Showing results for "The Assistants" in Literary Fiction

Newly divorced Jo is delighted to move into her best friend’s spare room almost rent-free. The high-tech luxury Camden flat is managed by a meticulous home assistant, called Electra, that takes care of the heating, the lights - and sometimes Jo even turns to her for company. Until, late one night, Electra says one sentence that rips Jo’s fragile world in two: ‘I know what you did’. And Jo is horrified. Because in her past she did do something terrible. Something unforgivable.

Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First two robbers appear and hold him up; then things take a turn for the better when broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time he begins to steal from the store.

From the bestselling author of The Dutch House, a secretive magician’s death becomes the catalyst for his partner’s journey of self-discovery in this “enchanting” book (San Francisco Chronicle) “that is something of a magic trick in itself.” (Newsweek) When Parsifal, a handsome and...

"The dead can't hurt you. Only the living can." Effie Jones, a former slave who escaped to the Union side as a child, knows the truth of her words. Taken in by an army surgeon and his wife during the War, she learned to read and write, to tolerate the sight of blood and broken bodies - and to forget what is too painful to bear. Now a young freedwoman, she has returned south to New Orleans and earns her living as an embalmer, her steady hand and skillful incisions compensating for her white employer's shortcomings. 

Nathan Porter, a young war veteran haunted by an atrocity he witnessed, ends up in an animation studio in southern California, where his dismal romantic history is upended by Violet Delmar, an older voice-over artist known nationally as "The Voice." Violet's siren song wafts in and out of Nathan's entire life, twisting through his misguided affairs and marriage, until he finds himself awakened, thanks to Violet, about no less than all of love and art.