Madeleine Severn is a tutor at the Garrettway School of Languages, she has a young outlook on life and is proud of her looks. Eighteen-year-old student Paul Grigson idolises Madeleine and during a date of his own he sees Madeleine with the married Bernard Hopkins. When Bernard arranges to meet Madeleine again, he feels jealous, but like most teenagers, Paul's moods change like a chameleon's. This is a romantic triangle surely destined for disaster and death. Simon Brett is the winner of The CWA Diamond Dagger 2014.
Necromanticism is a study of literary pilgrimage: readers' compulsion to visit literary homes, landscapes, and (especially) graves during the long Romantic period. The book draws on the histories of tourism and literary genres to highlight Romanticism's recourse to the dead in its reading, writing, and canon-making practices.
Romantic Revelations shows that the nonhuman is fundamental to Romanticism’s political responses to climatic catastrophes. Exploring what he calls "post-apocalyptic Romanticism," Chris Washington intervenes in the critical conversation that has long defined Romanticism as an apocalyptic field. "Apocalypse" means "the revelation of a perfected world," which sees Romanticism’s back-to-nature environmentalism as a return to paradise and peace on earth. Romantic Revelations, however, demonstrates that the destructive climate change events of 1816, "the year without a summer," changed Romantic thinking about the environment and the end of the world. Their post-apocalyptic visions correlate to the beginning of the Anthropocene, the time when humans initiated the possible extinction of their own species and potentially the earth. Rather than constructing paradises where humans are reborn or human existence ends, the later Romantics are interested in how to survive in the ashes after great social and climatic global disasters. Romantic Revelations argues that Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Clare, and Jane Austen sketch out a post-apocalyptic world that, in contrast to the sunnier Romantic narratives, is paradoxically the vision that offers us hope. In thinking through life after disaster, Washington contends that these authors craft an optimistic vision of the future that leads to a new politics.
Maddy Swift is just a normal high school girl—until she’s struck by lighting and reanimated as a zombie. Great. Like Barracuda Bay High wasn’t cold-blooded enough already! Navigating the perils of cliques and hot guys was bad enough. Now Maddy has to learn to survive as the undead. She quickly discovers she’s not the only one walking dead in class, and soon she’s thrown into an epic battle surrounding everyone she’s ever loved. Avoiding detection by curious Normals while fighting vengeful Zerkers and equally lethal Sentinels, Maddy discovers life as a zombie is no picnic. Turns out there’s a lot more to it than shuffling around 24/7 growling, “Brains!”
What is love's real aim? Why is it so ruthlessly selective in its choice of loved ones? Why do we love at all? In addressing these questions, Simon May develops a radically new understanding of love as the emotion we feel towards whomever or whatever we experience as grounding our life--as offering us a possibility of home in a world that we supremely value. He sees love as motivated by a promise of "ontological rootedness," rather than, as two thousand years of tradition variously asserts, by beauty or goodness, by a search for wholeness, by virtue, by sexual or reproductive desire, by compassion or altruism or empathy, or, in one of today's dominant views, by no qualities at all of the loved one. After arguing that such founding Western myths as the Odyssey and Abraham's call by God to Canaan in the Bible powerfully exemplify his new conception of love, May goes on to re-examine the relation of love to beauty, sex, and goodness in the light of this conception, offering among other things a novel theory of beauty--and suggesting, against Plato, that we can love others for their ugliness (while also seeing them as beautiful). Finally, he proposes that, in the Western world, romantic love is gradually giving way to parental love as the most valued form of love: namely, the love without which one's life is not deemed complete or truly flourishing. May explains why childhood has become sacred and excellence in parenting a paramount ideal--as well as a litmus test of society's moral health. In doing so, he argues that the child is the first genuinely "modern" supreme object of love: the first to fully reflect what Nietzsche called "the death of God."
New York Times bestselling author, Stephanie Rowe, unveils her heartwarming new Mystic Island series, where love always finds a way in this enchanting coastal Maine community. In Wrapped Up In You, can a moonlight kiss from twelve years ago heal two hearts that no longer believe in love? Haunted by his tragic past, Cole Charbonneau has returned to Mystic Island to sever the final ties to the place he once loved so dearly. His only goal is to walk away forever, until a woman from his past winds up on his doorstep, needing from him the one thing he can't give. After a heartless betrayal by those she trusted dearly, Willow Morgan has escaped to Mystic Island, hoping the magic of an island Christmas will heal the emptiness in her heart. The last thing she wants is love, but Mystic Island has its own plans for her…and they include a kiss she'd almost forgotten and the devastatingly handsome business mogul who touched her heart so long ago. Can she afford to fall for him a second time? AUTHOR BIO: New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Stephanie Rowe is the author of more than fifty novels. She's a 2018 winner and a five-time for the RITA® award, the highest award in romance fiction.
The main concern of this study is the artist’s vision of society; its major theme is the relation between the individual and society resulting from the impact of social and political upheavals on individual life. By criticism of society I mean the novelist’s awareness of the social reality and of the individual’s response to it; the writers I deal with all proved alive to the changes that were taking place in English society between the two World Wars. Though the social attitudes of the inter-war years as well as the writers’ response to them were shaped by lasting and complex influences, such as trends in philosophy and science, the two Wars stand out as determining factors in the development of the novel: the consequences of the First were explored by most writers in the Twenties, whereas in the following decade the novelists felt compelled to voice the anxiety aroused by the threat of another conflict and to warn against its possible effects. After the First World War many writers felt keenly the social disruption: the old standards, which were thought to have made this suicidal War possible, were distrusted; the code of behaviour and the moral values of the older generation were openly criticized for having led to bankruptcy. Disparagement of authority increased the individual’s sense of isolation, his insecurity, his disgust or fear. Even the search for pleasure so widely satirized in the Twenties was the expression of a cynicism born of despair. The ensuing disengagement of the individual from his environment became a major theme in the novel: his isolation was at once a cause for resentment and the source of his fierce individualism.
