Writers
Flaming Corsage
The sixth novel in Kennedy's Albany Cycle. In a Manhattan hotel room, a murder-suicide with four protagonists has
occurred. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, in the "Love Nest Killings of 1908," will not come fully
unraveled until the lives of the principle characters are fully explored.
From the Publisher
The Flaming Corsage opens in a Manhattan hotel room, two women and a man present. Into the room bursts a second
man, who transforms the scene into what the tabloids come to call "The Love Nest Killings of 1908." The mystery of that
carnage will not come fully unraveled until destiny enwraps the novel's principal and most memorable characters, Katrina
Taylor and Edward Daugherty. He is a first-generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright.
She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful and seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Theirs is a passionate
attachment from the first, simple and unrestrained on Edward's part, more indecisive for Katrina, who, remembering her
poet Baudelaire, regards love as apposite to death, "the divine elixir that gives us the heart to follow the endless night."
But when the great stalker strikes close to her family in the central event of the novel, a cataclysmic hotel fire, the marriage
changes into something else altogether. With virtuosic skill, Kennedy moves The Flaming Corsage back and forward in
time from 1884 to 1912, following the fates of Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs. These others range
from their socially opposed families to Katrina's lover, Francis Phelan; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa
Spencer; the rashly extroverted physician Giles Fitzroy and his wife, Felicity; and Edward's unnerving friend, the cynical
journalist Thomas Maginn.
Reef
Gunesekera's short story collection Monkfish Moon--a New York Times Notable Book of 1993--quickly established
him as a leading literary voice. Reef, his first novel, tells the powerful and moving story of a young Sri Lankan
houseboy who is so caught up in trying to please his master that he is oblivious to the larger world as it spirals out
of control. "An enchanting, endlessly funny and affecting novel."--San Francisco Chronicle.
From the Publisher
Reef is the elegant and moving story of Triton, a talented young chef so committed to pleasing his master's palate
that he is oblivious to the political unrest threatening his Sri Lankan paradise. It is a personal story that parallels the
larger movement of a country from a hopeful, young democracy to troubled island society. It is also a mature, poetic
novel which the British press has compared to the works of James Joyce, Graham Greene, V.S. Naipaul, and Anton
Chekhov. With his collection of short stories Monkfish Moon - a New York Times Notable Book of 1993 - Romesh
Gunesekera quickly established himself as a leading literary voice. Reef earned universal praise from European critics
and landed the young author on the short list for the 1994 Booker Prize, England's highest honor for fiction. Reef
explores the entwined lives of Mr. Salgado, an aristocratic marine biologist and student of sea movements and the
disappearing reef, and his houseboy, Triton, who learns to polish silver until it shines like molten sun; to mix a love
cake with ten eggs, creamed butter, and fresh cadju nuts; to marinade tiger prawns; and to steam parrot fish. Through
these characters and the forty years of political disintegration their country endures, Gunesekera tells the tragic,
sometimes comic, story of a lost paradise and a young man coming to terms with his destiny.
Once Were Warriors
Winner of the PEN Best First Book for Fiction Award and the basis for an internationally acclaimed feature film,
Once Were Warriors is the author's harrowing vision of New Zealand's indigenous people as told through the story of
one family. It conveys both the rich texture of Maori tradition and the wounds left by its absence. 2 cassettes.
From the Publisher
This hard-hitting novel is frank and uncompromising in its portrayal of Maori urban New Zealand society, a world of
frustration, resentment, and waste. Duff is fearless in his depiction of a part of his own society that he knows well. He
tells a raw, powerful story in which everyone is a victim until the strength and vision of one woman transcends
brutality and leads the way to a new alternative.
Moll Flanders
Moll Flanders is born in Newgate prison and abandoned six months later. Her drive to find a secure place in
society propels her through incest, adultery, bigamy, prostitution, and a resourceful career as a thief, before she is
returned to Newgate.
From the Publisher
Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in
search of property and power. Born in Newgate Prison to a picaresque mother, Moll propels herself through
marriages, periods of success and destitution, and a trip to the New World and back, only to return to the place of
her birth as a popular prostitute and brilliant thief. The story of Moll Flanders vividly illustrates Defoe's themes
of social mobility and predestination, sin, redemption and reward.
Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage
In a beautiful Appalachian town bordered by the Carolinas, Julie and Hank Harmon share their tumultuous first
year as a married couple. Morgan illuminates life in Gap Creek in fascinating detail as the young couple struggles
to deal with tragedy after tragedy.
From the Publisher
There is a most unusual woman living in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon works hard, "hard as a man" they say, so
hard that at times she's not sure she can stop. People depend on her. They need her to slaughter the hogs and
nurse the dying. She is just a teenager when her little brother dies in her arms. That same year she marries Hank
and moves down into the valley where fire and visions visit themselves on her and where con men and drunks
come calling. Julie and Hank discover that the modern world is complex, grinding ever on without pause or
concern for their hard work. To survive, they must find out whether love can keep chaos and madness at bay. In
this novel, Morgan returns to the vivid world of the Appalachian high country to follow Julie and Hank in their
new life on Gap Creek and their efforts to make sense of the world in the last years of the nineteenth century.
Scratching out a life for themselves, always at risk of losing it all, Julie and Hank don't know what to fear most -
the floods or the flesh-and-blood grifters who insinuate themselves into their new lives.