Showing results for "Ha!" in Coming of Age

Winner of the Booker Prize – Roddy Doyle’s witty, exuberant novel about a young boy trying to make sense of his changing world It is 1968. Patrick Clarke is ten. He loves Geronimo, the Three Stooges, and the smell of his hot water bottle. He can't stand his little brother Sinbad. His best...

A tea party at an Oxford college. Earnest undergraduates in floral dresses clink cups, discussing essay-crises, punting, summer balls. But to one student, they are grotesquely transformed: she is sitting among ominous armadillos with scaly shells, buzzing with black flies. Then, the laughter comes. As she is engulfed by mirthless hysterics, the Principal has no choice but to send her away.

Fred Twistleton is about to turn forty. Gathering with his friends to celebrate at a rented stately home, he finally hopes to get together with his college crush, the woman of his dreams, Heather. But Fred is also keen to publish his memoirs, and Heather realizes the revelations they contain could threaten her career as a high-flying foreign correspondent.

When the Chinese premier visits Harvard, international student Pei Lulu encounters a lone woman protesting who will drastically change her understanding of the People's Republic and her own place in the world. For the first time, Lulu learns of the 1989 protest movement and the government’s violent response. Determined to find out more, she seeks answers from her family, who share surprising stories of their involvement. A formative university course prompts Lulu to pursue a line of PHD research focused on the protest movement.

La paternidad, la infidelidad, la muerte, la incapacidad para comunicar los propios sentimientos, la irrupción súbita del amor, la fascinación por el otro, la arquitectura del deseo, el miedo a la felicidad, los temas centrales que hacen temblar las vidas de los protagonistas de estas excelentes nouvelles son, en realidad, los temas de cualquier vida, pero Barba tiene la maestría de resolverlos aquí con la extraña iluminación «intervenida» con la que se resuelven en la vida real.