In this extraordinary fantasy epic, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Dresden Files leads readers into a world where the fate of the realm rests on the shoulders of a boy with no power to call his own... For a thousand years, the people of Alera have united against the aggressive and threatening races that inhabit the world, using their unique bond with the furies—elementals of earth, air, fire, water, wood, and metal. But in the remote Calderon Valley, the boy Tavi struggles with his lack of furycrafting. At fifteen, he has no wind fury to help him fly, no fire fury to light his lamps. Yet as the Alerans’ most savage enemy—the Marat horde—return to the Valley, Tavi’s courage and resourcefulness will be a power greater than any fury, one that could turn the tides of war...
A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: THE WASHINGTON POST, NPR, TIME, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, SLATE, LIBRARY JOURNAL, KIRKUS, AND MANY MORE “Lauren Groff is a writer of rare gifts, and Fates and Furies is an unabashedly ambitious novel that delivers – with comedy, tragedy, well-deployed erudition and unmistakable glimmers of brilliance throughout.” —The New York Times Book Review (cover review) From the award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Florida and Matrix, an exhilarating novel about marriage, creativity, art, and perception. Fates and Furies is a literary masterpiece that defies expectation. A dazzling examination of a marriage, it is also a portrait of creative partnership written by one of the best writers of her generation. Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity, and power that is unlike anything that has come before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive, and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.
"For centuries, they have lived among us. When they were discovered, they were called witches, vampires, or devils and sentenced to a quick death. They are human just like us, except for a rare genetic quirk that has granted them immortality. Now, a chance encounter with a beautiful woman has led John Rogers into the middle of a secret war between the immortals. She needs his help in the battle between a rebellious group and their elders. The grand prize in this war is eternal life. The Furies weaves cutting-edge science into a far-ranging thriller, showing how a simple genetic twist could have inspired tales of witchcraft and sorcery, and how the paranormal could be possible"--
Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017 Selected one of New York Times Readers’ Favorite Books of 2017 Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. 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 many years, 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.
Paul Celan: Studies in His Early Poetry scrutinizes the influences detectable in the poems written during 1938-48. Among German writers, Büchner, Goethe, Gottfried von Strassburg, Gryphius, Mörike, the poet of the Nibelungenlied, Novalis, Rilke, and Trakl all provided motifs that, often repeated, make for a dense network inviting attention to the self-referential and self-revealing patterns in Celan's early work. In addition, there are many poems that contain motifs gleaned from Greek mythology and/or biblical data. These references, on occasion quite clear, more often so obscure as to be hazy allusions, yield the view that during his first decade of poetic activities Celan becomes increasingly recondite. When these references or allusions stand side-by-side in a given poem, they acquire a surrealistic tint and threaten to withhold clear meaning. Ambiguities, deliberately cultivated in the earliest poems, begin to boomerang and read like so many preludes to the struggles with language evident in the poetry of Celan's maturity. It is a certainty that Celan reacted quickly, if not immediately, to the events befalling the scenes of his early years (Czernowitz and the forced-labor camp). This phenomenon mandates the view of his poems as so many pieces of autobiography. It thus is inevitable that as early as 1940 he wrote against the backdrop of war, and soon thereafter in the shadow of the Holocaust that was destined to brand his mind forever. This volume is meant for anyone interested in Celan, close reading of modern poetry in general, comparative literature, motif studies, poetic reactions to Holocaust events, or even in a Jew's concept regarding the role of the deity in the destruction of those for whom the poet speaks.
Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biography: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home. In showing us Wright’s facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright.
