The Glass Room

The Glass Room

Author: Simon Mawer

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2009-10-27

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 1590513975

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Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.


The Glass Castle

The Glass Castle

Author: Jeannette Walls

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2007-01-02

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 1416544666

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A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.


The Man in the Glass House

The Man in the Glass House

Author: Mark Lamster

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2018-11-06

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 0316453498

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A "smoothly written and fair-minded" (Wall Street Journal) biography of architect Philip Johnson -- a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable and influential figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as one of America's leading architects with his famous Glass House in New Caanan, CT, and his controversial AT&T Building in NYC, among many others in nearly every city in the country -- but his most natural role was as a consummate power broker and shaper of public opinion. Johnson introduced European modernism -- the sleek, glass-and-steel architecture that now dominates our cities -- to America, and mentored generations of architects, designers, and artists to follow. He defined the era of "starchitecture" with its flamboyant buildings and celebrity designers who esteemed aesthetics and style above all other concerns. But Johnson was also a man of deep paradoxes: he was a Nazi sympathizer, a designer of synagogues, an enfant terrible into his old age, a populist, and a snob. His clients ranged from the Rockefellers to televangelists to Donald Trump. Award-winning architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson's controversial and endlessly contradictory life to tell the story of a charming yet deeply flawed man. A rollercoaster tale of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this book probes the dynamics of American culture that made him so powerful, and tells the story of the built environment in modern America.


The Glass Hotel

The Glass Hotel

Author: Emily St. John Mandel

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0525521151

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!


Thin Air

Thin Air

Author: Ann Cleeves

Publisher: Minotaur Books

Published: 2015-05-05

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1466879351

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Ann Cleeves is back with Thin Air, the sixth book in her beloved Shetland series, which is now a hit television show starring Douglas Henshall. A group of old university friends leave the bright lights of London and travel to Shetland to celebrate the marriage of one of their friends. But, one of them, Eleanor, disappears—apparently into thin air. It's mid-summer, a time of light nights and unexpected mists. And then Eleanor's body is discovered lying in a small loch close to the cliff edge. Detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves are dispatched to investigate. Before she went missing, Eleanor claimed to have seen the ghost of a local child who drowned in the 1920s. Her interest in the ghost had seemed unhealthy—obsessive, even—to her friends: an indication of a troubled mind. But Jimmy and Willow are convinced that there is more to Eleanor's death than they first thought. Is there a secret that lies behind the myth? One so shocking that someone would kill—many years later—to protect? Ann Cleeves' striking new novel is a quintessential whodunit with surprises at every turn.


The Glass Virgin

The Glass Virgin

Author: Catherine Cookson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2004-12-06

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 074327430X

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From bestselling author Catherine Cookson comes a compelling riches-to-rags story featuring secrets, scandal, and emotional drama set in Victorian England. Annabella Lagrange had the kind of childhood that most can only dream about. The only child of an aristocratic couple, raised on their magnificent estate in the English countryside, she was loved by her parents and coddled by servants who acquiesced to her every whim. She was allowed to do anything she wanted, except, of course, to stray too far from her wing of the house. But her seclusion didn't concern her too much, because when she grew up, she planned to marry her handsome cousin Stephen and live happily ever after. However, on the morning of her tenth birthday, Annabella ventured farther than she'd ever gone before. Overcome with curiosity, she opened a forbidden door that led into her father's private quarters, and what she found there showed her with shocking clarity that her father was not the man she thought he was. And though she couldn't know it at the time, the events of that day set in motion the uncovering of a secret that had been kept for many years. So begins the remarkable story of Annabella Lagrange, a sensitive, beautiful young woman who was raised as a lady. But when she turns eighteen, she learns the surprising circumstances of her birth, and her entire world quietly crashes around her. Suddenly she's forced from the genteel surroundings of her youth into the rough, lower-class society of Victorian England, where only her quick wit and determination can save her from starvation. Catherine Cookson was one of the world's most beloved writers, and in The Glass Virgin her powers are at their height. Rarely has a heroine been portrayed more sensitively or a situation more compellingly. Filled with passion and drama, The Glass Virgin is a rare treat for lovers of romantic fiction.


The Mars Room

The Mars Room

Author: Rachel Kushner

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-05-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1476756600

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TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).


Room

Room

Author: Emma Donoghue

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-05-07

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 178682177X

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Kidnapped as a teenage girl, Ma has been locked inside a purpose built room in her captor's garden for seven years. Her five year old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma's games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.


The Glass Room

The Glass Room

Author: Kate Holmquist

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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"On the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday Louisa Maguire takes a long hard look at her life and doesn't much like what she sees. Her mother didn't want her. Her husband is a womanizer. Her best friend keeps trying to seduce her. All she has left are her two beloved children, a hectic career photographing Dublin's beautiful people ... and a longing to turn back time and start all over again." "When two long-forgotten faces turn up in her studio, Louisa's mind is flooded with memories of her bohemian childhood in New York and of a summer in the Hamptons when she was seventeen. When her first love also arrives in Dublin, Louisa's life is turned upside-down and she is forced to confront the devastating truth about why she has always put security before passion and sex before love."--BOOK JACKET.