As a novelist and icon, Rushdie has embraced both 'popular' and 'high' culture; reflecting this, the Guide brings together both academic criticism and journalism to investigate the passions and preoccupations of Rushdie's many critics, steering the reader through the inflamed debates and rhetoric surrounding this much admired but controversial author.

    The Hobbs family farm, White House purveyor since 1897, is patrolled by fifteen and seven eights inch beagle, the seventh generation of its line. The beagle, born with a cannon ball thick scull, and teeth he honed on deer bones, is a canine assassin, who makes friends with his sworn enemy, a Flemish hare, a scholarly rabbit, tailored by nature in the worse fitting fur imaginable.

    When her every attempt to rekindle romance and affection with her husband--a prominent local doctor--fails, she finds herself turning to the friendship of Charlie Cobb, a new man in town. But as their relationship becomes more intimate, smalltown tongues start wagging, and their starcrossed affair leads to a shocking public murder.

    It’s a nice life, except for her tumultuous relationship history. She’s stoic about it, but at this point, Ellen wouldn’t mind a lasting one. When she meets Patrick, she’s optimistic. He’s attractive, single, employed, and best of all, he seems to like her back.Then comes that dreaded moment: He thinks they should have a talk. Braced for the worst, Ellen is pleasantly surprised. It turns out that Patrick’s ex-girlfriend is stalking him. Ellen thinks, Actually, that’s kind of interesting. She’s dating someone worth stalking. She’s intrigued by the woman’s motives. In fact, she’d even love to meet her.Ellen doesn’t know it, but she already has.

    She has wealth, well–connected friends, and a handsome fiance, Philip Alsop. Finally she has everything she wants.It is then, in a moment of beneficence, that Rosemary invites Eleanor Smith, a penniless young woman she sees under a streetlamp in the rain, into her home for a cup of tea. While there, Rosemary sees Eleanor exchange an unmistakable look with Philip, and she sends Eleanor on her way. But she cannot undo this chance encounter, and it leads to a tempestuous and all–consuming love triangle –– until the tides of war throw all their lives off balance.Inspired by a classic Katherine Mansfield short story, A Cup of Tea engages with its vivid –– and often amusing –– cast of characters, wonderful period detail, brilliant evocation of the uncertain days of World War I, and delightfully spare and picturesque sense of story.

    . .Barbara Parker is Miss Blackpool of 1964, but she doesn't want to be a beauty queen. She wants to make people laugh.So she leaves her hometown behind, takes herself to London, and overnight she becomes the lead in a new BBC comedy, Sophie Straw: charming, gorgeous, destined to win the nation's hearts.

    And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

    Since Sandy Shortt's childhood classmate disappeared twenty years ago, Sandy has been obsessed with missing things. Finding what is lost becomes her single-minded goal--from the lone sock that vanishes in the washing machine to the car keys she misplaced. It's no surprise, then, that Sandy's life's work becomes finding people who have vanished from their loved ones. Sandy's family is baffled and concerned by her increasing preoccupation. Her parents can't understand her compulsion, and she pushes them away further by losing herself in the work of tracking down these missing people. She gives up her life in order to offer a flicker of hope to devastated families...and escape the disappointments of her own. Jack Ruttle is one of those devastated people. It's been a year since his brother Donal vanished into thin air, and he has enlisted Sandy Shortt to find him. But before she is able to offer Jack the information he so desperately needs, Sandy goes missing too...and Jack now finds himself searching for his brother and the one woman who understood his pain. One minute Sandy is jogging through the park, the next, she can't figure out where she is. The path is obscured. Nothing is familiar. A clearing up ahead reveals a camp site, and it's there that Sandy discovers the impossible: she has inadvertently stumbled upon the place-- and people--she's been looking for all her life, a land where all the missing people go. A world away from her loved ones and the home she ran from for so long, Sandy soon resorts to her old habit again, searching. Though this time, she is desperately trying to find her way home...

    They believe they are well matched, as young lovers do, but Laurus's beloved family is in Copenhagen, hostage to what the fortunes of Hitler's war will bring. By the time the war is over, Laurus's family has played an active role in Denmark's grassroots rescue of virtually all seven thousand of the country's Jews. Meanwhile, in America, Sydney has led a group knitting for the war effort, and had a baby.Combining the story of one long American twentieth-century marriage with one of the most stirring stories of World War II, Leeway Cottage is a beautifully written tour de force of a novel.

    The shock of her death dramatically changes the lives of her daughter, troubled sister, and husband. . . . Told in the voices of several of the main characters and skipping back and forth in time, the narrative gradually and tantalizingly reveals the dark family secrets and the unsettling discoveries that lead to the truth of what actually happened the night of the drowning. . . .

    So she packs up her spare life, leaves her boyfriend behind, and heads across the country in search of a new place to begin. Settling in Boston, her life is suddenly changed by the chance meeting of two unlikely women: Eleanor, a seventy-eight year old widow who is stripping away the layers of her past, and June, an ambitious dance student who relies on a psychic to help manage her estranged relationships--all the while keeping a shocking secret. As these three resilient women of different backgrounds and ages face their own particular demons, Charlie becomes their shared center. Drawing strength from each other and the maternal bond that unites them, they soon discover that the lives they have run from just may be their saving grace. . . .

    She understood that her mother was ill and needed to be taken care of. That her father was a waterman, a life she envied. And she understood that her little sister, Rebecca, was unabashedly beautiful. And she was not. When Annie's father suddenly dies, no one questions which sister will take his place aboard the family oyster boat. And for the first time, Annie falls comfortably and easily into the only place in life she thought she could ever fit in-as a waterwoman. And then she meets Nathan... "Sensuous [and] funny...Hart's flavorful dialect, her knowledge of working the water, and her understanding of the complexity of relationships-particularly the ones between sisters-are masterful." (Sheri Reynolds, author of The Rapture of Canaan)

    It's the early '70s and no one discusses or even suspects domestic abuse. But after Maureen suffers another brutal beating, she flees with her infant daughter to a coastal town in Maine. The weeks pass slowly, and just as Maureen begins to settle into her new life and new identity, Harrold reappears, bringing the story to a violent, unforgettable climax.

    She has the look down: beat-up leather jacket, motorcycle boots, cheekbones, and wild hair. But she’s no ordinary guitar heroine. Her guitar is like none her audience has ever seen, part deadly weapon, part creature from some alien lagoon. Is that hair? Are those nipples? Is it flesh? Where does Jenny Slade come from? Where does she go? Geoff Nicholson fans know that wherever that is, the ride will be like no other.