Enna Petersen has never been good at making personal decisions, particularly when she has to choose between her passions. As a theater director, the stage is her world, the spotlight her vitamin D, the waft of greasepaint her oxygen. However, when her handsome American businessman boyfriend proposes and paints the picture of a luxurious life in Pennsylvania, she has to tear her heart in two and give up on her theatrical dreams. But as she navigates the visa gauntlet at the US embassy in England, she meets Will, a charismatic, erudite actor who encourages her to not give up on her dilapidated and much beloved theater. She is torn, tormented by the thought that her departure will certainly lead to Ashtead Theatre's demise, but she follows her heart, says goodbye to her homeland, and begins her new role as Cole's fiancée in America. However, homesickness soon strikes. Enna longs for the English countryside, her theater, and the passion that Will has inspired in her. After her American dreams fall apart, she is reunited with all three back in the UK, and with Will's help, she soon finds her theater more successful than she ever thought possible. She has everything she's ever wanted, including a gorgeous man in her bed to share it with, so why is it she can't stop thinking about Cole?
Enna Petersen has never been good at making personal decisions, particularly when she has to choose between her passions. As a theater director, the stage is her world, the spotlight her vitamin D, the waft of greasepaint her oxygen. However, when her handsome American businessman boyfriend proposes and paints the picture of a luxurious life in Pennsylvania, she has to tear her heart in two and give up on her theatrical dreams. But as she navigates the visa gauntlet at the US embassy in England, she meets Will, a charismatic, erudite actor who encourages her to not give up on her dilapidated and much beloved theater. She is torn, tormented by the thought that her departure will certainly lead to Ashtead Theatre's demise, but she follows her heart, says goodbye to her homeland, and begins her new role as Cole's fiancée in America. However, homesickness soon strikes. Enna longs for the English countryside, her theater, and the passion that Will has inspired in her. After her American dreams fall apart, she is reunited with all three back in the UK, and with Will's help, she soon finds her theater more successful than she ever thought possible. She has everything she's ever wanted, including a gorgeous man in her bed to share it with, so why is it she can't stop thinking about Cole?
After being rejected on the doorstep of her unfiancé, former theatre director Enna Petersen finds herself stranded in Pennsylvania in the dead of winter without a place to stay, a job, or even a warm jacket. She was supposed to be reconciled with Cole, not alone and searching for a new path. With no other options, Enna retreats to New York to stay with an old theatre friend in an apartment that is barely big enough to swing a microbe. Now a Brit out of water, Enna has to improvise and find a way to both stay in the States and to convince Cole that she is trustworthy and committed. In spite of the “shituation,” Enna quickly adapts to Brooklyn life and tries her best to rekindle Cole’s affections, but it’s just not that easy. After she shifts her focus from the bright spotlight of the stage to a small, candle-lit yoga studio she revels in the clarity it brings. Enna is forced to face the music with only one more attempt to reunite with Cole or accept what seems inevitable: a one-way ticket back to England and a broken heart.
Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and set during the heady days of New Zealand’s Gold Rush, The Luminaries is a magnificent novel of love, lust, murder, and greed, in which three unsolved crimes link the fates and fortunes of twelve men. Dickens meets Deadwood in this internationally celebrated phenomenon. In January 1866, young Walter Moody lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the west coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind a family scandal. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investigate what links three crimes that occurred on a single day: the town’s wealthiest man has vanished. An enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. A prostitute has supposedly tried to end her life. But nothing is quite as it seems. As the men share their stories, what emerges is an intricate network of alliances and betrayals, secrets and lies, that is as exquisitely patterned as the night sky. Part mystery, part fantastical love story, and intricately structured around the zodiac and the golden mean (each chapter is half the length of the preceding one), The Luminaries weaves together the changing fates and fortunes of an entire community, one where everyone has something to hide. Rich with character and event, it is a gripping page-turner – and a unique, atmospheric world – in which readers will gladly lose themselves. It confirms Eleanor Catton’s reputation as one of the most exciting and innovative novelists writing today.
Why did the Vikings sail to England? Were they indiscriminate raiders, motivated solely by bloodlust and plunder? One narrative, the stereotypical one, might have it so. But locked away in the buried history of the British Isles are other, far richer and more nuanced, stories; and these hidden tales paint a picture very different from the ferocious pillagers of popular repute. Eleanor Parker here unlocks secrets that point to more complex motivations within the marauding army that in the late ninth century voyaged to the shores of eastern England in its sleek, dragon-prowed longships. Exploring legends from forgotten medieval texts, and across the varied Anglo-Saxon regions, she depicts Vikings who came not just to raid but also to settle personal feuds, intervene in English politics and find a place to call home. Native tales reveal the links to famous Vikings like Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons; Cnut; and Havelok the Dane. Each myth shows how the legacy of the newcomers can still be traced in landscape, place-names and local history. This book uncovers the remarkable degree to which England is Viking to its core.
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