Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter of Aliens with a Human Heart, ex-husband and absent father, has been given 6 months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling. Charlie's novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As the train gets stuck at Didcot Junction and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous young woman who is his nemesis, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty and thoughtful, Edward St Aubyn's dazzling new novel overturns expectations and probes the very heart of being.
A beautifully modulated novel that shows Edward St. Aubyn at his sparkling best Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband, and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel-about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling. His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St. Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty, and thoughtful, Edward St. Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being.
A practical guide to create your very own escape room! Contains over 300 puzzle ideas! *Purchase includes link and password to download one full step-by-step escape room kit.* Now present in all fifty states, escape rooms offer a fun activity for corporate events, team training, youth groups, and all types of parties. But what if you could develop your very own escape room in the comfort of your own home? In this fun, full-color book, Paige Ellsworth Lyman, founder of TheGameGal.com, offers a practical guide to creating your own do-it-yourself escape room. Divided into two parts, the first half covers what an escape room is, how to develop theme and plot, how to set up a room, how to structure clues, and how to run the event. The second half provides multiple chapters of clues and challenges to use in your escape room, including codes, ciphers, mathematics, puzzles, physical objects, and more. This book is the perfect gift for puzzle enthusiasts looking for new challenges and families that are bored at home!
Lawrence-Lightfoot is enthralled by exits: long farewells, quick goodbyes, sudden endings, the ordinary and the extraordinary. She explores the ways we leave one thing and move on to the next in an enthusiastic, uplifting lesson about ourselves and the role of transition in our lives.
Now a Nickelodeon Original Movie! Over 100 Weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List! 44 State Award Lists! Discover what James Patterson calls “the coolest library in all the world” in this fun-filled, action-packed bestseller from the much-loved co-author of I Funny and Treasure Hunters! “A worthy successor to.…Willy Wonka.” —Booklist, Starred Review When Kyle learns that the world's most famous game maker, Luigi Lemoncello, has designed the town's new library and is having an invitation-only lock-in on opening night, he's determined to be there! But the tricky part isn't getting into the library—it's getting out. Because when morning comes, the doors stay locked. Kyle and the other kids must solve every clue and figure out every secret puzzle to find the hidden escape route! Don't miss bonus content in the back of the book—extra puzzles, an author Q&A, and more! And look for the puzzle-packed sequels—Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics and Mr. Lemoncello’s Great Library Race! “Full of puzzles to think about, puns to groan at …this solid, tightly plotted read is a winner for readers and game-players alike.” —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
NOW A MAJOR FILM STARRING MICHELLE PFEIFFER AND LUCAS HEDGES A tragedy of manners from the Man Booker-shortlisted author of The Sisters Brothers 'My favourite book of his yet' Maria Semple, author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette 'Pure joy' Mail on Sunday 'Buoyantly insane' New Yorker Frances Price is in dire straits. Scandals swirl around the recently widowed New York socialite, and her adult-aged, toddler-brained son Malcolm is no help. Cutting their losses, they grab their cat, Small Frank, and head for the exit. Paris becomes the backdrop for a giddy drive to self-destruction, helped along by a cast of singularly curious characters. Brimming with pathos, warmth and wit, French Exit is a riotous send-up of high society and a moving story of mothers and sons.
Will you get to the Orwellians before the Wanstein Club get to you? The clock is ticking… Based on the global phenomenon of Escape Rooms, and following on from the international bestseller The Escape Book by Ivan Tapia, this book puts your ingenuity, wit and perseverance to the test with even more fiendish challenges, puzzles, and enigmas that you must solve to thwart the sinister Wanstein Club. Investigative journalist Candela Fuertes is at rock bottom: her fight against Castian Warnes, the head of the powerful and sinister Wanstein Club, has undermined her credibility as a journalist, and meanwhile she suspects Warnes is behind the car accident that put her boss in hospital. Corroded by the thirst for revenge, she decides to turn to the only people who can help her in a cause that seems already lost: the Orwellians, a group of hackers hell bent on revealing the secrets of the rich and famous. In order to get to the Orwellians, you and Candela must follow their trail all over London. The chapters of the book are jumbled up, and to know where to continue reading, you must solve the puzzles, optical illusions, conundrums and anagrams that you find. Each time you solve a puzzle, the number you arrive at will indicate the page from which you can continue the story.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER An Atlantic Magazine Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year "The Melrose Novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England." —Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones Soon to be a Showtime TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle. By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose's story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family's chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor. From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father's ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother's Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother's desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation. Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy.
'A book that takes you on an intimate journey through Eastern Europe at a time when the dust was still settling from the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Eva Hoffman travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, building a compelling portrait of a region uncertain about its future.' Independent Shortly after the epochal events of 1989 Eva Hoffman spent several months in her native Poland and four other countries: the then-Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. She visited capital cities, wayside villages and provincial towns; stopped at shipyards, museums, and the coffee-houses of the intelligentsia; and talked to a great variety of people about the tumult they had lived through. Exit into History was the result: a portrait of the mosaic of the new Eastern Europe, a reconstruction of the turbulent post-war decades, and a meditation on the uses and misuses of historical memory.
