A whistling butcher is probably not anything particularly abnormal, she told herself. After all there are plenty of singing butchers, butchers who tell you jokes, butchers who tell you their life stories. But this one, with his little striped apron and his long legs in very short shorts, big feet with footy socks, blue singlet under the apron to match the blue denim shorts, the muscular arms and legs shining, hairless, olive skinned.
Finding fault with everything in her small Hungarian village, Valeria becomes an inadvertent respected critic whose opinions are embraced by her neighbors, a situation that is thrown into upheaval when Valeria's approval of a humble potter's work reveals vulnerabilities throughout the community.
A painter torn between his domestic arrangements and his artistic pursuits makes a fateful choice in this brilliant and provocative novel from a winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize Timothy Kane brought his wife and young daughter to Cape Cod in order to find the peace and quiet necessary to paint. But the mood inside their small cottage is far from tranquil—a past affair weighs on Timothy’s conscience, and the strain of running a household by herself is causing Enid to resent her husband. To make matters worse, Timothy’s friend Jim Connor has decided to move to the Cape and bring a gaggle of their Greenwich Village acquaintances with him. A committed anarchist, Jim does more than just preach the redistribution of wealth: He accomplishes it himself by shoplifting from department stores and giving the loot to struggling poets and painters. Jim and his rabble-rousing, art-obsessed crew stir up trouble wherever they go, and Timothy’s association with the group soon becomes a major point of contention between him and Enid. She expects him to sacrifice his friendship for the sake of his family’s security—a demand that runs counter to Timothy’s nature and his sense of what it means to be an artist. With the pressure mounting, he must find a way to balance his marriage and his work, or risk devastating consequences to both. An exquisitely crafted story about the hard truths of the creative life, Conversation has been lauded by the New York Times as a testament to “the brilliance of [Conrad Aiken’s] mind and the understanding of his heart.”
A suspenseful small-town horror novel of oppression, heartbreak and buried anguish – Shirley Jackson meets Never Let Me Go with the wild west setting of Westworld. When Lady Mae turns 18, she'll inherit her mother's job as the Butcher: dismembering Settlement Five’s guilty residents as payment for their petty crimes. An index finger taken for spreading salacious gossip, a foot for blasphemy, no one is exempt from punishment. But one day Winona refuses to butcher a six-year-old boy. So their leaders, known as the Deputies, come to Lady Mae’s house, and, right there in the living room, murder her mother for refusing her duties. Within twenty-four hours, now alone in the world, Lady Mae begins her new job. But a chance meeting years later puts her face to face with the Deputy that murdered her mother. Now Lady Mae must choose: will she flee, and start another life in the desolate mountains, forever running? Or will she seek vengeance for her mother’s death even if it kills her? A devastating, alarming page-turner infused with melancholy, humanity – and society’s maddening acceptance in the face of horror.
This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath. In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes. At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past.
