I first read this soon after it was published in 2011. I reread it this year because I wanted to see how well it would hold up after so many years. I wasn't disappointed. To begin with, it remains a moving tribute to the wonderfully talented Siobhan Dowd (author of Bog Child and Solace of the Road), who died far too soon of cancer. Ness paints the character of his protagonist, Conor, with admirably spare prose, and the story builds by accretion, so that the monster's tales become gradually intertwined with Conor's own path towards acceptance and mourning. Solidly YA in focus with much for this adult reader to appreciate.
The bestselling novel and major film about love, loss and hope from the twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness.
Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don't quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there's a visitor at his window. It's ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Patrick Ness takes the final idea of the late, award-winning writer Siobhan Dowd and weaves an extraordinary and heartbreaking…
Okay, so I'm a nonfiction hog and this book is a massive tome. But it's fascinating, because it's so deep and wide in scope--the earth's history in its entirety, no less. Who would dare to write such an all encompassing book? It's about all of the transformations that our planet has undergone in the entire period of its existence from the Big Bang to the present day. I really liked the rabbit holes this led me down and the connections that Frankopan leads readers to make--speleothem data, the histories of nomadic peoples, the creation of fertile land by the demise of plankton and sea-life in the Cretaceous, the interlinked disruptions of natural events and human reactions to them. And now here we are, transforming the planet once again--and what does it mean now to face the precariousness of our own future as a result?
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR: A revolutionary new history that reveals how climate change has dramatically shaped the development—and demise—of civilizations across time
*Detailing many years of extensive research, endnotes for this edition run to more than 200 pages. They are available online via a link contained in the book.*
Global warming is one of the greatest dangers mankind faces today. Even as temperatures increase, sea levels rise, and natural disasters escalate, our current environmental crisis feels difficult to predict and understand. But climate change and its effects on us are not new. In a bold narrative that…
I'm fascinated by Orwell, and how astonishingly relevant his work remains, from its relevance to our understanding of authoritarianism to the remarkable complexity of his short pieces like the essay, "Shooting an Elephant." Theroux evokes the world of Burma in Orwell's time as well as the journey of the naïve young man fresh from Eton, who ships out east in the service of the Raj. But the Orwell found most fascinating in this fictional exploration was the writer in the making, the one who reached for words in his mind and his journals to make sense of the mindboggling world he found himself in. empire was a brutal affair and the recruit ended up doing some pretty terrible things but Theroux leads us through his struggles with each action, and with himself.
Chosen by John Irving in the New York Times as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century
“Paul Theroux has exploited this biographical lacuna with great shrewdness and gusto… his fictional account of Blair’s life there [Burma] is a valid and entirely credible attempt to add flesh to the skeletal facts we have of this time. […]this novel is one of his finest, in a long and redoubtable oeuvre.” —New York Times Book Review
From the acclaimed author of The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers comes a riveting new novel exploring one of English literature’s most…
In this sequel to the bestselling Book Uncle and Me, bird lover Reeni is determined to save her city's bird count. Middle grade fun and friendship with an underlying theme that honors the natural world and the voices of children.
