Showing titles in City Life

Daddy’s girl Samantha Reynold hadn’t bargained on unexpectedly needing to step into her father’s shoes and take over the family casino business. Pampered and spoiled, Sam knows nothing about the rules of this glamorous but deadly new world. She has a lot to learn and even more to prove. But she won’t let her family down, especially when it looks like they could lose everything to their biggest rivals - the Stoker family.

1889, Paris. When Charles Zidler's extravagant pleasure palace, the Moulin Rouge, opens in bohemian Montmartre, he commissions local artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to create a series of posters to promote it. The striking lithographs Henri produces will make his name—and launch the careers of the performers he portrayed. This sparkling collection of plays introduces us to eight of those legendary artistes, whose lives were as vivid as Lautrec's paint.

Since she was sixteen, Willa's curious touchstone in life and work has been the 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing. She's always looking for The Feeling, the stirring in her heart—and loins—that she gets when watching the opening scenes. Now she's navigating her mid-thirties, her career as a romance publisher in an unusual family business, and her determination to remain child-free, while quietly holding out for a love as big as Beatrice and Benedick's.

Jeremy Jordan and Alexandra Chen hope to make a quiet home together but struggle to find a space safe from their personal secrets. For Jeremy, this means leaving behind his former life as an intelligence operative during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. For Alexandra, a high-powered job in image management for whole countries cannot prepare her for her missing brother's sudden reappearance. In a culture of limitless surveillance, Jeremy and Alexandra will go to great lengths to protect what is closest to them and answer the question of whether their love will be returned.

It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice's beloved dog Maebelle has been lost. Alice stays in New York, desperate to find her dog, while her husband Peter drives north to stay with friends in the Berkshires. Relieved to be alone, Alice isn't sure if she should remain married to Peter, but she's built a life with him. For his part, Peter is pleased to have time alone - he's tired of the lost-dog drama, of Alice's coolness, of New York. A psychiatrist, he ponders his patients and one particularly attractive woman in particular.

Unfinished Business focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

Self-proclaimed hot mess Scout Myers is determined to prove she’s got her act together. Raised by grandparents who saw her as her wayward mother’s wayward daughter, Scout’s used to being written off. So when the opportunity for a promotion arises at Paws in the City, the talent agency where she works, Scout is desperate to rise to the occasion. With shared custody of her little sister also on the line, Scout can’t afford a single mistake…like suddenly needing a canine stand-in for an important photoshoot. Luckily (or not) she knows the owner of the perfect pup replacement....

England, 1941. Reunited briefly with her husband-to-be before he returns to fighting, Lily Baker now finds her mundane army office work dreary. But when her boss asks her to keep watch on the happenings at the depot, she quickly suspects a new weapons supplier of fraud. As she trains her sharp eye on the potential cheat, she agrees to help an unmarried colleague with an unexpected pregnancy. But when, without evidence, she is accused of being the one with child, she faces hard decisions.

When Stuart is made redundant from his post as an advisor at Rayleigh Job Centre, he finds it hard to let go. Losing his job is tough enough, but worse than that is losing his chance of finally forging a relationship with his colleague, senior job seeker Nicola, who he's been yearning for ever since their one-night stand seven years ago. Queuing up to sign on, he finds himself reunited with his old school mates Joe and Terry, who he thought he outgrew years ago. They're delighted to have him back in their gang and are soon far too busy to find a job.

Rachel is 24, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox-Jewish woman intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam - by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family - and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk and honey.

When Jess first meets Josh at their Ivy League college she dislikes him immediately: an entitled guy in chinos, ready to take over the world. Meanwhile Jess is almost always the only Black woman in their class. And Josh can’t accept that life might be easier for him because he’s white. After graduating, Jess and Josh end up working together in the same investment bank. As they lunch, spar and pick each other’s brains, Jess begins to see Josh in a different light, and it seems their connection might be deeper than Jess could ever have imagined.

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.

Life doesn’t always turn out as expected...and as Katherine and her friends learn, sometimes it is more of a fruit salad than a bunch of lemons. Jessie is adjusting to married life...then finds out it isn’t the only thing she needs to adjust to. Erin closes an important chapter in her life...then opens the door and finds a much older chapter staring at her...slamming the door shut is her first inclination and probably the smartest thing she could do...but it is complicated...and she is soon to find out that it’s a lot more complicated than she could have ever imagined. The ladies at ...

A "La gran caiguda", Peter Handke ens porta a seguir a un personatge durant les seves aventures per la ciutat. El protagonista, un actor experimentat, desperta a casa d'una dona desconeguda. No recorda com o per quin motiu ha arribat allà. Començará a caminar sense rumb per la ciutat a l'espera del rodatge que comença el dia següent, i durant el seu camí es trobará a tot un conjunt de personatges a partir dels quals en Peter Handke parla de temes com la memória, la identitat i el passar del temps.

Winter blankets Montreal, while a bookseller and her lover dream of Prague. As the narrator’s open marriage becomes the subject of a novel, reality blurs with fiction, and she tries to reconcile the need to create with the desire for love and sex. Written in stark, spare prose, Prague is an introspective and intimate account of the making of a novel from life.

Michael and Wendy Mixner are a Brooklyn-based couple whose marriage is failing in the wake of a personal tragedy. Michael, a Wall Street trader, is meanwhile keeping a secret: He's lost the couple's life savings. And Wendy, a digital marketing strategist, has been hired onto a data-mining project of epic scale, whose mysterious creator has ambitions to reshape America's social and political landscapes. When Michael's best friend is murdered, the evidence leads back to Wendy's client, setting off a dangerous chain of events that will profoundly change the couple - and the country.

Set in the heart of global finance, Shadow Banking follows the lives of City hopefuls, as they try to wheel, deal and backstab their way to billions. Remember: lifes a trade. It is 1994. Al Denham turns up to his first day at City banking giant Trenchart Colville, he thinks hes there to start a job. But in fact, he's at the beginning of a journey that will change his life forever. Al is joined by a ragtag combination of the brash and the charming, the box-tickers and the risk-takers.

Dinner is served - with a little something on the side. A Brooklyn wife is too sharp to allow her husband’s wandering eye to get the best of her in this witty short story of a dinner party with a delicious comeuppance. Eleanor and Jonathan have joined a few of their most irritating best friends for an intimate catered gathering. Through all the intellectual chatter, Eleanor’s on watch. Jonathan has already confessed to wanting an open marriage, and tonight, Eleanor has decided to accommodate him. Just not quite the way he expects.

Known for its luxury and discrete service, the Hotel Louis XVI in Paris has attracted an international clientele of the rich and famous for many decades. Now, after extensive renovation and under new management, an esteemed group of loyal returning guests is set to descend upon the hotel, joined by a group of new faces who have managed to secure coveted reservations. Anxiously awaiting the guests is the new manager, Olivier Bateau, and his assistant, Yvonne Philippe. Both strive to continue the hotel's tradition for excellence.

Mr. Hoopdriver is a frustrated draper’s assistant in Putney, London. He is badly paid, over-worked, and he needs a holiday. He also owns a bicycle—though he is an awkward rider. When his annual ten days’ holiday comes around, Mr. Hoopdriver sets out on a bicycling tour of the “Southern Coast.” Wells wrote this at the height of the bicycling craze and before the automobile. The bicycle gave freedom to the working class, weakened the English class structure and gave a boost to female emancipation. In his story he explores these changes.