It is a beautiful story about a widower trying to look after his daughter, not entirely aware of the irony that she is really taking care of him. The plot tension is generated and propelled by the appearance of an abandoned infant, found after a carnival. Well, where else would we expect an infant to show up? Dr. Troy and his daughter Ronnie are lovable characters, beset by their need to care for one another. The doctor wants to find a husband for Ronnie and manages to find the most unlikely candidate. The question then becomes whether Ronnie will brain her father with a skillet. And then there is what to do with the baby?
As in all his books, Williams is a lovely stylist, frequently extremely funny though not quite so laugh-out-loud funny here as he was in THIS IS HAPPINESS, a novel in which the Troys are characters.
**Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award** **Longlisted for the HWA Gold Crown Award** **The instant Irish Times Top Ten bestseller**
A heartbreaking and life-affirming novel about small towns and second chances - from the international bestselling author of Four Letters of Love
'I am utterly obsessed with Niall Williams' Ann Patchett 'A rich and gorgeous book' The Times, The 10 best historical fiction books of 2024 'Irresistible ... A powerful pleasure' Karen Joy Fowler 'Deeply compassionate' Guardian 'Slow, rich, immaculate ... One of the most affecting books I've ever read' The Times 'A beautifully written…
A great, epic wonder of a book, one of my favorite novels ever. I just read it again after many years to see how it held up, and it is still as I remembered it. It is both a fictional biography of Sir Walter Ralegh and of the Age of Elizabeth. Ralegh himself is a prodigious figure, an adventurer, scholar, privateer, explorer, and courtier, and possibly beloved of Queen Elizabeth I.
The plot, insofar as it is relevant, has Ralegh in the Tower waiting to be executed by the paranoid and jealous King James I. But the story is really Ralegh's recollections of his life. In one particular scene, he tells his son Wat all the changes he has seen in his long life, and it is as fine a summation of the age of Elizabeth as one is ever going to see.
Just a great book, and wonderfully written by George Garrett.
A meticulous re-creation of Elizabethan England that forms a trilogy with The Succession and Entered from the Sun. Here the author delves into the story of Sir Walter Ralegh's fall from favor for alleged conspiracy against James I. Garrett transports the reader to a world of cunning, intrigue, and colorful abundance.
A wonderful character-driven novel covering many years in the intertwined lives of a half-dozen characters, set in Italy and the U.S., involving a small-time movie actress, a would-be hotel owner in Italy, their quick meeting in 1962 and another decades later. It is therefore a love story but an oddly interrupted one, filled with interesting and frequently hilarious characters (the town's local Communist has a rifle but his wife has used it to stake up her garden plants). It even includes an amusing cameo by Richard Burton, fleeing from his duties while filming CLEOPRATRA and unwittingly putting in motion the events of the story in several lives. He thinks CLEOPATRA is a weird movie, by the way.
The #1 New York Times bestseller—Jess Walter’s “absolute masterpiece” (Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author): the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 and resurfaces fifty years later in contemporary Hollywood.
The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet. Hailed by critics and loved by readers of literary and historical fiction, Beautiful Ruins is the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962...and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.
It is the summer of 1946, and the mysterious Gatsby-like millionaire Cary Morrison is found dead in his Chicago mansion, apparently the victim of a burglary gone hopelessly wrong. Soon after, the burglars themselves are found dead, one by one. Ray Foley, just returned from wartime service in Europe, finds himself involved, for one of the dead burglars was Ray's boyhood friend Eddy Walsh, and Ray decides to search for the killer. At the heart of the mystery is a missing statue, a hollow Greek statuette said to contain Morrison's records of all his illegal financial transactions with mobsters and public officials. Ray's investigation attracts the wrong kind of attention, as a number of interested-and dangerous-people assume he has the statue or knows of its whereabouts.
Ray's search brings him in contact with street toughs, bookies, gangsters, a sophisticated and streetwise private investigator named Max Silver, a tough young nurse named Hannah Marcel, a crusty street cop named Carmody, and the eccentric Sal Greene, a major figure in the local mob, and the killer, in the hot Chicago summer.
