Swimming to Elba
Swimming to Elba

Author: Silvia Avallone

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2012-06-14

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1101583622

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A sensually charged novel about two girls growing up fast in a failing industrial town on the coast of Italy Anna and Francesca are on the brink of everything: high school, adulthood, and the edge of ambition in their provincial town. It’s summer in Piombino, Italy, and in their skimpy bathing suits, flaunting their newly acquired curves, the girls suddenly have everyone in their thrall. This power opens their imagination to a destiny beyond Piombino; the resort town of Elba is just a ferry ride away and yet they’ve never dared to go. Maybe the future is waiting for them there, or somewhere beyond. When their friendship suffers a blow, the girls set off on their own only to discover that their budding sexuality takes them further than they expect, though not as far as their dreams. As their choices take them to a painful crossroads, the girls must reconnect if they have any hope of escaping their small town destinies. In this poetic, prizewinning debut, Silvia Avallone captures the lost innocence of a generation. Harrowing yet ultimately redemptive, Swimming to Elba is a story about the power of friendship, and the way that family, friendship, and economics shape our world.

Lizzie & Dante
Lizzie & Dante

Author: Mary Bly

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0593134842

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The insightful, audacious, and deeply romantic story of a woman whose life turns upside down after she meets an enigmatic chef on vacation in Italy, from a New York Times bestselling author “Delicious.”—People • “Smart, sexy and funny, full of joy in simple pleasures.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune What if falling in love means breaking someone’s heart? On the heels of a difficult break-up and a devastating diagnosis, Shakespeare scholar Lizzie Delford decides to take one last lavish vacation on Elba, the sun-kissed island off the Italian coast, with her best friend and his movie-star boyfriend. Once settled into a luxurious seaside resort, Lizzie has to make big decisions about her future, and she needs the one thing she may be running out of: time. She leaves the yacht owners and celebrities behind and sneaks off to the public beach, where she meets a sardonic chef named Dante, his battered dog, Lulu, and his wry daughter, Etta, a twelve-year-old desperate for a mother. While Dante shows Lizzie the island’s secrets, and Etta dazzles with her irreverent humor, Lizzie is confronted with a dilemma. Is it right to fall in love if time is short? Is it better to find a mother briefly, or to have no mother at all? And most pressingly, are the delicacies of life worth tasting, even if you will get to savor them only for a short while? A luscious story of love, courage, and Italian wine, Lizzie & Dante demands to know how far we should travel to find a future worth fighting for.

Return to Laughter
Return to Laughter

Author: Elenore Smith Bowen

Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 1839742895

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This classic of anthropological literature is a dramatic, revealing account of an anthropologist’s first year in the field with a remote African tribe. Simply as a work of ethnographic interest, Return to Laughter provides deep insights into the culture of West Africa—me subtle web of its tribal life and the power of the institution of witchcraft. However, the author’s fictional approach gives the book its lasting appeal. She focuses on the human dimension of anthropology, recounting her personal triumphs and failures and documenting the profound changes she undergoes. As a result, her story becomes at once highly personal and universally recognizable. She has vividly brought to life the classic narrative of an outsider caught up and deeply involved in an utterly alien culture. “The first introspective account ever published of what it’s like to be a field worker among a primitive people.”—Margaret Mead

Monsters Don't Scuba Dive
Monsters Don't Scuba Dive

Author: Debbie Dadey

Publisher:

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 90

ISBN-13: 9780590226356

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The new swimming instructor at Camp Lone Wolf, Nessie McFarland, has a strange attraction to the water. And when the kids hear that the Loch Ness monster has gone missing from Scotland, they get a funny feeling. The Loch Ness monster is described as black and skinny with a long neck and a little head which sounds a lot like Nessie in her scuba gear. But Nessie couldn't really be a monster, could she?

Timeskipper
Timeskipper

Author: Stefano Benni

Publisher:

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13:

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From the author of Margherita Dolce Vita One late-winter morning as he is "hop-hiking" downhill toward his character-building destination, a vomit-yellow cube surrounded by a garden of barbarously unkempt weeds known as the Bisacconi elementary school, Stefano Benni's young hero encounters a peculiar man--as big as a mountain and as filthy as a garbage dump, with a vast beard the color of a dung-heap, dressed from head to foot in layers and rags, and in the company of a swarm of buzzing flies. A god, perhaps? A pagan divinity? Who can tell! After a brief tête-à-tête, this earthy apparition endows the young boy with a rare gift: an internal "duoclock" that allows him to see into the future and at the same time exist in the present with an uncommon fullness. Meet Timeskipper. Timeskipper sees and foresees the epochal events of his era from postwar reconstruction to the birth of television--from the golden age of rock'n'roll to the revolutionary sixties and the turbulent seventies. These events are tenderly offset by his own private experiences: his first love, his first job, leaving home, hilariously wild adventures with oddball acquaintances. This vibrant fictional character is the repository of our collective experience. His is the story of our time, an era of momentous change. A moving and inventive satiric tale in which imagination defies corruption and conformity, in which the innocence of yesteryear comes face-to-face with the moral aridity of today's money-obsessed society, Timeskipper is one of Stefano Benni's most touching and enduring creations. Colored by Benni's trademark linguistic inventiveness and irresistible humor, this is a coming-of-age story with a difference.

The Taming of the Duke
The Taming of the Duke

Author: Eloisa James

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2009-10-13

Total Pages: 397

ISBN-13: 0061800333

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Imogen, Lady Maitland, has decided to dance on the wild side. After all, she's in the delicious position of being able to take a lover. A discreet male who knows just when to leave in the morning. But Lady Maitland is still under the watchful eye of her former guardian, the wildly untamed Rafe, the Duke of Holbrook. He believes she is still in need of a "watchdog." She laughs at the idea that someone so insufferably lazy and devoted to drink can demand that she behave with propriety. It's Rafe's long-lost brother, a man who looks precisely like the duke but with none of his degenerate edge, who interests Imogen. To Imogen, he's the shadow duke . . . the man who really should hold the title. But when Imogen agrees to accompany Gabe to a masquerade...whose masked eyes watch her with that intense look of desire? Who exactly is she dancing with? The duke or the shadow duke? Rafe . . . or Gabe?

Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto
Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto

Author: Gianni Rodari

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2011-12-06

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1612190049

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A fable for children and adults: a story of life, death, and terrorism—in the grand tradition of Exupéry’s The Little Prince When we first meet 93-year-old millionaire Baron Lamberto, he has been diagnosed with 24 life-threatening ailments—one for each of the 24 banks he owns. But when he takes the advice of an Egyptian mystic and hires servants to chant his name over and over again, he seems to not only get better, but younger. Except then a terrorist group lays siege to his island villa, his team of bank managers has to be bussed in to help with the ransom negotiations, and a media spectacle breaks out . . . A hilarious and strangely moving tale that seems ripped from the headlines—although actually written during the time the Red Brigades were terrorizing Italy—Gianni Rodari’s Lamberto, Lamberto, Lamberto has become one of Italy’s most beloved fables. Never before translated into English, the novel is a reminder, as Rodari writes, that “there are things that only happen in fairytales.”

Everything Is Broken Up and Dances
Everything Is Broken Up and Dances

Author: Edoardo Nesi

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1590519329

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This extended autobiographical essay explains in clear, engaging terms how the role of economics and finance in the Western world has shifted in the twenty-first century, from cultivating wellbeing in society to eroding the wealth of the middle class. Just a handful of years into the new millennium, globalization has had a profound impact on economies and societies throughout Europe and America. In this accessible yet literary work, Edoardo Nesi and Guido Maria Brera illustrate its effects in Italy through the changes that occurred in their own lives: while the former was forced to sell the textile company his grandfather founded before World War II, the latter became one of the key figures in European asset management. Between Bill Clinton's remarks at the Lincoln Memorial on December 31, 1999 that closed the American Century, and Donald Trump's inauguration speech, economics and finance stopped functioning as instruments constructing a healthy society and became weapons to destroy the middle class. As demagogues seduce citizens of nations across the globe, Everything Is Broken Up and Dances tells the critical story of how we corrupted what we might in retrospect call "the best of all possible worlds"--a world without banking crises, unemployment, terrorism, and populism, in which it was impossible to think that a state might default on its debt.

Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)
Cloud Atlas (20th Anniversary Edition)

Author: David Mitchell

Publisher: Vintage Canada

Published: 2010-07-16

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 0307373576

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#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

Glamour in Glass
Glamour in Glass

Author: Mary Robinette Kowal

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-04-10

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1429987286

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Mary Robinette Kowal stunned readers with her charming first novel Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence. This magic comes in the form of glamour, which allows talented users to form practically any illusion they can imagine. Shades debuted to great acclaim and left readers eagerly awaiting its sequel. Glamour in Glass continues following the lives of beloved main characters Jane and Vincent, with a much deeper vein of drama and intrigue. In the tumultuous months after Napoleon abdicates his throne, Jane and Vincent go to Belgium for their honeymoon. While there, the deposed emperor escapes his exile in Elba, throwing the continent into turmoil. With no easy way back to England, Jane and Vincent's concerns turn from enjoying their honeymoon...to escaping it. Left with no outward salvation, Jane must persevere over her trying personal circumstances and use her glamour to rescue her husband from prison . . . and hopefully prevent her newly built marriage from getting stranded on the shoals of another country's war. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.