A Northern Light in Provence

Author: Elizabeth Birkelund

Category: Literary

Regular price: $13.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: September 28, 2024

Deal ends: September 28, 2024

Description:

A woman leaves her coastal Greenland village to translate the works of a renowned Provençal poet and finds her life irrevocably changed, in this tender and romantic novel set in a French village.“A charming and beautifully written novel about self-discovery, the power of language, and yes, love!”—Sara Gruen, author of Water for ElephantsIlse Erlund is a translator who lives in a house on stilts along the west coast of Greenland. Isolated and restless in her world by the sea, she convinces her publisher to pay for a trip to the country she has never visited but whose language she speaks fluently: France. Her mission is to translate the verses of Geoffrey “Po” Labaye, a charismatic poet known as “the last living troubadour of Provence.”Upon arrival in the medieval hilltop village of Belle Rivière, Ilse falls under the spell of the Provençal way of life, captivated by the air, the sun, the vibrant spring colors, and the dulcet sounds of the dialect. Soon enough, Ilse is captivated by the poet, too, and she and Po develop a daily rhythm and warm camaraderie—which is disrupted by the arrival of the poet’s son, Frey. Though he has a fiancée back in Paris, Frey turns his attentions to Ilse, and suddenly she is forced to learn another language, one her translation skills have not prepared her to decode. Where—and with whom—does her future lie?With an eye and ear attuned to the sensibilities of French life, Elizabeth Birkelund has created a love story about a woman forced to choose between the security of her quiet northern home and the possibility of the life of her dreams.

Dragon’s Teeth

Author: Upton Sinclair

Category: Literary

Regular price: $12.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: September 27, 2024

Deal ends: September 27, 2024

Description:

Pulitzer Prize Winner: An American in Germany fights against the rising tide of Nazi terror in this monumental saga of twentieth-century world history. In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, Lanny Budd’s financial acumen and his marriage into great wealth enable him to continue the lifestyle he has always enjoyed.  But the devastation the collapse has wrought on ordinary citizens has only strengthened Lanny’s socialist ideals—much to the chagrin of his heiress wife, Irma, a confirmed capitalist.   In Germany to visit relatives, Lanny encounters a disturbing atmosphere of hatred and jingoism. His concern over the growing popularity of the Nazi Party escalates when he meets Adolf Hitler, the group’s fanatical leader, and the members of his inner circle. But Lanny’s gravest fear is the threat a national socialist government poses to the German Jewish family of Hansi, the musician husband of Lanny’s sister, Bess—a threat that will impel the international art dealer to risk his wealth, his future, even his life in a courageous attempt to rescue his loved ones from a terrible fate.   Winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Dragon’s Teeth brilliantly captures the nightmarish march toward the Second World War. An astonishing mix of history, adventure, and romance, the Lanny Budd Novels are a testament to the breathtaking scope of Upton Sinclair’s vision and his singular talents as a storyteller.

Time’s Arrow

Author: Martin Amis

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: September 27, 2024

Deal ends: September 27, 2024

Description:

In this icy, knife’s-edge story of a life that progresses backward through time, unfolding into one of the darkest episodes of the 20th century, Amis (“at his intriguing, heedful, and powerful best” —Time Out), finds a chillingly original approach to the Holocaust in fiction • From the acclaimed author of Zone of Interest"The narrative moves with irresistible momentum.... [Amis is] a daring, exacting writer willing to defy the odds in pursuit of his art." —Newsday Tod. T. Friendly is living his life in reverse. Doctor Friendly has just died, but he moves “out of blackest sleep” to find himself surrounded by doctors and on the deathbed of a man in whose body he is imprisoned. After weeks of improving in the hospital, he is sent home to his affable, melting-pot, primary-colors existence in suburban America.As Friendly breaks up with his lovers in a prelude to seducing them and mangles his patients before he sends them home, his life races backward toward the one appalling moment in modern history when such reversals make sense. From the fresh-cut lawns of his retirement to the hustle of New York, and then back to the boat which reverses his course to the war-torn Europe Friendly came from, Amis brings the steeliest nerve to the job of realizing the novel’s inevitable logic. Trapped in his body from grave to cradle, Friendly’s consciousness can only watch as he struggles to make sense of the good doctor’s most ambitious project yet—the final solution.

Go Tell It on the Mountain

Author: James Baldwin

Category: Literary

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: September 27, 2024

Deal ends: September 27, 2024

Description:

One of the most brilliant and provocative American writers of the twentieth century chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (

Chicago Sun-Times

).

Baldwin's classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin tells the story of the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, "

Mountain

is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

Comanche Moon

Author: Larry McMurtry

Category: Literary

Regular price: $9.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: September 27, 2024

Deal ends: September 27, 2024

Description:

“One of our finest storytellers and he’s at his best here” in the conclusion to the series that began with the Pulitzer Prize–winning

Lonesome Dove

(

People

).

Texas Rangers August McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, now in their middle years, are just beginning to deal with the enigmas of the adult heart—Gus with his great love, Clara Forsythe; and Call with Maggie Tilton, the young whore who loves him. Two proud but very different men, they enlist with a Ranger troop in pursuit of Buffalo Hump, the great Comanche war chief; Kicking Wolf, the celebrated Comanche horse thief; and a deadly Mexican bandit king with a penchant for torture.

Comanche Moon

joins the twenty-year time line between

Dead Man’s Walk

and

Lonesome Dove,

following beloved heroes Gus and Call and their comrades-in-arms—Deets, Jake Spoon, and Pea Eye Parker—in their bitter struggle to protect an advancing Western frontier against the defiant Comanches, courageously determined to defend their territory and their way of life.At once vividly imagined and unflinchingly realistic,

Comanche Moon

is a sweeping adventure full of tragedy, cruelty, courage, honor and betrayal—the culmination of Larry McMurtry’s peerless vision of the American West.“A sprawling, picaresque novel.” —

The New York Times Book Review

“The [frontier] myth is intact, if a tad tattered, by McMurtry’s darkly comedic touch and sly debunking of chivalric conventions.” —

The New York Daily News

“Almost impossible to put down . . . McMurtry knows how to deploy his most suspenseful episodes for maximum effect.” —

Boston Herald

“A monumental work that has few equals.” —

Library Journal

“A singular treat.” —

San Francisco Examier & Chronicle Book Review

The Man Who Loved Children

Author: Christina Stead

Category: Literary

Regular price: $11.99

Deal price: $2.99

Deal starts: September 27, 2024

Deal ends: September 27, 2024

Description:

“This crazy, gorgeous family novel” written at the end of the Great Depression “is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century” (Jonathan Franzen,

The New York Times

).

First published in 1940,

The Man Who Loved Children

was rediscovered in 1965 thanks to the poet Randall Jarrell’s eloquent introduction (included in this ebook edition), which compares Christina Stead to Leo Tolstoy. Today, it stands as a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life.   In a country crippled by the Great Depression, Sam and Henny Pollit have too much—too much contempt for one another, too many children, too much strain under endless obligation. Flush with ego and chilling charisma, Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the “ugly duckling” whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers.   Named one of the best novels of the twentieth century by

Newsweek,

Stead’s semiautobiographical work reads like a Depression-era

The Glass Castle

. In the

New York Times

, Jonathan Franzen wrote of this classic, “I carry it in my head the way I carry childhood memories; the scenes are of such precise horror and comedy that I feel I didn’t read the book so much as live it.”