After a prank lands him in serious trouble, Malcolm Hernandez, a sixteen-year-old boy, is shipped off to live with his grandparents while his mother attempts to save him from expulsion and criminal charges. Malcolm believes the stay will be easy-a vacation with milk and cookies and tales from the past. His hopes, however, are shattered when he bumps heads with his grandfather, Ronald O'Donnell-a stern, violent man with a sinister past. Ronald plans on disciplining his grandson in order to 'save' him from himself. He is not afraid of abusing him, either. He will physically, emotionally, and mentally break him. Jon Athan, the author of The Abuse of Ashley Collins, invites you to stay at grandfather's house to witness true human horror. WARNING: This book contains scenes of graphic violence, including violence towards children. This book is about abuse-emotional, physical, and mental. This book does not contain any explicit sex scenes, but it does discuss sexual abuse. This book is not intended for those easily offended or appalled.
In this book, Charles Ritchie looks back at some of the characters that peopled his childhood and youth, in the years before his brilliant career in Canada’s diplomatic corps began. In these essays we are introduced to his uncles, Harry “Bimbash” Stewart and the dashing, doomed Charlie Stewart; to his indomitable mother; to his mad cousin Gerald; to the newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook; to his college friend Billy Coster, who threw away wealth and a secure future; and to a host of others. With his usual unerring eye and elegant prose, Charles Ritchie brings them all to life again, with affection and wit.
In the tradition of Augustine's "Confessions", Robert Clark tells the story of his return to the Catholic Church through the prism of the religious history of his ancestors.
The neighbors tell Kurt his grandfather, who has been his guardian since he was four years old, committed a series of crimes to acquire his farm. In this coming-of-age novel, Kurt needs to know if the neighbors’ stories are true. The crimes they say his grandfather got away with include fraud, forgery, arson and murder.
The poems in this first poetry book by a Cuban American writer explore a variety of contemporary and historical themes that combine to create a modern immigrant consciousness, not only immigration from nation state to nation state but also from states of culture and spirit. Beginning with poems that harken back over 40 years of lived experience in the mountains of Cuba, the hills of Galicia, Spain, and the paved streets of Brooklyn and Harlem to poems of love and loss, of life in the military and the high seas, the book grapples with the complex conflicts and tensions of identity, displacement, and autonomy while seeking beauty in all her forms. From the evocative lyricism of the delicately constructed décimas to the sprawling long lines and semantic plays of the free verse, this is a work by a poet writing in the full measure of his powers.
Keiko is not happy to be staying in her great grandfather's house while her parents are away. But she discovers that there is far more to life in the countryside than she first thought: walnut sailboats, straw snowboots, great grandfather's stories and the magic of New Year.
In this deeply moving story of love and loss Newbery Medalist Patricia MacLachlan celebrates the beautiful relationship between children and grandparents as well as the nurturing world of nature. Grandfather shares his love of and information about birds with the children and Milo, the youngest, who rarely talks, is especially attentive. When grandfather can no longer see well, Milo helps him spot and take care of some of his favorite birds. The day comes when the children come home from school and Grandfather is no longer there; but Milo knows where he is - outside soaring through the sky is the bald eagle grandfather wanted to be.
This acclaimed picture book from two award-winning creators about connecting across generational and language differences shows that sometimes you don't need words to find common ground. When a young boy visits his grandfather, their lack of a common language leads to confusion, frustration, and silence. But as they sit down to draw together, something magical happens -- with a shared love of art and storytelling, the two form a bond that goes beyond words. With spare text by Minh Lê and luminous illustrations by Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat, this stirring story about reaching across barriers will be cherished for years to come. "A beautifully told and illustrated story about a grandson and grandfather struggling to communicate across divides of language, age and culture." --- Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize winner Don't miss LIFT, also by Minh Lê and Dan Santat!
This is the story of Sasha Abramsky's grandparents, Chimen and Miriam Abramsky, and of their unique home at 5 Hillway, around the corner from Hampstead Heath. In their semi-detached house, so deceptively ordinary from the outside, the Abramskys created a remarkable House of Books. It became the repository for Chimen's collection of thousands upon thousands of books, manuscripts and other printed, handwritten and painted documents, representing his journey through the great political, philosophical, religious and ethical debates that have shaped the western world. Chimen Abramsky was barely a teenager when his father, a famous rabbi, was arrested by Stalin's secret police and sentenced to five years hard labour in Siberia, and fifteen when his family was exiled to London. Lacking a university degree, he nevertheless became a polymath, always obsessed with collecting ideas, with capturing the meanderings of the human soul through the world of great thoughts and thinkers. Rejecting his father's Orthodoxy, he became a Communist, made his living as a book-dealer and amassed a huge, and astonishingly rare, library of socialist literature and memorabilia. Disillusioned with Communism and belatedly recognising the barbarity at the core of Stalin's project, he transformed himself once more, this time into a liberal and a humanist. To his socialist library was added a vastrove of Jewish history volumes. Chimen ended his career as Professor of Hebrew and Jewish studies at UCL, London and rare manuscripts expert for Sotheby's. With his wife Miriam, Chimen made their house a focal point for left-wing intellectual Jewish life: hundreds of the world's leading thinkers, from at their table. The House of Twenty Thousand Books brings alive this latter-day salon by telling the story of Chimen Abramsky's love affair with ideas and with the world of books and of Miriam's obsession with being a hostess and with entertaining. Room by room, book by book, idea by idea, the world of these politically engaged intellectuals, autodidacts and dreamers is lovingly resurrected. In this extraordinary elegy to a lost world, Sasha Abramsky's passionate narrative brings to life once more not just the Hillway salon, but the ideas, the conflicts, the personalities and the human yearnings that animated it. 'The sheer richness of this marvellous book - in terms of its style, think Borges, Perec - amply complements the wondrous complexity of the family - in terms of its subject-matter, think the Eitingons, the Ephrussi - about which Sasha Abramsky writes so lovingly. And as a portrait of London's left-wing Jewish intellectual life it is surely without equal.' Simon Winchester 'I loved this touching and heartfelt celebration of a scholar, teacher and bibliophile, a man whose profound learning was fine-tempered by humane wisdom and self-knowledge. We might all of us envy Sasha Abramsky in possessing such a remarkable grandfather, heroic in his integrity and evoked for us here with real eloquence and affection.' Jonathan Keates 'Sasha Abramsky has combined four kinds of history - familial, political, Jewish, and literary - into one brilliant and compelling book. With him as an erudite and sensitive guide, any reader will be grateful for the opportunity to be immersed into the house of twenty thousand books.' Samuel Freedman 'The House of Twenty Thousand Books is a grandson's elegy for the vanished world of his grandparents' house in London and the exuberant, passionate jostling of two traditions - Jewish and Marxist - that intertwined in his growing up. It is a fascinating memoir of the fatal encounter between Russian Jewish yearning for freedom and the Stalinist creed, a grandson's unsparing, but loving reckoning with a conflicted inheritance. In the digital age, it will also make you long for the smell of old books, the dust on shelves and the collector's passions, all on display in The House of Twenty Thousand Books.' Michael Ignatieff
