Book picks similar to
The King Who Made Paper Flowers: A Novel by Terry Kay
fiction
book-club
southern-fiction
simply-lovely
There Are Ants In My Sugar
Annica Foxcroft - 2007
She has to adapt and make a home for her baby daughter and aging husband amidst boreholes, long drops and Aga stoves.She comes to terms with her neighbours, Joshua, a practising Sangoma, and Ben, a Jewish pig farmer; is educated in the ways of the Practical by her indomitable maid May; and comes of age through her determined efforts to create things of beauty amidst the khakibos - a lawn and poetry. She even restores the family fortune by engaging in a lucrative and uniquely South African venture.
Dandelion Soup
Babs Horton - 2004
The attached tag bears his own name and address. Who is she? And why would a complete stranger send her to him? As Solly attempts to find the answers, other Ballygurry inhabitants are drawn into the mystery. Their inquiries lead to the secluded monastery of Santa Eulalia on the medieval trail to Santiago de Compostela. As the Ballygurry pilgrims begin to thaw in the Spanish sunshine, a number of interwoven mysteries from the past gradually unfurl to rekindle old hatreds--"and restore old passions.
The Same Sweet Girls
Cassandra King - 2005
None of the Same Sweet Girls are really girls anymore, and none of them have actually ever been that sweet. But this spirited group of Southern women, who have been holding biannual reunions ever since they were together in college, are nothing short of compelling. There's Julia Stovall, the First Lady of Alabama, who, despite her public veneer, is a down-to-earth gal who only wants to know who her husband is sneaking out with late at night. There's Lanier Sanders, whose husband won custody of their children after he found out about her fling with a colleague. Then there's Astor Deveaux, a former Broadway showgirl who simply can't keep her flirtations in check. And Corinne Cooper, whose incredible story comes to light as the novel unfolds.
Divining Rod
Michael Knight - 1998
Then the story abruptly shifts back in time to the day Simon Bell returns to his childhood home in Sherwood, Alabama, haunted by the deaths of his parents. It is a hot, unmoving summer day when he begins an affair with Delia Holladay. Delia is young, beautiful, and married. Their illicit liaison will bring about a final reckoning no one could have anticipated -- not Delia nor Simon nor Delia's husband, Sam, a teacher many years her senior who thought he knew all the history of the world ... until he met Delia. This major work by gifted writer Michael Knight is a moving exploration of the power of love and the consequences of betrayal.
White Plains
David Hicks - 2017
But in the aftermath of 9/11, Flynn leaves his wife and children, resigns his teaching position and heads west, only to get lost in his guilt and in the mountains of Colorado. When he ends up stuck overnight in a snow drift during a blizzard on the Continental Divide, he realizes he needs to remake himself into the kind of man his children need him to be. With wit and insight, David Hicks turns a compassionate but unblinking eye on what it means to be human—to be lost while putting yourself back together again, to be cowardly while being brave, to fail and fail again on the way to something that might be success.With wit and insight, David Hicks turns a compassionate but unblinking eye on what it means to be human—to be lost while putting yourself back together again, to be cowardly while being brave, to fail and fail again on the way to something that might be success.
Magnificent Bastards
Rich Hall - 2008
Meet the man who vacuums bewildered prairie dogs out of their burrows; a frustrated werewolf who roams the streets of Soho getting mistaken for Brian Blessed; a smug carbon-neutral eco-couple; a teenage girl who invites 45,000 MySpace friends to a house party; the author of a business book entitled Highly Successful Secrets to Standing on a Corner Holding Up a Golf Sale Sign and a man whose attempts to teach softball to a group of indolent British advertising executives sparks an international crisis.
The Glittering Art of Falling Apart
Ilana Fox - 2016
For Eliza, the heady pull of its nightclubs and free-spirited people leads her into the life she has craved - all glamour, late nights and excitement. But it comes at a heavy cost.Cassie is fascinated by her family's history and the abandoned Beaufont Hall. Why won't her mother talk about it? Offered the chance to restore Beaufont to its former glory, Cassie jumps at the opportunity to learn more about her past.Separated by a generation, but linked by a forgotten diary, these two women have more in common than they know . . .
Cricket Kings
William McInnes - 2006
With these characters William will make us laugh and cry. And never again will we think that someone is just a regular bloke - everyone can be a king or a queen in their own suburb.
My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress
Christina McKenna - 2004
A remarkable memoir which is often humorous and ultimately very moving as a young Catholic girl struggles to break away from destructive influence of her father in 1960s Ulster.
Ransom Seaborn
Bill Deasy - 2006
Deasy quietly explores the ties that bind, and the evolution of a heart that everyone will recognize, and root for" -- Jane McCafferty, author of "One Heart" --- Ransom Seaborn is an astonishing literary debut in the spirit of Gatsby and Holden Caulfield.
Flight Patterns
Karen White - 2016
But then her work as an expert of fine china—especially of Limoges—requires her to return to the one place she swore she’d never revisit...It’s been ten years since Georgia left her family home on the coast of Florida, and nothing much has changed, except that there are fewer oysters and more tourists. She finds solace seeing her grandfather still toiling away in the apiary where she spent much of her childhood, but encountering her estranged mother and sister leaves her rattled.Seeing them after all this time makes Georgia realize that something has been missing—and unless she finds a way to heal these rifts, she will forever be living vicariously through other people’s remnants. To embrace her own life—mistakes and all—she will have to find the courage to confront the ghosts of her past and the secrets she was forced to keep...
Spark
Patricia Leavy - 2019
One day an invitation arrives. Peyton has been selected to attend a luxurious all-expense-paid seminar in Iceland, where participants, billed as some of the greatest thinkers in the world, will be charged with answering one perplexing question. Meeting her diverse teammates--two neuroscientists, a philosopher, a dance teacher, a collage artist, and a farmer--Peyton wonders what she could ever have to contribute. The ensuing journey of discovery will transform the characters' work, their biases, and themselves. This suspenseful novel shows that the answers you seek can be found in the most unlikely places. It can be read for pleasure, is a great choice for book clubs, and can be used as unique and inspiring reading in qualitative research and other courses in education, sociology, social work, psychology, and communication.
Grace
Jane Roberts Wood - 2001
In a time when people reveal little about themselves, their problems, and their passions, Grace takes readers into the hearts of four families during the last year of the War. Bound together by neighborhood and southern customs, yet separated by class, money and family, they are an unforgettable lot, vibrantly brought to life.As the war draws to an end, it becomes the catalyst that drives the inhabitants of Cold Springs across the boundaries that had once divided them, taking them to places both chaotic and astonishing.
Paint Your Wife
Lloyd Jones - 2004
His special favorite was Alice, who returned his attentions. Her husband George came home from the war, and set out to prove his love and reclaim his wife by shifting a hill with a wheelbarrow to improve the view. Now, decades later, Alma's 'in lieu of' payment is revived so that an abandoned mother living in a depressed town can make her way. For the other townspeople looking to escape various corners of despair, drawing classes provide the answer. For when you draw, the only thing that matters is what lies before you.
Shepherds & Butchers
Chris Marnewick - 2008
At nineteen, he is a Death Row warder at Maximum Security Prison in Pretoria, South Africa: a shepherd who cares for the condemned - and a butcher who escorts them to the gallows. In the summer of 1987, after thirty-two men were hanged in two weeks (all real cases), Leon loses control, with tragic results. And now he's the one facing the death penalty. Only the most precarious line of legal argument stands between Leon and the gallows. Chasing a defense, his advocate trawls the deepest recesses of life in the Pot - the twilight world of Death Row - in order to determine the effect of multiple executions on his young client. In 1987, 164 people were executed at Maximum Security. Two years later, the last man went to the gallows, after more than four thousand hangings in Pretoria in that century. Shepherds & Butchers portrays legal execution in unprecedented detail, revealing its devastating impact on all those involved. At the same time, it exposes the callous violence on the other side of the noose, where murderers reign. Chris Marnewick's first novel is a gripping courtroom drama steeped in the factual.