Amnaj Boonngamanong, owner of a Florida gulf coast bar, En La Playa, is forced to decide whether to sell his niece to pay gambling debts to a gangster known for his brutality to women or to risk his own life by refusing. He sells his niece.His decision sets off a chain of deadly events-as unstoppable as the hurricane that is battering the coastline-that alters the lives of his family, the undocumented immigrants in his bar, a prizefighter with no hands, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, and a toddler lost at sea.Told from multiple points of view, The Sky After Rain charts the depths the characters will go to endure the storms in their lives and to find salvation in the bonds they form with each other.The Sky After Rain might remind readers of John Hawkes's The Lime Twig for its darkness and plot obscurity, of William Gass's novella "The Pedersen Kid" in its repetitive themes, and of William Faulkner's use of multiple narrators in As I Lay Dying.If anything makes it unique, it's the use of various languages--Thai script, Spanish, English--in the telling of the story. Less unique, but also not so common, is a portrait of a non-detective, non-Bangkok setting for Thai people.
An extraordinary memoir of one woman's experiences in China. ******************************** Tessa Keswick first travelled to China in 1982 and immediately fell in love with its history, culture and landscape. Over the next thirty years, she travelled extensively in China, visiting its temples and landmarks, the sites of its most famous battles, and the birthplaces of its best-known poets and philosophers. She also witnessed China's transformation, as hundreds of millions were lifted out of poverty and the country emerged as an economic superpower in waiting. Keswick's observations of life in China are perceptive and full of insight. Her narrative is rich in microhistories of people encountered and places visited. By presenting a colourfully woven tapestry of contrasting experiences and localities, she allows the reader to glimpse the sheer diversity of China and its vast population. A multi-textured and revealing survey of the world's largest country, as seen through one woman's eyes, The Colour of the Sky After Rain offers a compelling portrait of China in an age of radical change, and charts the key staging posts in its recent, remarkable history. ******************************** 'Tessa Keswick provides joyous insights into her life with husband Sir Henry Keswick' Sunday Times. 'Keswick is an engaging, lively guide and she is at her best when writing about the Chinese landscape' Daily Mail. 'At precisely the time that we need to understand China more than ever, along comes a book that is incisive, honest, witty, and beautifully written which explains the Chinese people and society to a Western audience superbly. Impossible to categorize, The Colour of the Sky After Rain is part-memoir, part-travelogue, part-history, part-thoughtful musing, and packed with insights into the Chinese state and soul that forces us to look afresh at the world's thrusting new superpower' Professor Andrew Roberts. 'If you want an enthralling read about China and to learn a lot about that extraordinary country at the same time, read Tessa Keswick's The Colour of the Sky After Rain. I derived so much pleasure and excitement from the story that I hardly noticed all the history I was imbibing. The Colour of the Sky aAter Rain is both serious and seriously entertaining. It is strongly recommended' Lady Antonia Fraser. 'The Colour of the Sky After Rain made me want at once to leap on to a plane and travel to Zhongdian, to Jiayuguan, to Suzhou, to Xinjiang (and on and on)... I learnt a great deal from this book about the history of China over the millennia and especially over the last fifty years' Neil MacGregor.
After Rain - Twelve remarkable stories by the master storyteller William Trevor 'There is no better short story writer in the English-speaking world' Wall Street Journal In this collection of twelve dazzling, acutely rendered tales, William Trevor plumbs the depths of the human heart. Here we encounter a blind piano tuner whose wonderful memories of his first wife are cruelly distorted by his second; a woman in a difficult marriage who must choose between her indignant husband and her closest friend; two children, survivors of divorce, who mimic their parents' melodramas; and a heartbroken woman traveling alone in Italy who experiences an epiphany while studying a forgotten artist's Annunciation. Trevor is, in his own words, 'a storyteller. My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so.' Conscious or not, he touches us in ways that few writers even dare to try. If you enjoyed The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer, you will love this book. It will also be adored by readers of Colm Toibin, George Saunders and James Joyce. William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork. He has written eighteen novels and novellas, and hundreds of short stories, for which he has won a number of prizes including the Hawthornden Prize, the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the David Cohen Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. In 2002 he was knighted for his services to literature. His books in Penguin are: After Rain; A Bit on the Side; Bodily Secrets; Cheating at Canasta; The Children of Dynmouth; The Collected Stories (Volumes One and Two); Death in Summer; Felicia's Journey; Fools of Fortune; The Hill Bachelors; Love and Summer; The Mark-2 Wife; Selected Stories; The Story of Lucy Gault and Two Lives.
On Christmas Eve 1971, the packed LANSA flight 508 from Lima to Pucallpa was struck by lightning and went down in dense jungle hundreds of miles from civilization. Of its 93 passengers, only one survived. Juliane Koepcke, the seventeen-year-old child of famous German zoologists. She'd been thrown from the plane two miles above the forest canopy, but had sustained only a broken collarbone and a cut on her leg. With incredible courage, instinct and ingenuity, she survived three weeks in the "green hell" of the Amazon - using the skills she'd learned in assisting her parents on their research trips into the jungle - before coming across a loggers hut, and, with it, safety. Now she tells her fascinating story for the first time, and in doing so tells us about her 'Gerald Durrell' childhood - with a menagerie of wild, exotic and sometimes dangerous pets - about how she learned to survive at her parents ecological station deep in the rainforest and about her present-day commitment to this wildlife as a biologist and dedicated environmentalist.
From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a deeply emotional contemporary romance about the second chances waiting beyond the shattered dreams of youth. When eighteen-year-old Avelina Belo meets a charismatic cowboy the summer before her senior year of high school, she doesn’t know that accepting his invitation to dinner will lead to a whirlwind marriage three months later and an exciting new life on a Montana ranch. She also doesn’t know that, in a few short years, fate will send everything crashing down around her. A thousand miles away and fresh out of medical school, Nate Meyers is poised to become UCLA’s next superstar heart surgeon. His laser focus is the key to his success, but it’s also his greatest liability. When a routine surgery ends in disaster, derailing his career, he’s confronted with the hard truth: there’s no one waiting for him at home, no one to help him pick up the pieces. Regrouping on his uncle’s Montana ranch, Nate meets Avelina, a beautiful but mysterious young woman who keeps to herself and barely speaks a word. As he discovers the details of her devastating past, Avelina teaches him more about matters of the heart than he ever knew before. But can they trust each other enough to put everything on the line?
A delightful picture book about a wonderfully wet walk. Simple text and colourful illustrations introduce the science of rain to very young children. This is a highly illustrated ebook that can only be read on the Kindle Fire or other tablet.
Evoking both the exotic and the mundane, using images that reverberate in the mind, the author breathes life into short pieces, poems that leave behind an imprint. Writing poems since teenage years, this now-mature writer uses both traditional and modern forms, including impressionism and surrealism. This is meant to be your new companion of contemporary literature that you would want to keep by your bedside to read at leisure whenever the mood arises.
Sensitive, hopeful, intimate, petite stories and devotional messages touching your many seasons of tenderness, and the beautiful meaning and grace growing from that fertile ground. Fragrant medicine words for Lovers of Rumi, Hafez, and Gibran.
Probability Theory: A Primer intends to give a non-technical introduction to probability theory, as it is used in the social sciences. The topics covered include the concept of probability and its relation to relative frequency, the properties of probability, discrete and continuous random variables, and binomial, uniform, normal and chi-squared distributions. Readers who have taken basic college mathematics will be comfortable with this work, which frequently draws intuition and examples instead of technically involved arguments to make its points. In spite of the elementary level of discussion, the concepts of continuous random variables and distributions are carefully developed. Thus, the book prepares the reader not only for a precise understanding of sampling theory, where discrete probabilities are used, but also to a deeper understanding of most of the statistical techniques applied in social science data analysis.
