Showing results by publisher "riverrun" in All Categories

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France, to escape the horrors of the new Germany he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, who he made famous, can help him. And thus, almost through no fault of his own, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark.

For centuries, the most beautiful, able and aristocratic women in England competed for positions at court. Some who came to serve were remarkable for their learning and exemplary virtue, but others were notable for promiscuity and lack of scruple, drawn to court by a lust for money and power. Several ladies-in-waiting became royal mistresses, showing few qualms about betraying the queen consorts they ostensibly served.

Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called vivacious, always a bit of dazzle to her. Could she not see there was death about him? Could he not see there was death about her?

Cath is a photographer hoping to go freelance, working in a record shop to pay the rent and eking out her time with her manager, Steve. He thinks her photography is detective work, drawing attention to things that would otherwise pass unseen, and maybe he's right. Starting work on her new project - photographing murder houses - she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just 18.

Nine-year-old Tooly is spirited away from Bangkok by a seductive group of outsiders who take her from city to city across the globe. At 20, she is wandering the streets of Manhattan with a scribbled-on map, scamming strangers for her shadowy protector, Venn. Now, aged 31, she runs a secondhand bookshop on the Welsh borders and has found peace with her strange upbringing - until she's called to return to New York to see her dying father. Warm, hilarious and fizzing with intelligence, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers is a masterpiece about the search for identity.

In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men: Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney; Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry; Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman and Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist.

Social worker Kit Goddard is convinced that Sandbeach Child Services have let an injured 17-year-old boy down, just like they'd done to her brother 10 years earlier. Since the referral came in, it had been passed between departments, her own manager Georgia and colleague Tim brushing it off as a low-risk, low-priority case. But Kit can't shake the feeling that something isn't quite right. Scanning the referral, she notices that the house 17-year-old Dylan Meredith lives in with his 'weird' mother had been described as decrepit.

It was February 2020 when Ed O'Loughlin heard that Charlotte, a woman he'd known, had died, young and before her time. He realised that he was being led to reappraise his life, his family and his career as a foreign correspondent and acclaimed novelist in a new colder light. He was suddenly faced with facts that he had been ignoring - that he was getting old; that he wasn't what he used to be; that his imagination, always over-active, had, at some point, reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. He saw he was mourning his former self, not Charlotte.

After years spent in the city, working with his business partner Randy on Bränd media, Ethan finds himself in the quiet, closed-off town of Starkfield. His wife Zenobia is perpetually distracted by the swirling #MeToo politics, the Kavanaugh hearings, and her duties to the feminist activism group she formed: All Them Witches. Ethan finds himself caught between their regular meetings at his home and the battle to get his livewire daughter Alex to sleep.

As a player, Thom Callaghan was defined by the winning goal he scored in an FA Cup final. The goal wasn't the blessing he imagined it would be. His whole career was defined by that brief moment of glory. With his playing days over, Callaghan, still a local hero, is tempted back to his old club as caretaker manager. His task: to rescue it from relegation. He's got the job solely on the recommendation of his former boss and mentor Frank Mallory, now desperately ill and responsible for the team's precipitous decline.

Sandbeach, South Wales. Two women have come forward to make historical sexual allegations against a pillar of the local community, Matthew Cooper. And child-safeguarding protocol demands that Social Services remove the accused from his home and his family while a formal assessment is carried out. The Cooper case lands on the desk of inexperienced Social Worker Kit Goddard. Although intrepid and intuitive, she is ill-prepared for such a high-profile case.

Jenny Tinkley lives to mother her two complicated sons and prop up her technology-obsessive husband. Hank, who has installed gadgets, cameras and voice-recognition devices in their smart house. He tells her it's all designed to help her, but she is convinced their home is judging her - reminding her to load the laundry, buy milk, do better - and she becomes paranoid that she's being spied upon by the white goods.

Evan's job is to help people die. Evan is a nurse, a suicide assistant. His job is legal - just. He's the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it. Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead. As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against the limits of the law - and his own morality. And with Viv increasingly unwell and his love life complicated, to say the least, Evan begins to wonder who might be there for him.

Gateshead, April 1866. The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane takes the forgotten case of a child murder in 1866 as a springboard to delve deeply into the pysche of the Victorians. What Jane Housham finds in this exploration of guilt, sexual deviance and madness is a diagnosis that is still ripe for the challenging and a sentence that provokes even our liberal modern judgment.

Dr. Adam Knox returns from serving with an NGO in the Central African Republic in disgrace. His attempt to protect patients from a brutal militia ended in disaster. He's a little rougher, a little wiser, and a lot more cynical. His new clinic tends to the vagrant, vulnerable and victimized of LA's streets. It earns from the villains willing to pay for discretion. His cynicism remains until the night a beaten Romanian woman abandons her son on his operating table. She seems to be on the run.

Ireland is about to be torn apart by the War of Independence. Hannah O'Donovan helps her father hide rebel soldiers in the attic, putting her family in great danger from the British soldiers who roam the countryside. An immediate connection between Hannah and O'Riada, the leader of this hidden band of rebels, will change her life and that of her family forever....

Boston, 1833 Aboard the USS Orbis as it embarks from Boston and surges south to round Cape Horn, Hiram Carver takes up his first position as ship's doctor. Callow and anxious among the seasoned sailors, he struggles in this brutal floating world until he meets William Borden. Borden. The Hero of the Providence. A legend among sailors, his presence hypnotises Carver, even before he hears the man's story. Years before, Borden saved several men from mutiny and led them in a dinghy across the Pacific to safety.

After a college party, two boys drive a girl home: drunk and passed out in the back seat. Rumours spread about what they did to her, but later they'll tell the police a different version of events. Alice will never remember what truly happened. Her fracture runs deep, hidden beneath cleverness and wry humour. Nick - a sensitive, misguided boy who stood by - will never forget. That's just the beginning of this extraordinary journey into memory, fear and self-portrayal.

9th November 1989, East Berlin, the day the Berlin Wall will fall: Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi agent, is now in the fading twilight of his career. Twenty five years earlier: a physicist, Johannes Held, had been sent by the East Germans to infiltrate a US military operation in the American desert. Held had unknowingly fathered a child there, a fact Zeiger was aware of, and when he returned and refused to divulge what he had learned despite being tortured, Zeiger strangely became a sort of friend. But he would still betray him, a treachery that haunts him to this day.

Meet Ned and Alice: internet entrepreneurs with a delightfully demagnetised moral compass. In Berlin, their combined talents have brought social media start-up The Thing Factory, to the verge of lucrative success. But Ned - a businessman with a history of shady dealings - is unhappy at his increasing lack of control in the company. As his anxieties become harder to ignore, Alice's ambitions are meanwhile tempting her to jettison her own principles for a turn at the wheel.