Yeongju did everything she was supposed to, go to university, marry a decent man, get a respectable job. Then it all fell apart. Burned out, Yeongju abandons her old life, quits her high-flying career, and follows her dream. She opens a bookshop. In a quaint neighbourhood in Seoul, surrounded by books, Yeongju and her customers take refuge. From the lonely barista to the unhappily married coffee roaster, and the writer who sees something special in Yeongju - they all have disappointments in their past. The Hyunam-dong Bookshop becomes the place where they all learn how to truly live. A heart-warming story about finding comfort and acceptance in your life – and the healing power of books.
A small girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm in rural Ireland, without knowing when she will return home. In the strangers' house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. And then a secret is revealed and suddenly, she realizes how fragile her idyll is. Winner of the Davy Byrnes Memorial Prize, Foster is now published in a revised and expanded version. Beautiful, sad and eerie, it is a story of astonishing emotional depth, showcasing Claire Keegan's great accomplishment and talent.
Few true friends have I known and two were giraffes...' Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave. It's 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California's first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world's first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes. Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it's too late.
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.
Beauregard "Bug" Montage: honest mechanic, loving husband, devoted parent. He's no longer the criminal he once was - the sharpest wheelman on the east coast, infamous from the hills of North Carolina to the beaches of Florida. But when his respectable life begins to crumble, a shady associate comes calling with a clean, one-time job: a diamond heist promising a get-rich payout. Inexorably drawn to the driver's seat and haunted by the ghost of his outlaw father, Bug is yanked back into a savage world of bullets and betrayal, which soon endangers all he holds dear.
Our Land in Colour celebrates the rich story of Aotearoa through the restoration of images never before seen in colour. Two hundred images have been meticulously colourised, opening a window back in time with remarkable detail. Aotearoa New Zealand from 1860 to 1960 was a world of black and white. It was a time when communities were isolated, made their lives from the land and lived an identity forged by the outdoors. Our Land in Colour is the way New Zealanders experienced life for a century before colour photography became prevalent, before large-scale urbanisation, and before the arrival of television and jet-airliners changed the nation forever. From how the people adapted to the environment and the way they had to feed, clothe, house and transport themselves across an at times inhospitable land, to how they banded together with a spirit that would become famously Kiwi - each image in this 400-page book is a reminder of who we were and where we've come from.
A collection of forty-seven poems about nature and the multitude of reasons to wake early.
The year is 1933. Hannah Arendt escapes Berlin, seeking refuge among the stateless gathering in Paris. Simone de Beauvoir reimagines the dance between consciousness and the world outside in a Rouen cafe. Ayn Rand labours in Hollywood exile on the novel she believes destined to reignite the flame of liberty in her adoptive nation. Simone Weil, disenchanted with the revolution's course in Russia, devotes her entire being to the plight of the oppressed. Over the next decade, one of the darkest in Europe's history, these four philosophers will conceive in parallel ideas that would circle the globe in the second half of the century, reshaping it. The Visionaries follows in its protagonists' footsteps from Leningrad to New York, Spain at civil war to France under occupation, as each is uprooted by totalitarianism's ascendence. It shows them facing the injustices, unfreedom and unfathomable violence of their time as women, refugees, activists, resistance fighters - but above all as thinkers.
What happens when an art gallery owner from New Zealand buys a dilapidated French house on a whim? Anna Bibby owned a successful art gallery in New Zealand until one day, on holiday in France, she bought a falling-down house in a picturesque medieval village. So began the process of renovating her beautiful old house which, of course, wasn't without its issues and roadblocks. Anna didn't speak the language, she didn't know anyone and her understanding of French culture was limited. Despite all this she managed to find artisans to help, she survived the brutal winter in the unrenovated house and the locals took her under their wing. Anna tells her story in a humorous, warm and generous way. She takes a real delight in the place she has found herself in. She has an ongoing relationship with a handsome Portuguese stonemason, doomed attempts at cooking French food and she blithely blunders into local French culture, with amusing results. Beautifully illustrated with gorgeous photography, this is both an engaging read and also a beautiful book to pore over and dream of your own European adventures.
Welcome to the club. I'm still here now, all these years later. You don't leave once you've joined; it's a life membership. Grief eases and changes and returns but it never disappears. But you will be okay. Somehow you will be. When Cariad was just fifteen, her dad died. She became the person-whose-dad-had-died; a mess of emotions and questions; a grief-mess. Years later, she began trying to unravel this tightly wound grief. What had happened? What effect had it all had on who she was?