again. Her pampered childhood in Germany ended abruptly in flight from the coming Nazi terror.

London: Penguin, 2002. Whitbread Award. Used. The raucous novel that won the prestigious Whitbread Novel Award, Twelve Bar Blues is a virtuoso epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the passionate tones of his coronet. But Lick's true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister Sylvie, for whom he searches for among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di Napoli, a black English former prostitute turned singer who travels from London to New York and Chicago in 1999 in search of the answer to the mystery of her family's roots. Funny and poignant, Twelve Bar Blues is a dynamic novel with all the emotional energy and breakneck tempo of a red-hot Big Easy jazz band that… Read More

London: Penguin Books Limited, 2004. Used. Master storyteller Patrick Neate has written a funny, provocative and daring tale of London high- and low-life set among the capital's twirtysomethings. Featuring performance poetry; murder; Trafalgar Square's only fried-chicken induced battle; hat selling; bank robbery for the middle classes, love (and other social ailments); as well as pigeons - lots of crazed, angry thinking pigeons - The London Pigeon Wars is both a comic fable for our times and an exciting bird's eye view of life (and death) in the city.

London: Little, Brown, 1998. Used. A corporate world of blackmail and murder is exposed in a suspense thriller about Ned Allen who, downsized and desperate, seeks employment with a sleazy real-estate tycoon only to discover the true consequence of his job

London: John Murray, 2007. Used. Brought up as a Christian, Marina Nemat's peaceful childhood in Tehran was shattered when the Iranian Revolution of 1979 ushered in a new era of Islamic rule. After complaining to her teachers about her Maths lessons being replaced by Koran study, Marina was arrested late one evening. She was taken to the notorious prison, Evin, where interrogation and torture were part of the daily routine. Aged sixteen, she was sentenced to death. Her prison guard snatched her from the firing squad bullets but exacted a shocking price in return - marriage to him and conversion to Islam. Marina lived out her prison days as his secret bride, spending nights with him in a separate cell. Marina struggled to reconcile her hatred towards Ali and her feelings of physical repulsion with the fact that he had saved her life. When Ali was murdered by his enemies from Evin, and saved Marina's life for a second time, her feelings were complicated even further. At last she was able to return… Read More

London: Vintage, 2007. Used. Translated by Sandra Smith, with an introduction by Patrick Marnham. In 1929, 26-year-old Irene Nemirovsky shot to fame in France with the publication of her first novel David Golder. At the time, only the most prescient would have predicted the events that led to her extraordinary final novel Suite Fran??aise and her death at Auschwitz. Yet the clues are there in this astonishingly mature story of an elderly Jewish businessman who has sold his soul. Golder is a superb creation. Born into poverty on the Black Sea, he has clawed his way to fabulous wealth by speculating on gold and oil. When the novel opens, he is at work in his magnificent Parisian apartment while his wife and beloved daughter, Joy, spend his money at their villa in Biarritz. But Golder's security is fragile. For years he has defended his business interests from cut-throat competitors. Now his health is beginning to show the strain. As his body betrays him, so too do his wife and child, leaving him to… Read More

London: Chatto & Windus, 2006. Used. Suite franaise is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irene Nemirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Nemirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust. The notebook containing the two novels was preserved by her daughters but not examined until 1998. They were published in a single volume entitled Suite franaise in 2004.

London: Random House, 2008. Used. An old man looks back on a chequered life with secret regrets, concealing a truth he will not reveal until the end. Fire in the Blood is a small and beautiful chamber piece which starts quietly, lyrically, but then races away with revelations and narrative twists in a story about young women forced into marriages with old men, about mothers and daughters, stepmothers and stepdaughters, youthful passions and the regrets of old age, about peasant communities and the way they hide their secrets. N??mirovsky looks at her characters, both young and old, with the same clear-eyed distance and humanity as she displayed in Suite Fran??aise, unpeeling layer after layer. Atmospheric and haunting as Embers and with the crystalline perfection of Chekhov, Fire in the Blood is a gripping literary find.. "--publisher's website.

London: Random House, 2011. Used. Introspective, intense and poignant, this book is the most autobiographical of all Irene Nemirovsky's novels, now available in English for the first time. Imbued with melancholy, and regret, it explores the troubled relationship between a young girl, her distant, self-absorbed mother and her mother's lover, Max. We follow the family through the Great War and the Russian Revolution, as the young Helene grows from a dreamy, unhappy child into an angry young woman.