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The Novelist by Jordan Castro


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Covington Billionaires Box Set #2


Erin Swann - 2018
    Contains Protecting the Billionaire, Picked by the Billionaire, Saved by the BillionaireProtecting the BillionaireI hadn't seen her since the day I broke her brother's nose.We came from different worlds. She was trouble wrapped in temptation, and it would be smart to keep my distance.The last time I'd dared to touch Katie, her brother foolishly took a swing at me. Her family taught me a painful lesson that day about money and power. I gave him a bloody nose. They destroyed my life.Today she desperately needed a ride back to LA. Six hours of her warm body wrapped around mine on the back of my bike was the price she'd have to pay.With her life in flames, the danger was more real than she knew. When she ran from her brother and into my arms, the kiss was meant to scare her off. It didn't work. She's sexual napalm, and I'm the match. Now we're both toast.I'm not giving her up until I have to. Even if it destroys me.Katie:I hadn't seen Nick since high school, the day he broke my brother's nose.I bumped into him while trapped in Las Vegas with no way to get home. Maybe this was my second chance.I didn't accept the ride to LA on the back of his bike just because he'd been the hottest and baddest boy in school. I swear I didn't.My life was all planned out. I left my sensible house every day in my sensible clothes and went to my sensible job.Until, some crazy targeted me, and it all went up in smoke.Now, I'm done being sensible. I know what I want, and he's pure trouble. Nick's all wrong for me, but only he can keep me safe.I'm falling for him. It can't work. It doesn't make sense. I'm walking straight into a broken heart, and I can't stop.Picked by the BillionaireA night I wouldn't forget. An offer I couldn't refuse.Liam:I had dared to love once and lost. The memory haunted me every day.Now, I have rules, three simple rules:I don't do dinner, they never come to my place, and I never stay the night.Until I met the tantalizing Amy and she turned everything upside down.It was just one night. Tomorrow I could get back to normal I told myself.When she turned up at my next meeting, normal was no longer on the horizon.Now, she is essential to defeating my nemesis.One way or another she may be my undoing.Amy:I couldn't get past my failed marriage - I couldn't take the terrifying leap.When the question became his place or mine, I ran back to my computer to pick another.My sister convinced me to try shock therapy - a one-night stand to get over my phobia.One night without inhibitions and never see him again, that was the plan. Simple enough, right?The next day, he walked into my meeting. Suddenly things weren't simple anymore.He held the key to my company's survival; there was just one catch.I had to pretend to be his girlfriend.How hard could that be?Saved by the BillionaireThe FBI and the cartel are after her for the same thing: information she doesn’t have.Natalie had gone from the Belle of Boston to Witch of the West End. Everybody in town hated her for her ex-husband’s crimes. Then the FBI showed up to seize everything she owned. Without a penny to her name, she only survived by taking a job working for the most disagreeable man in town.Billionaire inventor Ryan Westerly had never allowed thoughts of any woman to intrude upon his work.

The Girl with the Dogs


Anna Funder - 2015
    But Tess senses she's at a hinge moment, poised between the life she thought she wanted and the one she long ago decided against. The demands of her Sydney family seem unrelenting: an uneasy teenage daughter, a father who has just been placed in care, the impending sale of her childhood home. Sent to London for a conference, she's unable to resist the pull of that relinquished life. What, she wonders, would it be like now? And might it have suited her better after all?Deceptively concise, moving, elegant, The Girl with the Dogs was published online in 2014 under the title of Everything Precious.

The Rehearsal


Eleanor Catton - 2008
    When news spreads of a high school teacher's relationship with his underage student, participants and observers alike soon take part in an elaborate show of concern and dismay. But beneath the surface of the teenage girls' display, there simmers a new awareness of their own power. They obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity, jealousy, and approbation native to any adolescent girl, under the watchful eye of their stern and enigmatic saxophone teacher, whose focus may not be as strictly on their upcoming recital as she implies.

Winslow in Love


Kevin Canty - 2005
    His marriage is over and he is alone, teaching poetry as a visiting professor in Montana and continuing to avoid actually writing himself. He drinks to oblivion every night.At this freezing college, in the dead of winter, Winslow meets Erika, one of his poetry students. What begins with office hours and Jim Beam in paper cups becomes a road trip as they travel through Utah and Arizona. Long haunted by thoughts of death, both Erika and Winslow begin to glimpse the power life can hold if they will only open up to the shame, beauty, and heartbreak of it all.

How to Be Lost


Amanda Eyre Ward - 2004
    . . Ward's depiction of family, with its attendant love and guilt, will keep you turning pages."--PeopleJoseph and Isabelle Winters seem to have it all: a grand home in Holt, New York, a trio of radiant daughters, and a sense that they are safe in their affluent corner of America. But when five-year-old Ellie disappears, the fault lines within the family are exposed: Joseph, once a successful businessman, succumbs to his demons; Isabelle retreats into memories of her debutante days in Savannah; and Ellie's bereft sisters grow apart--Madeline reluctantly stays home, while Caroline runs away.Fifteen years later, Caroline, now a New Orleans cocktail waitress, sees a photograph of a woman in a magazine. Convinced that it is Ellie all grown up, Caroline embarks on a search for her missing sister. Armed with copies of the photo, an amateur detective guide, and a cooler of Dixie beer, Caroline travels through the New Mexico desert, the mountains of Colorado, and the smoky underworld of Montana, determined to salvage her broken family.

Onyx Rides


Celeste Granger - 2018
    However, when the relationship failed, Onyx was prepared to move on. Dillon wasn’t. Dillon refuses to let Onyx go, and his definition of love turns ugly. Onyx finds herself on the defense, shadowed and stalked by the man who once claimed undying love for her. Multimillionaire Egypt Anderson is not only the CEO of his own construction and development company, but he is also the President of the Down South Riders, a motorcycle club. Egypt spends his days in the boardroom and his nights on the back of his classic Harley Davidson. Egypt and Onyx don’t travel in the same circles and at first, glance, seem to have very little in common. However, a chance encounter with a ruggedly handsome Egypt changes the trajectory of Onyx’s life and redefine what love really is. Onyx Rides is book 1 of the Lady Guardians 3 book series Cruisin is book 2 of the Lady Guardians 3 book series. And, Curvalicious is book 3.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers


Max Porter - 2015
    Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This self-described sentimental bird is attracted to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and physical pain of loss gives way to memories, this little unit of three begin to heal.In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief, Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent.

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.

Dept. of Speculation


Jenny Offill - 2014
    of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all. Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art. With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.

Antwerp


Roberto Bolaño - 2002
    Reading this novel, the reader is present at the birth of Bolaño’s enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. From this springboard—which Bolaño chose to publish in 2002, twenty years after he’d written it (“and even that I can’t be certain of”)—as if testing out a high dive, he would plunge into the unexplored depths of the modern novel.Antwerp’s fractured narration in 54 sections—voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers by, from an omniscient narrator, from “Roberto Bolaño” all speak—moves in multiple directions and cuts to the bone.

Idaho


Emily Ruskovich - 2017
    Jenny, the mother, is in charge of lopping any small limbs off the logs with a hatchet. Wade, the father, does the stacking. The two daughters, June and May, aged nine and six, drink lemonade, swat away horseflies, bicker, and sing snatches of songs as they while away the time.But then something unimaginably shocking happens, an act so extreme it will scatter the family in every different direction.In a story told from multiple perspectives and in razor-sharp prose, we gradually learn more about this act, and the way its violence, love and memory reverberate through the life of every character in Idaho.

You Should Have Left


Daniel Kehlmann - 2016
    New surroundings and new ideas, a new beginning. Fresh air."These are the opening lines of the journal kept by the narrator of Daniel Kehlmann's spellbinding new novel: the record of the seven days that he, his wife, and his four-year-old daughter spend in a house they have rented in the mountains of Germany—a house that thwarts the expectations of his recollection and seems to defy the very laws of physics. The narrator is eager to finish a screenplay, entitled Marriage, for a sequel to the movie that launched his career, but something he cannot explain is undermining his convictions and confidence, a process he is recording in this account of the uncanny events that unfold as he tries to understand what, exactly, is happening around him—and in himself.

The Lost Island


P.K. Hawkins - 2020
    

To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter Compilation


Jordan Krane - 2016
    The novel was so successful that it had earned him a Pulitzer Prize back in 1961. The story of the novel revolves around historical background of American society in the middle of 20th century, prior to the African-American Civil Rights Movement, which was largely led by racism and the cruel regime of white people towards the colored minority. Main character of the novel is a woman nicknamed Scout and her family that, unlike many other white families from that time, raise their voices against the justice system which proclaims racism against African-American people. Read more....

Powerless – the year the lights went out


Suzanne Goldring - 2016
    There is no mains water, no petrol and no news. Towns and cities are chaotic and dangerous. Who will survive the months ahead without electricity? But out in the country, Sandra is determined to keep going. Can she keep her family healthy through the long, wet winter? And can they all adapt to life without power?