Book picks similar to
The Backslider by Sean McGrady
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english-literature
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contemporary
Night Waking
Sarah Moss - 2011
She also has an insomniac toddler, a precocious, death-obsessed seven-year-old, and a frequently-absent ecologist husband who has brought them all to Colsay, a desolate island in the Hebrides, so he can count the puffins. Ferociously sleep-deprived, torn between mothering and her desire for the pleasures of work and solitude, Anna becomes haunted by the discovery of a baby's skeleton in the garden of their house. Her narrative is punctuated by letters home, written 200 years before, by May, a young, middle-class midwife desperately trying to introduce modern medicine to the suspicious, insular islanders. The lives of these two characters intersect unexpectedly in this deeply moving but also at times blackly funny story about maternal ambivalence, the way we try to control children, and about women's vexed and passionate relationship with work. Moss's second novel displays an exciting expansion of her range - showing her to be both an excellent comic writer, and a novelist of great emotional depth.
Machines Like Me
Ian McEwan - 2019
In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.
The Fine Art of Fucking Up
Cate Dicharry - 2015
Not even Jackson Pollock’s!Your archenemy taunts you with clandestine bacon frying. Your boss feverishly cyberstalks an aging romance novel cover model. Your husband unexpectedly takes in a wayward foreign national. Your best friend reveals a secret relationship with your longstanding workplace crush.Welcome to the life of Nina Lanning, lone and floundering administrator of a prestigious Midwestern art school. Her colleagues are pioneers of contemporary art movements, inspirational orators, creative virtuosos and the source of constant headaches as they rage against the authority Nina represents. They also happen to be her closest friends.When once-a-century flooding threatens to destroy the art building, and the priceless Jackson Pollock trapped inside, Nina and her ragtag band of faculty members undertake to rescue the early work of the splatter master. Propelled by disasters both natural and personal, Nina must confront her colleagues, her husband, and most importantly, herself. Cate Dicharry’s debut novel is a painfully hysterical examination of what is truly worth saving, and mastering the art of letting go.
Hand to God: A New American Play
Robert Askins - 2017
But when the young members of the Christian Puppet Ministry put those teachings into practice, one devout young man's puppet takes on a shocking personality that no one could have expected. In this hilarious black comedy, a foul-mouthed sock puppet named Tyrone soon teaches those around him that the urges that can drive a person to give in to their darkest desires fit like a glove. In Hand to God, a "true tour de force" (New York Times), Robert Askins has written a play of "unerring perfection" (Huffington Post). The must-see hit of the 2015 Broadway season, starring Steven Boyer and Geneva Carr, garnered an Obie Award and five Tony Award nominations, including Best Play, following its sold out, critically acclaimed off-Broadway runs at MCC Theater and Ensemble Studio Theatre.
Her Final Words
Skylar Finn - 2019
Reese Lindley has never stopped wondering what happened to her.Sleeping BeautiesWhen the daughter of a prominent businessman and a wealthy debutante vanishes, Reese Lindley returns to her hometown to cover the case for her podcast. Confronted by the past and her estranged family, Reese learns that the quiet town has more secrets to hide than she ever could have imagined.The ProfessorWhen Nicole Costello's boyfriend is kidnapped by a notorious secret society, she finds herself infiltrating the inner workings of the society itself in order to save him. In a race against the clock, Nicole uncovers the dark secrets of her parents' pasts, but can she come to terms with the truth in enough time to rescue her boyfriend?
The Castle in the Pyrenees
Jostein Gaarder - 2008
In the summer of 2007 they meet again on a balcony of an old wooden hotel by a fjord in western Norway. It is a place they both have fond memories from, and their meeting turns out to be fateful. But is it purely coincidental that they meet at that particular spot at that particular time? Over a couple of weeks that summer they write emails to each other, and it becomes clear that they have been living with very different interpretations of their shared past. This intimate love story of rediscovery explores the question: can science explain everything, or does some invisible force influence our lives?
Wait
C.K. Williams - 2010
K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style.
Hallucinating Foucault
Patricia Duncker - 1996
The narrator, an anonymous graduate student, sets off on the trail of a French novelist named Paul Michel, who is currently confined to an asylum. Engineering his hero's release, the narrator finds himself enmeshed in bizarre love triangle, of which the three vertices are himself, the novelist, and the late Michel Foucault. Sex, it seems, can be made safe, but the oddball intimacy of reading cannot.
The Fall
Albert Camus - 1956
His epigrammatic and, above all, discomforting monologue gradually saps, then undermines, the reader's own complacency.
Rising Storm (MacKenzie Cove #1)
Edie James - 2022
Dauntless (2019)
Marcus Follin - 2019
The collected teachings of The Golden One.Dauntless: The Wild Hunt Edition (2021) is a greatly updated version of this book.
BAILEY BROTHERS CHRISTMAS TREE FARM: A Holiday Romance Collection
Lana Dash - 2021
Women from all over flock to the farm, hoping to meet the shirtless sexy lumberjacks from the video.With this twist of holiday fate, can the brothers save their farm and find love before Christmas?ETHANI thought the biggest thing I'd have to worry about this holiday was keeping the family Christmas tree farm afloat with my brothers. But when a news crew shows up to do a story on us, I come face to face with the girl whose heart I broke in high school. She's here for a story, and I'm ready to give her the one I should have told her all those years ago.CHRISTOPHERNone of us could have expected the response we'd get after we attempt to market the family farm with the video, but I can't deny I love the attention we are getting from it. But when my best friend calls me out on my new behavior, the dynamic of our friendship shifts, and I see her in a new light. Will we go back to the way things were before, or will we get a chance at a new beginning?LUKEThe farm is swarming with women, but the only one who isn't here for the "sexy lumberjacks" in the video is the only woman I can’t get out of my head. Can I find a way to show the gorgeous single mom that even though I’m younger than her, I might just be the man she didn’t know she was looking for?BAILEY BROTHERS CHRISTMAS TREE FARM is a three-story collection of sweet and steamy romances about brothers trying to save their family Christmas tree farm and finding love during the holiday season. If you enjoy second chance, friends to lovers, and older single mother/younger man romances—you won’t want to miss this!
The Letter
Maria Duffy - 2013
But just before she sets off for a fun-filled New York hen party weekend, she finds a letter addressed to her sister Caroline. Dated only weeks before Caroline died in a tragic accident, it contains some startling information which forces Ellie to face some truths about herself, Caroline's death - and even her forthcoming marriage. Ellie has spent the three years since Caroline's death running from the truth. But as the weekend in New York comes to a close, she makes a drastic decision. As Ellie finally lays old ghosts to rest, she realises that the truth can set you free. But will she be willing to take the risk?
Finding Me ~ Complete Boxed Set
K.L. Kreig - 2017
Four months. That’s it. Smile. Dote. Look pretty for the cameras. Be his beck and call girl, his faux girlfriend. Four months, then I walk away two hundred fifty thousand dollars richer, never setting eyes on Shaw Mercer again. No emotions, no strings, and definitely no falling in love with the client. Yet, Seattle’s infamous playboy proves to not only be irresistible, he may be the man I never thought I wanted. What began as a ruse, a strategically planned campaign move suddenly morphs into reality, and I find myself breaking my own rules of self-preservation one by one. But the world has a cruel way of slapping me across the face as she always does. Just when I think Shaw and I might have our happily ever after, my ex-fiancé re-enters the picture and flips our lives upside down with devastating secrets neither of us see coming, but more importantly, neither of us will be able to escape. I can only stand by and watch helplessly as the future I’d allowed myself to dream of comes crashing down around me once again. *** Contains adult subject matter. +18 only