Forced back into the working world after her lawyer husband's downfall, Helen discovers a talent for public relations and is tempted away from her dysfunctional family by her childhood crush, who needs her professional assistance.
Ben and Helen Armstead have reached breaking point. Once a privileged and loving couple, widely envied and respected, it takes just one afternoon - and a single act of recklessness - for Ben to deal the final blow to their marriage, spectacularly demolishing everything they built together. Separated from her husband, Helen and her teenage daughter Sara leave their family home for Manhattan, where Helen must build a new life for them both. Thrust back into the working world, Helen takes a job in PR - her first in many years - and discovers she has a rare gift: she can convince arrogant men to admit their mistakes, spinning crises into second chances. Faced with the fallout from her own marriage, and her daughter's increasingly distant behaviour, Helen finds that the capacity for forgiveness she nurtures so successfully in her professional life is far harder to apply to her personal one. A Thousand Pardons is an elegant, audacious, gripping and sharply observed novel about a marriage in ruins and a family in crisis; about the limits of self-invention and the seduction of self-destruction. Praise for Jonathan Dee: 'A deliciously sophisticated engine of literary darkness.' Jonathan Franzen. 'Dee is graceful; articulate and perceptive, and often hilariously funny... full of elegance, vitality and complexity.' New York Times. 'The Privileges is verbally brilliant, intellectually astute and intricately knowing. It is also very funny and a great, great pleasure to read. Jonathan Dee is a wonderful writer.' Richard Ford. 'The Privileges is a pitch-perfect evocation of a particular stratum of New York society as well as a moving meditation on family and romantic love. The tour de force first chapter alone is worth the price of admission.' Jay McInerney.
Smart and socially gifted, Adam and Cynthia Morey are perfect for each other. With Adam’s rising career in the world of private equity, a beautiful home in Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable standard, successful. But for the Moreys, their future of boundless privilege is not arriving fast enough. As Cynthia begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a choice that will test how much he is willing to risk to ensure his family’s happiness and to recapture the sense that the only acceptable life is one of infinite possibility. The Privileges is an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and guided above all else by their epic love for each other. BONUS: This edition contains a The Privileges discussion guide.
Thanks to the classic Dolly Parton film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and ZZ Top's ode "La Grange," many people think they know the story of the infamous Chicken Ranch. The reality is more complex, lying somewhere between heartbreaking and absurd. For more than a century, dirt farmers and big-cigar politicians alike rubbed shoulders at the Chicken Ranch, operated openly under the sheriff's watchful eye. Madam Edna Milton and her girls ran a tight, discreet ship that the God-fearing people of La Grange tolerated if not outright embraced. That is, until a secret conspiracy enlisted an opportunistic reporter to bring it all crashing down on primetime television. Drawn from exclusive interviews and expanded with newly uncovered information, Jayme Lynn Blaschke's revelatory exposition of the Ranch illuminates the truth and lies surrounding this iconic brothel.
A rural, working class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this urgent and inspired novel for our times. Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts who, after being swindled by a financial advisor, feels opportunity passing him and his family by. What future can he promise to his wife Karen and their young daughter Haley? When a wealthy money manager, Philip Hadi, moves to Howland to escape post-9/11 New York, he hires Mark to turn his his house into a secure location. The collision of these two men's very different worlds -- rural vs urban, middle class vs rich -- propels Jonathan Dee's powerful new novel. After the town's first selectman passes away suddenly, Hadi runs for office and begins subtly transforming the town in his image with unexpected results for Mark and his extended family. THE LOCALS is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time. It is also a novel that is timeless in its depiction of American small town life.
Vast legions of gods, mages, humans, dragons and all manner of creatures play out the fate of the Malazan Empire in this first book in a major epic fantasy series from Steven Erikson. The Malazan Empire simmers with discontent, bled dry by interminable warfare, bitter infighting and bloody confrontations with the formidable Anomander Rake and his Tiste Andii, ancient and implacable sorcerers. Even the imperial legions, long inured to the bloodshed, yearn for some respite. Yet Empress Laseen's rule remains absolute, enforced by her dread Claw assassins. For Sergeant Whiskeyjack and his squad of Bridgeburners, and for Tattersail, surviving cadre mage of the Second Legion, the aftermath of the siege of Pale should have been a time to mourn the many dead. But Darujhistan, last of the Free Cities of Genabackis, yet holds out. It is to this ancient citadel that Laseen turns her predatory gaze. However, it would appear that the Empire is not alone in this great game. Sinister, shadowbound forces are gathering as the gods themselves prepare to play their hand... Conceived and written on a panoramic scale, Gardens of the Moon is epic fantasy of the highest order--an enthralling adventure by an outstanding new voice. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The gripping story of a young woman's murder, unsolved for over two decades, brilliantly investigated and reconstructed by her stepsister. Growing up, Rachel Rear knew the story of Stephanie Kupchynsky's disappearance. The beautiful violinist and teacher had fled an abusive relationship on Martha's Vineyard and made a new start for herself near Rochester, NY. She was at the height of her life-in a relationship with a man she hoped to marry and close to her students and her family. And then, one morning, she was gone. Around Rochester-a region which has spawned such serial killers as Arthur Shawcross and the “Double Initial” killer-Stephanie's disappearance was just a familiar sort of news item. But Rachel had more reason than most to be haunted by this particular story of a missing woman: Rachel's mother had married Stephanie's father after the crime, and Rachel grew up in the shadow of her stepsister's legacy. In Catch the Sparrow, Rachel Rear writes a compulsively readable and unerringly poignant reconstruction of the case's dark and serpentine path across more than two decades. Obsessively cataloging the crime and its costs, drawing intimately closer to the details than any journalist could, she reveals how a dysfunctional justice system laid the groundwork for Stephanie's murder and stymied the investigation for more than twenty years, and what those hard years meant for the lives of Stephanie's family and loved ones. Startling, unputdownable, and deeply moving, Catch the Sparrow is a retelling of a crime like no other.
“A rich, believable portrait of a master politician out of office: needy, rivalrous, thin-skinned, proud, hot-tempered.” —The New York Review of Books Updated in 2017 and hailed as, “engrossing…detailed and intimate” (Publishers Weekly), veteran political journalist Joe Conason’s Man of the World brings you along with Bill Clinton, as the forty-second president blazes new paths in his post-presidential career. It is unlike the second career of any other president: “Bill Clinton” is a global brand, rising from the dark days of his White House departure to become one of the most popular names in the world. In his “deeply researched” (The New York Times Book Review) Man of the World, Joe Conason describes how that happened, examining Clinton’s achievements, his failures, his motivations, and his civilian life. He explains why Clinton’s ambitions for the world continue to inspire (and infuriate). Conason, who has covered Clinton for twenty years, interviewed him many times for this book—as well as Hillary and Chelsea and many of his friends, aides, rivals, and supporters. He has travelled with Clinton to Africa, Haiti, Israel, and across America. Conason’s “often absorbing chronicle captures the energy and charisma of the former president as he…finds a mission in his philanthropic work in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere” (Kirkus Reviews). Man of the World—starring the one and only Bill Clinton—tells the engrossing story of an extraordinary man who is still seeking to do good in the world.
Reprint of the fourth edition, which contains an additional text attributed to Voltaire. Originally published anonymously in 1764, Dei Delitti e Delle Pene was the first systematic study of the principles of crime and punishment. Infused with the spirit of the Enlightenment, its advocacy of crime prevention and the abolition of torture and capital punishment marked a significant advance in criminological thought, which had changed little since the Middle Ages. It had a profound influence on the development of criminal law in Europe and the United States.