Showing results for "The Ordinary" in Genre Fiction

Award-winning author William Kent Krueger has gained an immense fan base for his Cork O’Connor series. In Ordinary Grace, Krueger looks back to 1961 to tell the story of Frank Drum, a boy on the cusp of manhood. A typical 13-year-old with a strong, loving family, Frank is devastated when a tragedy forces him to face the unthinkable - and to take on a maturity beyond his years.

The energetic and bitingly satirical novel from author Edward Ashton, author of Mickey7! The End of Ordinary is a riveting near-future thriller that asks an important question: if we can’t get along when our differences are barely skin deep, what happens when they run all the way down to the...

This collection of Buk's grimmest diaries gives an insight into the noir and brutal Los Angeles that Bukowski observed and lived so well. He was a legend in his time: a madman, a recluse, a lover...tender, vicious...never the same. These are exceptional stories that came pounding out of his violent and depraved life - horrible and holy. You cannot listen to them and come away the same again.

“Jackson at her best: plumbing the extraordinary from the depths of mid-twentieth-century common. [Just an Ordinary Day] is a gift to a new generation.”—San Francisco Chronicle Acclaimed in her own time for her short story “The Lottery” and her novel The Haunting of Hill...

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death...

Haunted by a shadow from the past, a young farmer attempts suicide beneath a rotting burial elm, unearthing a dark ancestral history. But deep beneath the diseased generational roots lies a powerful secret—one that could save both the man and the land.

One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying...

From a New York Times bestselling author, the much-anticipated third novel in the Greycourt series. Cold and brooding, Julian Greycourt, the heir to the Windemere dukedom, has always known that his uncle the duke was responsible for his mother’s death. Now he’s determined to exact revenge...

Ordinary Wolves depicts a life different from what any of us has known: Inhuman cold, the taste of rancid salmon shared with shivering sled dogs, hunkering in a sod igloo while blizzards moan overhead. But this is the only world Cutuk Hawcley has ever known. Born and raised in the Arctic, he has learned to provide for himself by hunting, fishing, and trading. And yet, though he idolizes the indigenous hunters who have taught him how to survive, when he travels to the nearby Inupiaq village, he is jeered and pummeled by the native children for being white.

Farley stands out among his Iñupiat neighbors in the Alaska village he calls home, both white and enormous, like the hungry polar bears that wander its streets. Jovial and a little hapless, he works as an investigator for a North Slope oil company, passing the long Arctic winters drinking whiskey with the village’s preacher and playing in the weekly poker game hosted by its matriarch and mayor. When his young daughter visits from thousands of miles away in Portland—where she lives with her mother, who despises him—a shocking moment of violence leaves her dead and Farley injured.

Songs in Ordinary Time is set in the summer of 1960 - the last of quiet times and America's innocence. It centers on Marie Fermoyle, a strong but vulnerable woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for the dangerous con man Omar Duvall.

Christmas Eve, 2019. Ninety-four-year-old Molly lies in her hospital bed. A stroke and a fall may have broken her body - but her mind is alive with memories. London, 1940s. Molly is a bright young woman, determined to help the war effort and keep her head up despite it all. Life becomes brighter when she meets and falls in love with a man who makes her forget everything with one dance. But then war forces her to make an unforgettable sacrifice.

In this superb collection of short stories, Elizabeth Berg takes us into pivotal moments in the lives of women, when memories and events come together to create a sense of coherence, understanding, and change. In “Ordinary Life,” Mavis McPherson locks herself in the bathroom for a week, shutting out her husband and the realities of their life together — and, no, she isn’t contemplating a divorce. She just needs some time to think, to take stock of her life, and to arrive, finally, at a surprising conclusion.

Stewart Dubinsky knew his father had served in World War II. And he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horror of the Balingen concentration camp. But when he discovers, after his father's death...

In Ordinary Love, Smiley focuses on a woman's infidelity and the lasting, indelible effects it leaves on her children long after her departure. Good Will describes a father who realizes how his son has been affected by his decision to lead a counterculture life and move his family to a farm. As both stories unfold, Smiley gracefully raises the questions that confront all families with the characteristic style and insight that has marked all of her work.

Shelley Anderson is trying to provide fun for her two young children when she rents the first floor of Sea View House a year after a painful divorce. The kids haven't been adjusting well, and the house is perfect. Daniel Stone, the man who's renting the top floor of the house, is trying to find his balance after losing his wife. He definitely wants to be left alone. He's less than thrilled by the instant rapport between his beautiful golden retriever and her two active kids. And he's definitely shaken by the rapport that springs up between himself and Shelley.

What happens when the Pope and the Dalai Lama decide they need a secret vacation? Roland Merullo’s playful, eloquent, and life-affirming novel finds the world’s two holiest men teaming up for an unsanctioned road trip through the Italian countryside--where they rediscover the everyday...

Mistletoe, Maine, is buzzing and not just because Christmas is around the corner! Dante West, local cutie-turned-Hollywood hunk, is returning home to make his next movie. Everyone in town is excited . . . except librarian Lucy Marshall. When Dante took off for LA without warning—or even a...

In fifteenth-century Italy, Paolo Uccello recognizes the artistic talent of his young daughter, Antonia, and teaches her how to create a masterpiece. The girl composes a painting of her mother and inadvertently sparks an enduring mystery. In the present day, a copyist painter receives a commission from a wealthy Chinese businessman to duplicate a Paolo Uccello painting. Together, the painter and his teenage daughter visit China, and in doing so they begin their escape from a tragic family past.

On a chilly fall evening at the prestigious Performing Arts High School of Boston, best friends Tali Carrington and June Danforth go missing after auditioning for a play. They're last seen in grainy, out-of-focus surveillance footage that shows them walking away from the school. Two days later in a town south of Boston, Tali is found disoriented and traumatized by the ocean's edge, and June is pronounced dead at the scene.