When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.

    In the century since its first performance, The Cherry Orchard has undergone a wide range of conflicting interpretations: tragic and comic, naturalistic and symbolic, reactionary and radical. Beginning with the 1904 premiere at Stanislavsky's Moscow Art Theatre, this study traces the performance history of one of the landmark plays of the modern theatre. Considering the work of such directors as Anatoly Efros, Giorgio Strehler, Peter Brook, and Peter Stein, Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard explores the way different artists, periods and cultures have reinvented Chekhov's poignant comedy of failure and hope.

    There he is stunned to discover that his father’s will disinherits his family and leaves everything – including the family home – to a secret son, Andrew Shaw.The news fills the Shaw family with hope. Twenty-year-old Andrew is in desperate need of a kidney transplant, and for him the inheritance may mean the difference between life and death. However, the lives of Andrew, his devoted older sister Tors and young brother Jack are disrupted when their mother insists they move from their home in Kerry to Wicklow to stake their claim under the will. There they live in a tiny bungalow on the sea front, while the Murtaghs take steps to contest the will.Gradually, both Seán Murtagh and Tors Shaw recognise the need to seek some middle ground but that seems impossible, such is the hostility between the families and the burning resentment that exists between the mothers.Andrew Shaw’s focus, however, is not on the question of the inheritance. There is something else he needs from the Murtaghs . . . something only they can give him . . .The Secret Son is a poignant and thought-provoking story that will stay with you long after you turn the last page.

    As a girl, Genevieve Martin spent the happiest summer of her life in Paris, learning the delicate art of locksmithing at her uncle's side. But since then, living back in the States, she has become more private, more subdued. She has been an observer of life rather than an active participant, holding herself back from those around her, including her soon-to-be-ex-husband. Paris never really left Genevieve, and, as her marriage crumbles, she finds herself faced with an incredible opportunity: return to the magical city of her youth to take over her late uncle's shop. But as she absorbs all that Parisian culture has to offer, she realizes the city also holds secrets about her family that could change her forever, and that locked doors can protect you or imprison you, depending on which side of them you stand.

    Ed's family is very wealthy and very dysfunctional. Ed's father, a guilt-ridden judge, rarely emerges from his dusty study. Ed's morbidly obese, sexually perverse mother retired to her bed after a skiing incident ten years ago. They may live in the same luxurious apartment, but Ed and his parents barely interact. A bizarre yet touching friendship develops between Trevor and Ed both men are equally in need of someone who can show them umderstanding and compassion. As the boisterous narrative increasingly focuses its attention on Trevor's past and the mysterious stirrings of his psyche, Lorcan Roche's The Companion becomes a darkly humorous tale of obsession. An Irish take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and A Confederacy of Dunces, The Companion's electrifying style, shocking finale, and its moving tale of friendship under duress all make for an immensely rewarding read."

    William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism, and abject poverty.Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk

    Set in the 1920s, Kerrigan’s novel tells of a young Irish woman who must choose between her new life in New York City and her husband back home in Ireland, brilliantly capturing these two vastly different worlds in the process. Readers of historical fiction, as well as fans of the novels of Frank Delany and other Irish themed works, will adore their time spent on Ellis Island.