The Axeman's Carnival
The Axeman's Carnival

Author: Catherine Chidgey

Publisher: Victoria University Press

Published: 2022-12-08

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1776920988

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Everywhere, the birds: sparrows and skylarks and thrushes, starlings and bellbirds, fantails and pipits &– but above them all and louder, the magpies. We are here and this is our tree and we' re staying and it is ours and you need to leave and now. Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. &‘ If it keeps me awake,' says Marnie' s husband Rob, a farmer, &‘ I' ll have to wring its neck.' But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple' s future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds &– and all of the precarity, darkness and hope within them &– bleed into one another. Like a stock truck filled with live cargo, the story moves inexorably towards its dramatic conclusion: the annual Axeman' s Carnival. Part trickster, part surrogate child, part witness, Tama the magpie is the star of this story. Though what he says aloud to humans is often nonsensical (and hilarious with it), the tale he tells us weaves a disturbingly human sen

Wolf Boy
Wolf Boy

Author: Evan Kuhlman

Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)

Published: 2006-11-28

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307337987

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With the humanity and intimacy of "Ordinary People," this novel reinvents a classic narrative archetype to follow a young family coping with staggering loss. A graphic-novel subplot adds both humor and visual interest to this moving tale of hope and redemption. Illustrations.

Pretty in Plaid
Pretty in Plaid

Author: Jen Lancaster

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780451226808

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The newest memoir from the New York Times best-selling author of Such a Pretty Fat offers an humorous, inside look at the scribe's childhood. Original.

In a Fishbone Church
In a Fishbone Church

Author: Catherine Chidgey

Publisher: Victoria University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780864733351

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When Clifford Stilton dies, his son Gene crams his carefully kept diaries into a hall cupboard - but Clifford's words have too much life in them to be ignored, and start to permeate his family's world. Clifford taught Gene about how to find rocks and fossils, and about how to kill birds and fish. Gene passes on a similar inheritance to his daughters, Bridget and Christina - they have their own ways of digging and discovering the past, keeping an account of life, watching out for the varieties of death that lie hidden. Etta their mother tells a very different story of her 1940s childhood. In a fishbone church spans continents and decades. From the Berlin rave scene to the Canterbury duck season, from the rural 1950s to the cosmopolitan present, these five vivid lives cohere in a deeply affecting and exhilarating novel. In a fishbone church, Catherine Chidgey's acclaimed debut, won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, the Adam Award, the regional Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel, and a Betty Trask Award in the UK, where it was also longlisted for the Orange Prize. First published in 1998, it has been a bestseller in New Zealand and has been published around the world.

Vertical Worlds (Adult Coloring Book)
Vertical Worlds (Adult Coloring Book)

Author: Allison Rae

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams

Published: 2016-09-27

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781419722707

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This stunning and original coloring book presents an array of remarkable worlds all presented in a tower of spectacular detail and intricacy. Architecture buffs, city lovers, map enthusiasts, and avid colorists will lose themselves in the Vertical City, where shops perch above parking lots that sit atop skyscrapers. Other realms include the Carnival, the Tree House, the Natural History Museum, the Bazaar, the Train Station, the Hotel, the University, the Music Festival, the Farm, the Cathedral, the Film Studio, the Zoo, the Art Museum, and the Aquarium. The striking cover has gold foil stamping, and each piece of art inside is completely hand-drawn with masterful precision.

A Carnival of Snackery
A Carnival of Snackery

Author: David Sedaris

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 754

ISBN-13: 0316256463

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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mas­tered it. If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leap­ing to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs. These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harm­less laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

Greta & Valdin
Greta & Valdin

Author: Rebecca K Reilly

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2024-02-06

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1668028042

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For fans of Schitt’s Creek and Sally Rooney’s Normal People, an irresistible and bighearted international bestseller that follows a brother and sister as they navigate queerness, multiracial identity, and the dramas big and small of their entangled, unconventional family, all while flailing their way to love. It’s been a year since his ex-boyfriend dumped him and moved from Auckland to Buenos Aires, and Valdin is doing fine. He has a good flat with his sister Greta, a good career where his colleagues only occasionally remind him that he is the sole Maaori person in the office, and a good friend who he only sleeps with when he’s sad. But when work sends him to Argentina and he’s thrown back in his former lover’s orbit, Valdin is forced to confront the feelings he’s been trying to ignore—and the future he wants. Greta is not letting her painfully unrequited crush (or her possibly pointless master’s thesis, or her pathetic academic salary...) get her down. She would love to focus on the charming fellow grad student she meets at a party and her friendships with a circle of similarly floundering twenty-somethings, but her chaotic family life won’t stop intruding: her mother is keeping secrets, her nephew is having a gay crisis, and her brother has suddenly flown to South America without a word. Sharp, hilarious, and with an undeniable emotional momentum that builds to an exuberant conclusion, Greta & Valdin careens us through the siblings’ misadventures and the messy dramas of their sprawling, eccentric Maaori-Russian-Catalonian family. An acclaimed bestseller in New Zealand, Greta & Valdin is fresh, joyful, and alive with the possibility of love in its many mystifying forms.

The Wish Child
The Wish Child

Author: Catherine Chidgey

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2018-10-02

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1640090983

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This internationally bestselling historical novel that "fans of The Book Thief will enjoy" follows two children and a mysterious narrator as they navigate the falsehoods and wreckage of WWII Germany (Publishers Weekly). Germany, 1939. As Germany’s hope for a glorious future begins to collapse, two children, Sieglinde and Erich, find temporary refuge in an abandoned theater amid the rubble of Berlin. Outside, white bedsheets hang from windows; all over the city, people are talking of surrender. The days Sieglinde and Erich spend together will shape the rest of their lives. Watching over them is the wish child, the enigmatic narrator of their story. He sees what they see, he feels what they feel, yet his is a voice that comes from deep inside the ruins of a nation’s dream. Winner of the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Awards “A remarkable book with a stunningly original twist.” —The Times (London)