A Mountain of Crumbs
A Mountain of Crumbs

Author: Elena Gorokhova

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2010-01-12

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1439135584

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Elena Gorokhova’s A Mountain of Crumbs is the moving story of a Soviet girl who discovers the truths adults are hiding from her and the lies her homeland lives by. Elena’s country is no longer the majestic Russia of literature or the tsars, but a nation struggling to retain its power and its pride. Born with a desire to explore the world beyond her borders, Elena finds her passion in the complexity of the English language—but in the Soviet Union of the 1960s such a passion verges on the subversive. Elena is controlled by the state the same way she is controlled by her mother, a mirror image of her motherland: overbearing, protective, difficult to leave. In the battle between a strong-willed daughter and her authoritarian mother, the daughter, in the end, must break free and leave in order to survive. Through Elena’s captivating voice, we learn not only the stories of Russian family life in the second half of the twentieth century, but also the story of one rebellious citizen whose curiosity and determination finally transport her to a new world. It is an elegy to the lost country of childhood, where those who leave can never return.

Evil in Return
Evil in Return

Author: Elena Forbes

Publisher: House of Anansi

Published: 2010-08-28

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 088784281X

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DI Mark Tartaglia investigates the murder of a bestselling novelist in the third novel in Elena Forbes’ bestselling mystery series. Bestselling novelist Joe Logan walks out into a hot summer’s evening in central London. The next day his body is found dumped in a disused Victorian crypt at the Brompton Cemetery. He has been tied up, shot, and castrated. The killing has the hallmarks of a professional hit. But what had Logan done to deserve such a brutal end? Detective Mark Tartaglia is convinced that Logan’s personal life holds the key, but unravelling the victim's recent past proves difficult. Then the body of a second man is found in an old boathouse on the Thames — killed in an identical fashion to Logan. A vicious and methodical killer is at work, but what does he want and how does he lure his victims to their death? If Tartaglia can find the link between the two dead men maybe he can find the killer before he strikes again.

Our Lady of Pain
Our Lady of Pain

Author: Elena Forbes

Publisher: House of Anansi

Published: 2008-09-08

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1770890262

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In the second novel in Elena Forbes’ bestselling mystery series, DI Mark Tartaglia’s investigation into a murder becomes a hunt for a possible serial killer. Hurting is her special skill. On a snowy February morning, London art dealer Rachel Tenison goes for a jog through Holland Park. Still giddy from the previous evening, her legs wobbly from too much drink and too little sleep, she falls at the bottom of an icy hill. Lying on her back, she savours the sensation of snowflakes melting on her skin and the unexpected stillness of the moment. But then there’s the sharp crack of a tree branch behind her, and a voice softly calling her name. Two days later, detectives Mark Tartaglia and Sam Donovan are assigned to the case when Rachel’s naked, frozen body is discovered in the park, bound and arranged in a strangely symbolic manner. Still haunted by “The Bridegroom,” a chillingly seductive serial killer with a penchant for lonely girls and deadly heights, they’re forced to put the past behind them as they try to catch Rachel’s murderer. But when a tip from a journalist draws their attention to grisly similarities between this and another unsolved crime, the web becomes more tangled than ever.

Under the Feet of Jesus
Under the Feet of Jesus

Author: Helena Maria Viramontes

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 1996-04-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1101078235

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Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature “Stunning.”—Newsweek With the same audacity with which John Steinbeck wrote about migrant worker conditions in The Grapes of Wrath and T.C. Boyle in The Tortilla Curtain, Viramontes presents a moving and powerful vision of the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions in California's fields. At the center of this powerful tale is Estrella, a girl about to cross the perilous border to womanhood. What she knows of life comes from her mother, who has survived abandonment by her husband in a land that treats her as if she were invisible, even though she and her children pick the crops of the farms that feed its people. But within Estrella, seeds of growth and change are stirring. And in the arms of Alejo, they burst into a full, fierce flower as she tastes the joy and pain of first love. Pushed to the margins of society, she learns to fight back and is able to help the young farmworker she loves when his ambitions and very life are threatened in a harvest of death. Infused with the beauty of the California landscape and shifting splendors of the passing seasons juxtaposed with the bleakness of poverty, this vividly imagined novel is worthy of the people it celebrates and whose story it tells so magnificently. The simple lyrical beauty of Viramontes' prose, her haunting use of image and metaphor, and the urgency of her themes all announce Under the Feat of Jesus as a landmark work of American fiction.