Showing results for "Libby" in Literary Fiction

The Man on the Mountaintop tells the story of Holy Man Joe, an ageing and unassuming man who lives in a hermitage on top of a mountain. During the summer months, thousands of hopefuls line the path leading to his door, seeking his wisdom. From bombastic, wealthy nobles intent on cheating their way to the top to drunkards who gradually build the physical and mental strength they need to quit their addiction, The Man on the Mountaintop is a rousing tale full of humour, wit and life lessons.

In 1933 in the Shenandoah Valley, there isn't a place for Lum (short for Columbia), a 33-year-old intersex woman. She travels by schedule from one branch of the family to another, assisting with cooking, childcare, and housework. Always an outsider, even in her own family, Lum secretly collects postcards of people like the Dog-faced Girl, imagining their stories, and nurtures her lifelong friendship with Smiley, an African-American man who sells furniture, odds and ends, and a little moonshine.

Mansfield Park is the third published and perhaps most subtle of Jane Austen's novels. It tells the story of Fanny Price, who, at the age of 10, is sent from her impoverished household to live with her wealthy aunt and uncle and be raised alongside her cousins. Fanny grows up as a misfit, not truly a member of the Bertram family, but too genteel to feel comfortable with her parents.

Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices - after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men.

In this deeply felt, compulsive and edgy work, Sarah Meehan Sirk shines a distinctive light on love and death in their many incarnations. In "The Dead Husband Project", an artist who has planned to make an installation out of her terminally ill husband’s dead body has to recalibrate when his diagnosis changes. In "The Date", an online dating match takes an unusual turn when the man who shows up to the restaurant has no face. In "Ozk", a young girl longs to connect with her socially isolated mother, a professor of mathematics who makes a radical discovery.

In January 1817, Jane Austen began work on Sanditon, but died a few months later, leaving it unfinished. The surviving fragment begins the story of Charlotte Heywood, a sheltered young woman who is invited to the up-and-coming resort town of Sanditon. While there, she meets a host of memorable characters, drawn with Austen's classic wit and insight, including a fortune-hunting fop, a domineering dowager, and a hoard of hypochondriacs.