Bücher der Reihe P.S. (Paperback)

In the winter of 1897, midwife Elspeth Howell arrives at her isolated farmstead in upstate New York to discover an unthinkable crime. The only survivor is her twelve-year-old son, Caleb, who joins her in mourning the tragedy and planning its reprisal.Their long journey leads them to a roughhewn lake town, defined by the violence of both its landscape and its inhabitants. There Caleb is forced into a brutal adulthood as he slowly discovers truths about his family he never suspected, and Elspeth must confront the terrible urges and unceasing temptations that have haunted her for years.Throughout it all, the love between mother and son serves as the only shield against a merciless world.

Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prizeshort-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian LiteratureA fascinating and intricate novel-in-stories, this stunning debut explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at a train station in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before a fatal bomb blast. His son, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words.Elegantly weaving together these voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardWinner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody MedalFinalist for the National Jewish Book AwardA singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, ?didn't suffer in the exact way? he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has?as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a ?writer??High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him?Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American?but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

"These essays gather up Rome and hold it before us, bristling and dense and dreamlike, with every scene drenched in the sound of fountains, of leaping and falling water." -- The New Yorker"Perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." -- New York TimesBringing to life the legendary city's beauty and magic in all its many facets, Eleanor Clark's masterful collection of vignettes, Rome and a Villa, has transported readers for generations.In 1947 a young American woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But instead of a novel, Clark created a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. Wandering the streets of this legendary city, Eleanor fell under Rome's spell--its pace of life, the wry outlook of its men and women, its magnificent history and breathtaking contribution to world culture. Rome is life itself--a sensuous, hectic, chaotic, and utterly fascinating blend of the comic and the tragic. Clark highlights Roman art and architecture, including Hadrian's Villa--an enormous, unfinished palace--as a prism to view the city and its history, and offers a lovely portrait of the Cimitero acattolico--long known as the Protestant cemetery--where Keats, Shelley, and other foreign notables rest.

An indelible story of one woman's life, revealed in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain's leading literary lights--Tessa Hadley."Clever Girl is...what could be called a 'sensibility' novel--a story that doesn't overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn't ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power."--Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book ReviewClever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an Englishwoman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's involving and moving novel follows Stella from childhood, growing up with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit, into the murky waters of middle age. It is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama--violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley's observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another that elevate this tale into "a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary" (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a box of documents belonging to his glamorous, mysterious late aunt, Priscilla, he was completely unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. Piecing together fragments of one woman's remarkable and tragic life, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and a spellbinding slice of history.

Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Fred D'Aguiar has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry for Bill of Rights, his narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory. In this beautifully imagined work of literary fiction, he returns to the territory of Jim Jones's utopian commune, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a resonant story of love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an extraordinary gorilla.Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, are members of a utopian community ruled by a magnetic preacher. When Trina, plays too near to the cage holding the commune's gorilla, Adam, the ape attacks and kills the child. Or so everyone believes. That night, the preacher dramatically "revives" her--an act that transforms Trina into a symbol of its charismatic leader's God-like power. Desperate to save her daughter from the preacher's control, the outspoken Joyce attempts a daring escape, a run for freedom aided by another prisoner--the remarkable Adam.Told with a sweeping perspective in lush prose, shimmering with magic, and devastating in its clarity, Children of Paradise is a brilliant and evocative exploration of oppression--of both mind and body--and of the liberating power of storytelling.