The Burning Boy is a vivid picture of life in a provincial town in times of disturbance and change. Certainties collapse in the face of violence. People start along strange ways, some to loss or ruin, others to unexpected happiness. The Burning Boy won the New Zealand Book Awards in 1991. 'Written with verve and economy, Maurice Gee's novel has a wealth of penetratingly observed incidents, some spectacular and dramatic, some distinctly unpleasant. Most, however, are ordinary, everyday events from which Gee builds an engaging narrative and a detailed picture of the life of the city - a city which, under different names in successive novels, he is steadily making into his equivalent of Hardy's Wessex.' - Times Literary Supplement
Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. Skinny Louie, daughter of Shanghai Lil, has a baby in the Begonia House on the day of the royal visit. Maura finds the baby and takes it home. Tia grows up with magical powers into the brave new world of the twenty-first century. Fiona Farrell's first novel – always moving, often hilarious – is a breathtakingly accomplished debut. It presents a head-on confrontation with a New Zealand psyche rarely found in history books. The Skinny Louie Book won the 1993 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction.
"A picture of life in a provincial town in times of disturbance and change. Certainties collapse in the face of violence. People start along strange ways, some to loss or ruin, others to unexpected happiness"--Publisher information.
In the apparently quiet Waikato of the 1930s and 1940s a number of lives connect in a complex web of family ties, desire and violence. Things are often not what they seem. The events of this story also take in boxing and farming, devotion and perversion, ranging as far as Tasmania and the Spanish Civil War.
The Singing Whakpapa is a tale for our time - a compelling historical detective story in which the truth is stranger than any fiction, and in which the present becomes a backseat driver to the past. What is the truth of history, what are the facts - and how are we to know them? This powerful novel is the story of John Flatt - missionary agriculturalist, witness to Waharoa's war of the 1830s against the Arawa, to the murder of the young woman Tarore and to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - and his great-great-grandson Hugh Grady, who more than a hundred-and-fifty years later tried to make sense of his own life by exploring all that has gone before. It is a story laced with passion, betrayal and revenge, at many levels, as greed overtakes good intentions and the cloak of history is pulled aside. The Singing Whakapapa won the New Zealand Book Awards in 1995.
Folklore pervades childhoods, families and communities and is the language of the illiterate. Even in large, modern cities, folklore-proverbs, lullabies, folk medicine, folktales-is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away. Wherever people live, folklore grows. India is a country of many languages, religions, sects and cultures. It is a land of many myths and countless stories. Translated from twenty-two Indian languages, these one hundred and ten tales cover most of the regions of India and represent favorite's narratives from the subcontinent. A.K. Ramanujan's outstanding selection is an indispensable guide to the richness and vitality of India's ageless oral folklore tradition.
Such is the strength of Joe Saul's longing for a child, that he feels he is cursed after three unfruitful years of marriage. Yet unbeknown to him, he is sterile. His young wife secretly conceives the child of another man and when Joe discovers her deception, his anguish is greater than ever.
A Penguin Classic Ancient pagan beliefs, the great Greek epics, and the Bible all inform this extraordinary novel by Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck, which occupied him for more than five difficult years. While fulfilling his dead father’s dream of creating a prosperous farm in California, Joseph Wayne comes to believe that a magnificent tree on the farm embodies his father’s spirit. His brothers and their families share in Joseph’s prosperity, and the farm flourishes—until one brother, frightened by Joseph’s pagan belief, kills the tree, allowing disease and famine to descend on the farm. Set in familiar Steinbeck country, To a God Unknown is a mystical tale, exploring one man’s attempt to control the forces of nature and, ultimately, to understand the ways of God and the forces of the unconscious within. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Two thousand years of legend and lore about the menace and majesty of dragons, which have breathed fire into our imaginations from ancient Rome to Game of Thrones A Penguin Classic The most popular mythological creature in the human imagination, dragons have provoked fear and fascination for their lethal venom and crushing coils, and as avatars of the Antichrist, servants of Satan, couriers of the damned to Hell, portents of disaster, and harbingers of the last days. Here are accounts spanning millennia and continents of these monsters that mark the boundary between the known and the unknown, including: their origins in the deserts of Africa; their struggles with their mortal enemies, elephants, in the jungles of South Asia; their fear of lightning; the world’s first dragon slayer, in an ancient collection of Sanskrit hymns; the colossal sea monster Leviathan; the seven-headed “great red dragon” of the Book of Revelation; the Loch Ness monster; the dragon in Beowulf, who inspired Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit; the dragons in the prophecies of the wizard Merlin; a dragon saved from a centipede in Japan who gifts his human savior a magical bag of rice; the supernatural feathered serpent of ancient Mesoamerica; and a flatulent dragon the size of the Trojan Horse. From the dark halls of the Lonely Mountain to the blue skies of Westeros, we expect dragons to be gigantic, reptilian predators with massive, bat-like wings, who wreak havoc defending the gold they have hoarded in the deep places of the earth. But dragons are full of surprises, as is this book. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Pick up an alien’s egg go crocodile hunting; run with a gang of pickpockets get lost in a magical maze. All this and more in these stories of adventure, humour and imagination.Oliver Twist leaves behind his gang of criminals for a better life an open window is just what a fertile mind needs in Saki’s ‘The Open Window’ Satyajit Ray’s Badan Babu has a brush with a Pterodactyl’s egg Rabindranath Tagore recollects boyhood days spent dreaming in an abandoned palanquin; and Sherlock Holmes sets off to solve the mystery of the engineer’s thumb. Featuring the works of such renowned authors as Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Premchand, Mark Twain and others, and a lively introduction by well-known children’s author Paro Anand, The Puffin Book of Classic Stories for Boys is a matchless collection from the masters of world literature for boys of all ages.
