. .In Number Eight he wants a baby, she doesn't. The guy a few doors down just wants to find love. Across the street a single mum struggles to cope. While the people next door might appear to have it all, their mortgage holder knows different.When the street syndicate wins the National Lottery, it seems that things are looking up. Enter a New York production company on a mission to document a 'quintessential' Dublin community - just as it becomes clear that the winning ticket is nowhere to be found.Facades begin to crumble in the scramble to uncover the missing ticket and, as the gloves come off for the once unremarkable residents of St Enda's, it's game on with everything to play for.

    They fill her life and her heart. She knows that it’s important to share love with actions and words, but that last one? About the words? That’s a problem. Because when it comes to saying ‘I love you’ to her forever person, Cath discovers that she doesn’t really know anything about love at all.Then, Rica Diamandis strolls into her life. Rica is perfect, sexy, made of stardust and magic, and Cath is intrigued. The sudden availability of a blank canvas, primed for love's artistic brushstrokes, takes Cath’s breath away. But when her father is taken to hospital with a life-threatening disease, Cath boxes up the romance with Rica, and packs it into the back of her heart. Fortunately, the universe has other ideas and Cath begins to realise that embracing emotional chaos is actually the art that creates the magic.From the world of 'Coming Home', but does stand alone.

    Sebald completed this controversial book before his death in December 2001. On the Natural History of Destruction is his harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined silences of our time. In it, the novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This historical void is in part a repression of things -- such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF -- too terrible to bear. But rather than record the crises about them, writers sought to retrospectively justify their actions under the Nazis. For Sebald, this is an example of deliberate cultural amnesia. His analysis of its effects in and outside Germany has already provoked angry painful debate. Sebald's novels are rooted in meticulous observation. His essays are novelistic. They include his childhood recollections of the war that spurred his horror at the collective amnesia around him. There are moments of black humor and, throughout, the sensitivity of his intelligence. This book is a study of suffering and forgetting, of the morality hidden in artistic decisions, and of both compromised and genuine heroics.

    Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe—Borges, Bierce, Céline, Cortázar, Faulkner, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet—he lays bare the inner workings of fiction, all the while urging young novelists not to lose touch with the elemental urge to create. Conversational, eloquent, and effortlessly erudite, this little book is destined to be read and re-read by young writers, old writers, would-be writers, and all those with a stake in the world of letters.

    With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him, and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of fiction, Kundera brings his extraordinary critical gifts to bear on the paintings of Francis Bacon, the music of Leos Janacek, and the films of Federico Fellini, as well as the novels of Philip Roth, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gabriel García Márquez, among others. He also takes up the challenge of restoring to its rightful place the work of Anatole France and Curzio Malaparte, major writers who have fallen into obscurity.Milan Kundera's signature themes of memory and forgetting, the experience of exile, and the championing of modernist art are here, along with more personal reflections and stories. Encounter is a work of great humanism. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. Elegant, startlingly original, and provocative, Encounter follows in the footsteps of Kundera's earlier essay collections, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, and The Curtain.

    Greg Garrard's animated and accessible volume traces the development of the movement and explores the concepts which have most occupied ecocritics, including:* pollution* wilderness* apocalypse* dwelling* animals* earth.Featuring an invaluable glossary of terms and suggestions for further reading, this is the first student-friendly introduction to one of the newest and most exciting trends in literary and cultural studies.

    

    Two sisters. One Ghost. An impossible sacrifice.Feuding half-sisters inherit a cottage on the Italian coast, along with its resident spirit and a secret manuscript. Their rivalry explodes through a struggle for control of their haunted house, but Italy infuses its magic into them until a shocking night changes everything for the sisters and their friends.A tale of sisterhood and the supernatural, perfect for fans of Mary Ellen Taylor and Barbara O'Neal."Two sisters, very different, both love and frustrate each other. When their father dies, they are co-inheritors of his house in Italy and must agree on what to do with it. They descend on the house and, slowly and gently, come to terms with their differences and reinforce the love they’ve always had for each other ... Romance blooms in all directions as each sister finds what she most needs, in a most surprising way." – Diane Byington, author of WHO SHE IS

    He dropped out of high school to pursue the venture full-time, and two years later sold ClickAgents for $40 million, making him one of the youngest self-made millionaires in history and allowing him and his entire family to realize their dreams. Chahal went on to become the youngest executive of a multi-billion dollar NASDAQ-listed company, and then sold his second company, BlueLithium, to Yahoo! for $300 million, turning many of his employees into multi-millionaires as well.In The Dream, Chahal's refreshing advice for entrepreneurs encourages them to embrace risk and to carve out new niches in the marketplace. He emphasizes the value of good business timing: how to execute an idea and get it to the marketplace, how to create and maintain solid business relationships, how to stay grounded, and -- most importantly -- how to teach yourself that failure is not an option.Chahal's story not only shows how a 16-year-old immigrant overcame discrimination and adversity to fulfill his highest ambitions, but also provides aspiring entrepreneurs with valuable hands-on advice on how to achieve success.

    Set in Berlin and Moscow and spanning eight decades, Fear of Mirrors is the story of betrayed illusions and destroyed hopes. It is also the story of people who believed they were fighting for certain ideals, only to be crushed by their own people.Lovers want to know the truth, but they do not always want to tell it. For some East Germans, the fall of Communism was like the end of a long and painful love affair: free to tell the truth at last, they found they no longer wanted to hear it. Vlady, a former dissident who loses his job when he refuses to renounce his socialist beliefs in the new, unified Germany, wants to tell his alienated son, Karl, what his family's long and passionate involvement with Communism really meant. It is the story of Ludwik, the Polish secret agent who recruited Philby, and of Gertrude, Vlady's mother, whose desire for Ludwik is matched only by her devotion to the Communist ideal.Ali carries us along as the political upheavals of the twentieth century unfold, as Vlady describes the hopes aroused by the Bolshevik revolution and discovers the almost unbearable truth about their betrayal. Written with deep political insight and sensitivity, Fear of Mirrors tells one of the great stories of the twentieth century -- the extraordinary history of Central Europe and the fall of Communism.

    Includes: Summer Unplugged Bayleigh is addicted to her cell phone and her mom has had enough. After catching her sending a less than lady-like photo to a boy who barely knows her, Bayleigh's mom sends her away to her grandparent's house for the summer--sans cell phone, laptop and Ipod. Bayleigh thinks the summer will be torture without social media...that is until she meets the boy next door. Autumn Unlocked After a summer grounded from technology, Bayleigh is back home and rebuilding her relationship with her mother. Her boyfriend Jace keeps his promise and stays in Texas, where he works at a local motocross track. Knowing her relationship with Jace is something special and not like all the guys before him, Bayleigh is determined to keep their love strong, despite his notorious fame in the motocross world and the dozens of girls throwing themselves at him in his new job. Winter Untold When Jace accepts a job that has him traveling all over the country, Bayleigh wonders how their relationship can survive on random text messages and intermitent phone calls. Frustrated by his popularity on Facebook and jealous of all the parties he's attending, she finds comfort and friendship in Chase, the guy who just moved in next door. Spring Unleashed Bayleigh graduates from high school and with her boyfriend Jace by her side, she feels like life can't get any better. That is until Jace and her mom suggest some plans for Bayleigh's future that she's not too thrilled about. As long as she can win them over to seeing things her way, life will be great again. Or so she thinks.

    In a range of work including novels of literary suspense that test both their protagonists’ souls and their readers’ nerves to the breaking point, Graham Greene explored a territory located somewhere on the border between despair and faith, treachery and love.

    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

    In this first anthology of its kind, Carey chooses accounts by scientists themselves--astronomers and physicists, biologists, chemists, psychologists--that are both arrestingly written and clear. Contributors include Carl Sagan, Charles Darwin, Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver Sacks, Lewis Thomas, Rachel Carson, Sigmund Freud, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and scores of others.

    But of his many books, not one offers a satisfactory introduction to the entire complex body of his work. The Foucault Reader was commissioned precisely to serve that purpose.The Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as a wealth of previously unpublished writings, including important material written especially for this volume, the preface to the long-awaited second volume of The History of Sexuality, and interviews with Foucault himself, in the course of which he discussed his philosophy at first hand and with unprecedented candor.This philosophy comprises an astonishing intellectual enterprise: a minute and ongoing investigation of the nature of power in society. Foucault's analyses of this power as it manifests itself in society, schools, hospitals, factories, homes, families, and other forms of organized society are brought together in The Foucault Reader to create an overview of this theme and of the broad social and political vision that underlies it.