Showing results by publisher "W. F. Howes Ltd" in World Literature

The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife—and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon—the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums—is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight.

"How ought one to live?" This is the question that obsesses London-based publisher Ayush, driving him to question every act of consumption. He embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him: his practical, economist husband; their twins; and even the authors he edits and publishes. One of those authors, a mysterious M. N. Opie, writes a story about a young academic involved in a car accident that causes her life to veer in an unexpected direction.

A Mouth Full of Salt uncovers a country on the brink of seismic change as its women decide for themselves which traditions are fit for purpose–and which prophecies it's time to rewrite.

Aspiring quantum physicist Sumi is newly married and has moved into her husband’s family home. Here she observes that the beguilingly tranquil middle-class town of Shantinagar is not very different from her beloved quantum world, with happenings in one house being cryptically entangled with things next door, objects mysteriously disappearing then reappearing again, and unexpected interactions revealing surprising truths.

Only weeks since her release from Borstal, Alice is a candidate for the position of junior nurse at Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments. With guidance from the working nurse's manual, and some tricks she picked up in prison, Alice brings support to the thousands of patients littering the hospital’s corridors and concrete courtyard. In the process, she attracts the attention of a lovesick patient, Teddy Bunt, apprentice to the nefarious ‘Gentleman Squad’ of the Karachi police.

John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland—Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted. Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff and is found, unconscious and badly injured, by Ivar who takes him home and tends to his wounds.

Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. Then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help. Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their carer. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.

Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a powerful account that captures a nation's longing for a rail line to reconnect North and South, a magical-realist novel that manages to reflect the lives of modern industrial workers, and a culmination of Hwang's career—a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

Ireland, 1000 AD. Gormflaith is unhappily married to Brian Boru, High King of Ireland, and although a queen she struggles with her limited position. As an immortal Fomorian with the secret gift of magic, Gormflaith has a burning desire: to find and destroy the hidden fortress of her sworn enemies, the Descendants, who seek to kill her kind at all costs. She begins to use her magical powers, and discovers she is more skilled than she ever realised... but can she control what she will become?

On the shores of this river, all the birds that fly, drink, perch on branches, and disturb siestas with the demonic squawking of the possessed—all those birds were once women. Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural. 

Rhyme and Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, through Byromania and the Victorian hearth, understanding why people simply enjoyed poetry. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

Shanghai, 2007: Fourteen-year-old Alva has always longed for more. Raised by her American expat mother, she's never known her Chinese father, and is certain a better life awaits them in America. But when her mother announces her engagement to their wealthy Chinese landlord, Lu Fang, Alva's hopes are dashed, and so she plots for the next best thing: the American School in Shanghai. Upon admission, though, Alva is surprised to discover an institution run by an exclusive community of expats and the ever-wilder thrills of a city where foreigners can ostensibly act as they please.

Tama is just a helpless chick when he is rescued by Marnie, and this is where his story might have ended. “If it keeps me awake,” says Marnie's husband Rob, a farmer, “I'll have to wring its neck.” But with Tama come new possibilities for the couple's future. Tama can speak, and his fame is growing. Outside, in the pines, his father warns him of the wickedness wrought by humans. Indoors, Marnie confides in him about her violent marriage. The more Tama sees, the more the animal and the human worlds—and all the precarity, darkness and hope within them—bleed into one another.

Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories, doesn't want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.

Paris, 1585: Giordano Bruno has come to Paris, a city on the edge of catastrophe. Alone and near destitute, Bruno turns to old friend and zealous preacher Paul Lefevre. But when the priest is murdered, Bruno is pulled into a dangerous world. If Bruno can't uncover the truth, not only is the future of the de Valois monarchy threatened - but his own life will be the forfeit.

Harith Athreya is taking a well-earned break at a boutique hotel in the Himalayan foothills. But his holiday is swiftly cut short when mysterious bloody handprints start appearing on the walls around the resort. When a woman then falls to her death, chaos and confusion reigns. The hotelier is convinced that the key to the case rests with four other young people who checked in at the same time as the victim, all pretending for some reason not to know each other.

DS George Cross has always wondered why his mother left him when he was a child. Now she is back in his life, he suddenly has answers. But this unexpected reunion is not anything he's used to dealing with. When a disturbing case lands on his desk, he is almost thankful for the return to normality. The body of a monk is found savagely beaten to death in a woodland near Bristol. Nothing is known about Brother Dominic's past, which makes investigating difficult. How can Cross unpick a crime when they don't know anything about the victim? And why would someone want to harm a monk?

981 AD. The Viking King of Dublin is dead. His young widow, Gormflaith, has ambitions for her son – and herself – but Ireland is a dangerous place and kings tend not to stay kings for long. Gormflaith also has a secret. She is one of the Fomorians, an immortal race who can do fire-magic. She has kept her powers hidden at all costs, for there are other immortals in this world – like the Tuatha DE Danann, a race of warriors who are sworn to kill Fomorians.

Lady Dona St Columb seems to revel in scandal: she is involved in every intrigue of the Restoration Court. But secretly, the shallowness of Court life disgusts her, and in her heart she longs for freedom and honest love. Retreating to Navron, her husband's Cornish estate, she seeks peace and solitude away from London. But Navron is being used as the base for a French pirate, an outlaw hunted all over Cornwall. Instead of feeling fear, Dona's thirst for adventure has never been more aroused; in Jean-Benoit Auéry she finds a sensitive man who would, like her, gamble his life for a moment's joy.

As the daughter of Korean bodega owners, Jia Song promised herself that she would have every luxury when she grew up. Now she’s made junior partner at her prestigious law firm, and it’s all finally within reach. So when her boss asks her to sit in on the hush-hush family implosion of a client, she accepts without hesitation–only to find out that it is one of the most famous Korean families in the world. The Parks and their mega successful Korean beauty brand are worth a billion dollars.