Catalog Search Results
1) Sweet tooth
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Description
Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.
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Regarded as one of the finest literary biographies ever published, this book reveals a man of outsized appetites and private vulnerabilities, and is the source of much of what we know about one of the towering figures of English literature. This edition collates and corrects the textual inaccuracies of previous versions, returning to the original manuscript in order to present a definitive edition of this landmark text.
3) Thomas Hardy
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A portrait of the enigmatic nineteenth-century novelist and poet discusses his humble origins, rise through the London literary scene, and efforts to challenge the sexual and religious conventions of his time.
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"Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart - so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?"--Publisher's description.
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"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
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"Inspired by the twenty-three "tales," Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multifaceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter; thwarted lover; artistic genius; formidable country woman. This dramatic narrative charts her transformation from a young girl with a love of animals and fairy tales into a bestselling author and canny businesswoman--so deeply unusual for the Victorian...
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"Margaret Cavendish, then Lucas, was born in 1623 to an aristocratic family. In 1644, as England descended into civil war, she joined the court of the formidable Queen Henrietta Maria at Oxford. With the rest of the court she went into self-imposed exile in France. Her family's wealth and lands were forfeited by Parliament. It was in France that she met her partner, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a marriage that made her the Duchess...
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"Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, 'She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern.' She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why--despite all the evidence to the...
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Charles Dickens' life was like that a hero from his novels. Born into a modest middle-class family, his father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced to take a factory job. His life experiences helped turn him into one of the greatest English novelists of the century, but also eventually destroyed him.
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"Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit...
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Series
Brimful Coffers mysteries volume 1
Description
Agatha Award–Winning Author: When a book critic dies in an English village, a mystery-writing sleuth smells a rat.
A number of mystery authors, including Lorinda Lucas, call the village of Brimful Coffers home. Occasionally, there is a violent death . . . for example, the demise of a hapless rat, done in by Lorinda's two kitties.
But when the victims are book critic Plantagenet Sutton and a visiting writer, Lorinda finds the case much more difficult...
13) Will
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Description
"Will Self is one of Britain's best-known contemporary writers, a public intellectual whose novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into over twenty languages. In Will, his first ever memoir, he turns his attention fully to his own self, and in particular his addictions as a young man. An addiction memoir like no other, Will echoes the best of Self's psychedelic fiction, and is one of the most eloquent depictions of the allure...
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'I have never before in my life kept a diary of my thoughts, and here at the start of my ninth decade, having for the moment nothing much else to write, I am having a go at it. Good luck to me.'
So begins this extraordinary book, a collection of diary pieces that Jan Morris wrote for the Financial Times over the course of 2017.
A former soldier and journalist, and one of the great chroniclers of the world for over half a century, she writes here...
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"What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own...
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A moving testament to one of the literary world's most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser. In this memoir, Fraser recounts the life she shared with the renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and an insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother...
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"Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in [this book], acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it. In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership....
18) J.K. Rowling
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""Relevant images match informative text in this introduction to J.K. Rowling. Intended for students in kindergarten through third grade""--
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'I don't believe in God, but I miss him.' Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard.
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Description
When Aurelie Harcourt's father dies in debtor's prison, he leaves her just two things: his wealthy family, whom she has never met, and his famous pen name, Nathaniel Droll. Her new family greets her with apathy and even resentment. Only the quiet houseguest, Silas Rotherham, welcomes her company. When Aurelie decides to complete her father's unfinished serial novel, writing the family into the story as unflattering characters, she must keep her identity...
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