Showing titles in City Life

Inspired by the real-life murder of a British army soldier by religious fanatics, and the rampant burning of mosques that followed, Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City is a snapshot of the diverse, frenzied edges of modern-day London. A crackling debut from a vital new voice, it pulses with the frantic energy of the city’s homegrown grime music and is animated by the youthful rage of a dispossessed, overlooked, and often misrepresented generation.

In the late 1960s, Leo Gazzara left his family in Milan and moved to Rome for work. Soon unemployed, he has spent his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between hotels, bars, romantic entanglements and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends. Rome is indifferent. Leo drifts, aimless and alone. On the evening of his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna, a young woman who is both fragile and seductive. All night they drive the city in Leo’s run-down Alfa Romeo, talking and talking. They eat brioche for breakfast, drink through the dawn, drive to the sea and back.

Bea Seger has spent a lifetime running from her childhood. The daughter of a famous photographer, she and her brothers were the subjects of an explosive series of images in the 1960s known as the Marx Nudes. Disturbing and provocative, the photographs shadowed the family long past the public outcry and media attention. Now, decades later, both the Museum of Modern Art and Hollywood have come calling, eager to cash in on Bea’s mother’s notoriety.

Meet Mark Dunham, a guy struggling to keep his life afloat who reluctantly finds himself selling cars. The next up is his, but he's clueless and hasn't sold a single car. Having tried nearly everything, including standing roadside in a gorilla costume, he comes across an old movie projector in the basement of the dealership, which opens a portal through time. This unlikely discovery thrusts Mark into an epic adventure where he uncovers a new way of selling cars, taught to him by the late founder of the dealership himself.

The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife—and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon—the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums—is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight.

It’s 2015 in New York City, and three women all known as Mrs. Tobias—Veronika, the matriarch, her daughter-in-law Mel, and Mel’s daughter-in-law Birdie—are trying to navigate personal difficulties, some of which are with one another. Veronika and Mel, despite having little in common, are both psychotherapists who are more skilled at helping other people than solving their own problems. Birdie, still dealing with the culture shock of moving to New York City and marrying into the Tobias clan, is pushed to her limit when her husband gets into trouble.

At the deteriorating Pheasant Run, the occupants keep their secrets and sadnesses locked tight behind closed apartment doors. Kind Leo Umberti, formerly an insurance agent, now quietly spends his days painting abstract landscapes and mourning a long-ago loss. Down the hall, retired professor Rydell Clovis tries desperately to stay fit enough to restart a career in academia. Cassie McMackin, on the same floor, has seemingly lost everything - her husband and only child dead within months of each other - leaving her loosely tethered to this world.

Set on the eve of the financial crash of 2008, this evocative novel is made up of three stories linked by time and place, and also by the moving, unexpected interactions of a rich cast of characters. Barcelona Dreaming is narrated, in turn, by an English woman who runs a gift shop, an alcoholic jazz pianist, and a translator tormented by unrequited love, all of whose lives will be changed forever. Underpinning the novel, and casting a long shadow, is a crime committed against a young Moroccan immigrant.

Southern Brooklyn, July 1996. Fire hydrants are open and spraying water on the sizzling blacktop. Punk kids have to make their own fun. Bobby Santovasco and his pal Zeke like to throw rocks at cars getting off the Belt Parkway. They think it's dumb and harmless until it's too late to think otherwise. Then there's Jack Cornacchia, a widower who lives with his high school age daughter Amelia and reads meters for Con Ed but also has a secret life as a vigilante, righting neighbourhood wrongs through acts of violence.

In her signature sharp prose, brilliantly translated by Jamie Chang, Nam-Joo returns with this haunting account of a neglected housing complex in the shadows of Town: a former fishing village bought out by a massive conglomerate. Town is prosperous and safe―but only if you’re a citizen with “valuable skills and assets,” which the residents of Saha Estates are not. Disenfranchised and tightlipped, the Saha are forced into harsh labor, squatting in moldy units without electricity.

She's beauty, brains, and trouble. With Daddy's money, life could have been one continuous party for Seattle socialite Jordan Dean. Instead she chose college and a career. She doesn't have time for love or men - not with work and the responsibilities of raising her younger sister. But when her sister is kidnapped and a sexy Special Ops bodyguard is suddenly thrust into her life, Jordan must let go of her tightly controlled world and accept help from the one man who poses a huge risk to her well-guarded heart.

A frustrated lawyer finds release where she least expects it - and where she needs it most - in this exhilarating, sexy romp through the finest gluten-free indulgences in a New York City grocery store. After another long workday, the only thing Meredith wants is a big bowl of paleo maple-pecan coconola. But the hour-long checkout line at 7:00 p.m. at an all-organic supermarket stands between her and satisfaction, and the yupster mob is working her last nerve. Then, out of nowhere, a spontaneous flirtation with a stranger shows her there’s a lot more than coconola waiting for her.

Happy works a dead-end job at the amusement park, biding his time and saving money for a clandestine journey to Europe, where he'll finally land a breakout role. After a nightmarish passage to Italy, Happy still manages to find relief in food and fantasy, even as he is forced into ever-worsening work conditions over a debt he allegedly accrued in transit. But his daydreams grow increasingly at odds with his bleak reality, one shared by so many migrant workers.

Here is the preface to 12 magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates - with unequaled grace and tenderness - the deepest feelings we have.

I’m New York’s most notorious billionaire bachelor, and I don’t do relationships. But when Mia Barnett, my beautiful new intern, literally crashes into my life on her wedding day, I'm captivated. She’s the woman who's about to turn my world upside down. A runaway bride that’s desperate for a fresh start. I'm determined to give her one—in my bed and at my studio. Then secrets and scandals surface, threatening to destroy us both. Protecting her could cost me everything. But losing this woman who's awakened my heart? Not an option. I'll risk it all to make her mine.

The Vanderhaven family of Manhattan has it all: wealth, prestige, good looks, and a thriving business empire. But their seemingly perfect world is ripped apart when their younger daughter, eight-year-old Brenna, runs off after overhearing her parents arguing. Out on the streets, she quickly realizes she’s lost. Even more frightening, Brenna soon realizes that a man is following her. Meanwhile, in a townhouse in Brooklyn, Callie Griffin is throwing a birthday party for her one-year-old son, Oliver. The joy of the day is ruined by her sister Lauren’s too short, drive-by appearance.

As an ex-Navy SEAL, I faced unimaginable battles and unspeakable horrors… I was broken and driven to push away those who mattered most to me. Until a ghost from my past came roaring back into my life, looking strikingly beautiful yet just as shattered as the day I cast her aside. "Addison," I murmured, barely believing she was standing before me. The moment our eyes meet, it's like a bolt of lightning to my heart. Something is wrong, though. She claims she's not my Addison, but every fiber in me knows it's her. Guilt and regret crash over me for pushing her out of my life. I threw away ...

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.

Imogen has always dreamed of writing for a magazine. Infinite internships later, Imogen dreams of any job. Writing her blog around double shifts at the pub is neither fulfilling her creatively nor paying the bills. Harri might just be Imogen's fairy godmother. She's moving from the glossy pages of Panache magazine to launch a fierce feminist site, The Know.

Bridget O'Connor was one of the great short story writers of her generation. She had a voice that was viscerally funny and an eye for both the glaring reality and the absurdity of the everyday. In After A Dance, we meet a selection of O'Connor's most memorable characters often living on the margin of their own lives: from the anonymous thief set on an unusual prize to the hungover best man clinging to what he's lost, to the unrepentant gold-digger who always comes out on top. From unravelling narcissists to melancholy romantics all human life is here - at its best and at its delightful worst.