250 Document (s)

A memoir of growing up in New York in the 1930s and in Ireland in the 1940s. McCourt tells of extreme hardship and suffering, in Brooklyn tenements and Limerick slums - too many children, too little money, his mother barely coping as his father's drinking bouts brought the family close to disaster.

Artemis is at boarding school in Ireland when he suddenly receives an urgent video e-mail from Russia. In it is a plea from his father, who has been kidnapped by the Russian Mafiya. As Artemis rushes to his rescue, he is stopped by Captain Holly Short of the LEPrecon fairy police. But this time, instead of battling the fairies, he is going to have to join forces with them if he wants to save one of the few people in the world he loves.

Peter Bruegel's paintings---a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival, and many others---have long defined our idea of everyday life in sixteenth- century Europe. They are classic icons of a time and place in much the same way as Norman Rockwell's depictions of twentieth-century America. We know relatively little about Bruegel, but after years of research, novelist Rudy Rucker has built upon the what is known and has created for us the life and world of a true master who never got old. In sixteen chapters, each headed by a reproduction of one of the famous works, Rucker brings Bruegel's painter's progress and his colorful world to vibrant life, doing for Bruegel what the best-selling Girl with a Pearl Earring did for Vermeer. We follow the artist from the winding streets of Antwerp and Brussels to the glowing skies and decaying monuments of Rome and back. He and his friends, the cartographer Ortelius and Williblad Cheroo, an American Indian, are as vivid on the page as the multifarious denizens of Bruegel's unforgettable canvases.

In 1935 England, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses an event involving her sister Cecilia and her childhood friend Robbie Turner, and she becomes the victim of her own imagination, which leads her on a lifelong search for truth and absolution. Reissue. (A Focus Features film, written by Christopher Hampton, directed by Joe Wright, releasing Fall 2007, starring Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Brenda Blethyn, Vanessa Redgrave, & Romola Garai) (General Fiction)

The aye-aye - part lemur, part rodent, the beast with the magic finger that lurks in the forests of Madagascar - is one of the world's strangest creatures. Once thought to be extinct, the aye-aye is now found only in small colonies. Gerald Durrell's task was to capture some aye-aye for breeding at his Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Although on a serious scientific expedition, Durrell relates his adventures with humour.

Dans les derniers jours des turbulentes années 1970, à la suite de meurtres non élucidés qui ont choqué Detroit, les vies de plusieurs habitants sont rapprochées, avec des conséquences tragiques. Il y a Hannah, épouse d'un homme d'affaires local important, qui a entamé une liaison avec un inconnu au charisme sombre dont l'identité reste insaisissable ; Mikey, un arnaqueur de rue rusé qui se retrouve dans une mission inattendue pour réparer une injustice ; et le tueur en série connu sous le nom de Babysitter, une figure énigmatique et terrifiante à la périphérie de l'élite de Détroit. Suspensif, brillamment orchestré et captivant, Babysitter est un récit saisissant qui explore les risques de la poursuite d'une autre vie, remettant en question jusqu'où nous sommes prêts à aller pour protéger ceux que nous chérissons le plus. Dans son réquisitoire cinglant contre la politique corrompue, le racisme aveugle et la prédation sexuelle en Amérique, Babysitter est une œuvre de fiction contemporaine passionnante. In the waning days of the turbulent 1970s, in the wake of unsolved killings that have shocked Detroit, the lives of several residents are drawn together, with tragic consequences. There is Hannah, wife of a prominent local businessman, who has begun an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger whose identity remains elusive; Mikey, a canny street hustler who finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and the serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and terrifying figure at the periphery of elite Detroit. As Babysitter continues his rampage of killings, these individuals intersect with one another in startling and unexpected ways.Suspenseful, brilliantly orchestrated and engrossing, Babysitter is a starkly narrated exploration of the riskiness of pursuing alternate lives, calling into question how far we are willing to go to protect those whom we cherish most. In its scathing indictment of corrupt politics, unexamined racism, and the enabling of sexual predation in America, Babysitter is a thrilling work of contemporary fiction.

It came in a plain brown wrapper, no return address - a tape recording of a horrifying, soul-lacerating scream, followed by the sound of a childlike voice delivering the enigmatic and haunting message: 'Bad love. Bad love. Don't give me the bad love...' For child psychologist Dr Alex Delaware, the chant is the first intimation that he is about to enter a living nightmare. Others soon follow: disquieting laughter echoing over a phone line, a chilling trespass outside his home, a sickening act of vandalism. A carefully orchestrated campaign of vague threats and intimidation rapidly builds to a crescendo as harassment turns to terror, mischief to madness. Searching his memory for the phrase 'bad love', Alex recalls a symposium he attended commemorating the work of Dr Andres de Bosch who ran a clinic for troubled adolescents. But when he tries to contact the other delegates, Alex discovers a seemingly random series of violent deaths amongst them. As he delves deeper into the history of the clinic, the escalating pattern of violence becomes inescapably clear. And if Alex fails to decipher the twisted logic of the stalker's mind-games, he will be the next one to die.

Frankie Elkin is an average middle-aged woman with more regrets than belongings who spends her life doing what no one else will: searching for missing people the world has stopped looking for. When the police have given up, when the public no longer remembers, when the media has never paid attention, Frankie starts looking. A new case brings Frankie to Mattapan, a Boston neighborhood with a rough reputation. She is searching for Angelique Badeau, a Haitian teenager who vanished from her high school months earlier. Resistance from the Boston PD and the victim's wary family tells Frankie she's on her own. And she soon learns she's asking questions someone doesn't want answered. But Frankie will stop at nothing to discover the truth, even if it means the next person to go missing will be her ...

British crime fiction where characters become people and place is part of the story. Never underestimate a beautiful woman. You might not live to regret it. Suicide - the act of taking one's own life. Homicide - the act of taking someone else's. An unethical banker suffocates. A diamond dealer slits his wrists. A media magnate freezes in the snow. A disgraced CEO inhales exhaust fumes. Beatrice Stubbs, on her first real case since 'the incident', arrives in Switzerland to lead the investigation. Potential suspects are everywhere, her Swiss counterpart is hostile and the secretive world of international finance seems beyond the law. Battling impossible odds by day and her own demons at night, Beatrice has never felt so alone. She isn't. Someone's watching.

Quelque part en Amérique du Sud, une réception somptueuse donnée en l'honneur d'un puissant industriel japonais réunit des hôtes de marque autour de la célèbre cantatrice américaine Roxane Coss. Alors que s'égrènent les dernières notes du récital de la diva, une bande de guérilleros armés jusqu'aux dents investit les lieux. A défaut de pouvoir enlever le président du pays retenu ailleurs par des obligations «diplomatiques» aussi cruciales que soudaines, les terroristes prennent ses invités en otage. Toutes les femmes seront relâchées, à l'exception de la cantatrice, qui devrait servir de monnaie d'échange. Les négociations tournent court et la prise d'otages se prolonge. Au fil des semaines, puis des mois, des rapports singuliers se tissent au sein du groupe d'otages et entre guérilleros et prisonniers à mesure que s'instaure un fragile modus vivendi.

Having lived abroad for many years, Rosie decides that it's time to return to Dublin to look after her ageing aunt Min. Nothing much has changed in the area where Rosie grew up, and Min's increasing lack of interest in life begins to sap Rosie's spirit. While flicking through some self-help books looking for ways to distract Min, Rosie gets the idea to write an inspirational book for the middle-aged. Since her only contact in the world of publishing is her friend Markey who lives in New York, Rosie decides to put Min in a temporary care home while she travels to the United States to seek Markey's advice.

Four very different women are drawn together in the warm and engaging new novel by the bestselling author of JUST BETWEEN US. Good times or bad, friends are always there...In the beautiful town of Dunmore, four women understand what friendship really means. Abby's TV career is taking off, but her marriage to Tom is rocky. Meanwhile, her teenage daughter Jess despairs of ever finding a boyfriend. Lizzie has time for everyone: her grown-up children, her friends, even her ex-husband Myles, but never for herself. And then there's Erin, married and back in Ireland after eight years in Chicago. But can she face up to her past?When tragedy strikes, it rocks the small town. Drawn together in their sadness, the four women realise that life is for living, and they need to grab it with both hands...

The tale of Billy Lee Turner, a ten-year-old boy convicted of the murder of a white girl in Mississippi in 1937, illuminates the monstrous face of racism in America with harrowing clarity and power. Narrated in the rich accents of the American South, Billy's story is told amid the picking fields and town streets, the heat, dust and povery of the region in the time of the Depression. Albert French's haunting first novel is a story of racial injustice, as unsentimental as it is heartbreaking.

Set before and during the great war, Birdsong captures the drama of that era on both a national and a personal scale. It is the story of Stephen, a young Englishman, who arrives in Amiens in 1910. Over the course of the novel he suffers a series of traumatic experiences, from the clandestine love affair that tears apart the family with whom he lives, to the unprecedented experiences of the war itself.

After her resignation as Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner and the horrifying events which threatened her life in THE LAST PRECINCT, Kay Scarpetta has abandoned her elegant home in Richmond and is quietly living in Florida, beginning to get some balance back in her life and slowly establishing herself as a private forensic consultant. But her past won't let her rest, and her grief for Benton Wesley continues to grow, not diminish, as does the rage within Lucy, her niece. Then the architect of her changed fortunes contacts her from his cell on death row: deformed, blinded by Scarpetta's own actions, incarcerated in Texas strongest prison, Jean- Baptiste Chardonne still has the ability to terrify. But, unknown to Scarpetta, there are other forces behind the wolfman's apparent actions, invisibly shepherding her and those closest to her towards eliminating those who threaten them all. And it is all orchestrated by the one man in her life who knows every nuance of her soul. Visit the author's website at www patricia- cornwell.com

A long weekend in the Poconos is cut short when FBI agents Sherlock and Savich are helicoptered back to Washington, D.C., to lead the investigation into the brutal murder of a Supreme Court Justice. Savich allows Callie Markham, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, to partner with local Metro Police liaison Ben Raven since she's got the inside track – she's the stepdaughter of the murdered Justice. Is the murder a terrorist act? Or is it something more personal? Within twenty-four hours there's another murder with the same M.O. Savich and Sherlock are up against it this time, following leads that seem impossible to connect to the madness. But are they?

Fans around the world adore the best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma Ramotswe--with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi--navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea. A cobra has been found in Precious Ramotswe's office. Then a nurse from a local medical clinic reveals that faulty blood-pressure readings are being recorded there. And Botswana has a new advice columnist, Aunty Emang, whose advice is rather curt for Mma Ramotswe's taste. All this means a lot of work for our heroine and her inestimable assistant, Grace Makutsi, and they are, of course, up to the challenge. But there's trouble brewing in Mma Makutsi's own life. When Phuti Radiphuti misses their customary dinner date, she begins to wonder if he is having second thoughts about their engagement. And while Mma Makutsi may be able to buy that fashionably narrow (and uncomfortable) pair of blue shoes, it may not buy her the happiness that Mma Ramotswe promises her she'll find in the simpler things--in contentment with the world and enough tea to smooth over the occasional bumps in the road.

The "book of the dead" is the morgue log, a ledger in which all cases are entered by hand. For Kay Scarpetta, however, it is about to take on a new meaning. Fresh from her bruising battle with a psychopath in Florida, Scarpetta decides it's time for a change of pace, not only personally and professionally but geographically. Moving to the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, she opens a unique private forensic pathology practice, one in which she and her colleagues-including Pete Marino and her niece, Lucy-offer expert crime-scene investigation and autopsy services to communities lacking local access to modern, competent death investigation technology. It seems like an ideal situation, until the new battles start-with local politicians, with entrenched interests, with someone whose covert attempts at sabotage are clearly meant to run Scarpetta out of town.

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them.

Six years after the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning" Empire Falls, " Richard Russo returns with a novel that expands even further his widely heralded achievement. Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch has spent all his sixty years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be--chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an "empire" of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation. Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself far from anything they'd known in childhood. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the "history" he's writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who'd fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. "Bridge of Sighs" is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences--often contrary, sometimes not--prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.