This Green and Pleasant Land

This Green and Pleasant Land

Author: Ayisha Malik

Publisher: Bonnier Zaffre Ltd.

Published: 2019-06-13

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1785767534

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE DIVERSE BOOK AWARDS 'Tender, challenging and as warm as it was razor-sharp' Beth O'Leary 'If you've read Joanna Cannon I think you'll love this' Simon Savidge 'A sublimely witty and touching story' Jonathan Coe The standout new novel by acclaimed author Ayisha Malik - perfect for fans of David Nicholls and Candice Carty-Williams. In the sleepy village of Babel's End, trouble is brewing. Bilal Hasham is having a mid-life crisis. His mother has just died, and he finds peace lying in a grave he's dug in the garden. His elderly Auntie Rukhsana has come to live with him, and forged an unlikely friendship with village busybody, Shelley Hawking. His wife Mariam is distant and distracted, and his stepson Haaris is spending more time with his real father. Bilal's mother's dying wish was to build a mosque in Babel's End, but when Shelley gets wind of this scheme, she unleashes the forces of hell. Will Bilal's mosque project bring his family and his beloved village together again, or drive them apart? Warm, wise and laugh-out-loud funny, This Green and Pleasant Land is a life-affirming look at love, faith and the meaning of home.


Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant

Author: Patrice Nganang

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-04-12

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 0374713081

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A majestic tale of colonialism and transformation, Patrice Nganang's Mount Pleasant tells the astonishing story of the birth of modern Cameroon, a place subject to the whims of the French and the Germans, yet engaged in a cultural revolution. In 1931, Sara is taken from her family and brought to Mount Pleasant as a gift for Sultan Njoya, a ruler cast into exile by French colonialists. Merely nine years old, she is on the verge of becoming the sultan’s 681st wife. But when she is dragged to Bertha, the long-suffering slave charged with training Njoya’s brides, Sara’s life takes a curious turn. Bertha sees within this little girl her son Nebu, who died tragically years before, and she saves Sara from her fate by disguising her as her son. In Sara’s new life as a boy she bears witness to the world of Sultan Njoya---a magical yet vulnerable community of artists and intellectuals---and learns of the sultan’s final days in the Palace of All Dreams and the sad fate of Nebu, the greatest artist their culture had ever seen. Seven decades later, a student returns home to Cameroon to learn about the place it once was, and she finds Sara, silent for years, ready to tell her story. But her serpentine tale, entangled by flawed memory and bursts of the imagination, reinvents history anew. The award-winning novelist Patrice Nganang’s Mount Pleasant is a lyrical resurrection of early-twentieth-century Cameroon and an elegy to the people swept up in the forces of colonization.


Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

Author: Roz Chast

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2014-05-06

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1620406381

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#1 New York Times Bestseller 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the “crazy closet”-with predictable results-the tools that had served Roz well through her parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no longer be deployed. While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies-an anxious father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing personality had sidelined Roz for decades-the themes are universal: adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide the most personal care. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.


Skulduggery Pleasant – Apocalypse Kings

Skulduggery Pleasant – Apocalypse Kings

Author: Derek Landy

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2021-03-23

Total Pages: 77

ISBN-13: 0008463921

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A brand new Skulduggery Pleasant novella for World Book Day: a hilarious and thrilling standalone story in the internationally bestselling series – perfect for new readers, and essential for Skulduggery fans...


Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant

Author: Don Gillmor

Publisher: Random House Canada

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307360741

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In middle age, debt has become the most significant relationship in Harry Salter's life. He was born to wealthy parents in leafy and privileged Rosedale, at a time when the city was still defined by its WASP elite. But nothing in life has turned out the way Harry was led to expect. He's unsure of his place in society, his marriage is crumbling, his son is bordering on estranged, and on top of it all his father is dying. As he sits at his father's bedside, Harry inevitably daydreams about his inheritance. A couple of his father's millions would rescue him from his ballooning debt--maybe even save his marriage. But when the will is read, all that's left for Harry is $4200. Dale Salter's money is gone. Out of desperation and disbelief, Harry starts to dig into what happened to the money. As he follows a trail strewn with family secrets and unsavory suspicions, he discovers not only that old money has lost its grip and new money taken on an ugly hue, but that his whole existence been cast into shadow by the weight of his expectations.


Pleasant Valley

Pleasant Valley

Author: Louis Bromfield

Publisher: Kent State University Press

Published: 2023-03-21

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781606354612

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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Author: Fannie Flagg

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 042528655X

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Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again. Praise for Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe “A real novel and a good one [from] the busy brain of a born storyteller.”—The New York Times “Happily for us, Fannie Flagg has preserved [the Threadgoodes] in a richly comic, poignant narrative that records the exuberance of their lives, the sadness of their departure.”—Harper Lee “This whole literary enterprise shines with honesty, gallantry, and love of perfect details that might otherwise be forgotten.”—Los Angeles Times “Funny and macabre.”—The Washington Post “Courageous and wise.”—Houston Chronicle