“Glitteringly painful.”—Rachel Cusk “Powerful, and utterly compelling.”—Sarah Waters This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway. Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother—a novelist—attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story? Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.
The most controversial book in Britain' 'Urgent and vivid ... A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you.' Daily Telegraph 'An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love - and control' The Times One bleak, late winter's day, Julie Myerson finds herself in a graveyard, looking for traces of a young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly painted an exquisite album of watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realised, the barely-lived life cut short. And most of all, she is reminded of her own child. Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and was now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least, powerless to bring back the boy she had known. Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, this is the parallel story of a girl and a boy separated by centuries. The circumstances are very different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What happens when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in memory or in history? And how is a mother to cope when love - however absolute, however unconditional - is not enough to save her child?
Like Anita Shreve, Myerson writes in a literary and yet accessible manner. Her fifth book is a story of a troubled woman who falls for an outsider who has come to uncover the truth.
Trapped in a bad marriage, Susan learns that she's pregnant just as she begins to contemplate leaving her husband. Then she learns that her father has committed suicide. Into the midst of this emotional upheaval walks Lenny, a seductive painter, and she falls in love with him. In the tradition of Damage, this novel explores female sexuality and family loyalties.
It was 9:22, the moment when everything stopped. First there was the burning air, then came the darkness, the fire, and finally the frost. Now, in a frozen, wasted London, a woman, uncertain even of her own name, is fighting to stay alive. Along with a small group of fellow survivors, she takes refuge in an abandoned skyscraper in what was once the financial centre. But spectres stalk the empty offices and endless corridors, and soon visions of a forgotten world emerge, a world of broken love and betrayal, and horrific, shocking mercies, a world more traumatic even than the desolate present.
LIVING WITH TEENAGERS is a deliciously painful, unflinchingly honest look at what it's like to watch your children grow up into classic teenagers. They may shout at you, lie to you and hurt you... but they'll always be your flesh and blood, your grown-up babies. Whether you're battling with the rages and rudeness of your own tempestuous teenagers, gazing at your blank-canvas baby and thinking, 'That will never happen to us...', or the thought of having children is still only an idea, this is compulsive, car-crash reading. An extraordinary yet entirely everyday insight into family life, LIVING WITH TEENAGERS is by turns heartbreaking and humorous, heartwarming and enough to send a cold chill down your spine. Ever wondered what it's like to have your own teenage kids tell you that they love you, 'now f*** off'? Here's your chance to find out. Based on the anonymously penned Guardian column of the same name.
“Bloody brilliant.”—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train Internationally bestselling author Julie Myerson’s beautifully written, yet deeply chilling, novel of psychological suspense explores the tragedies—past and present—haunting a picturesque country cottage. Mary Coles and her husband, Graham, have just moved to a cottage on the edge of a small village. The house hasn’t been lived in for years, but they are drawn to its original features and surprisingly large garden, which stretches down into a beautiful apple orchard. It’s idyllic, remote, picturesque: exactly what they need to put the horror of the past behind them. One hundred and fifty years earlier, a huge oak tree was felled in front of the cottage during a raging storm. Beneath it lies a young man with a shock of red hair, presumed dead—surely no one could survive such an accident. But the red-haired man is alive, and after a brief convalescence is taken in by the family living in the cottage and put to work in the fields. The children all love him, but the eldest daughter, Eliza, has her reservations. There’s something about the red-haired man that sits ill with her. A presence. An evil. Back in the present, weeks after moving to the cottage and still drowning beneath the weight of insurmountable grief, Mary Coles starts to sense there’s something in the house. Children’s whispers, footsteps from above, half-caught glimpses of figures in the garden. A young man with a shock of red hair wandering through the orchard. Has Mary’s grief turned to madness? Or have the events that took place so long ago finally come back to haunt her…?
P.E. You either loved it or hated it, looked forward to it or dreaded it, but we've all been forced to do it. Sometimes a note could get you out of it, but the following week there you'd be again, writhing on a cold and dusty gym floor in your underwear. Skinny, timid, knock-kneed Julie Myerson was 'not a games person', according to her teachers. In this touching, funny and occasionally devastating exploration of her childhood, she now asks the question: why not?
Ever thought about all the people who lived in your house before you? Julie Myserson did, and set out to learn as much as she could about their often fascinating lives. house, an ordinary home, and ordinary people have lived in it for over a century. But start to explore what they did, who they were, what they believed in, what they desired and they soon become as remarkable, as complicated, as fascinating as anyone. Victorian terraced family house, of average size, in a typical Victorian suburb (Clapham) and she loves it. She wanted to find out how much those who preceded her loved living there, so she spent hours and hours in the archives at the Family Record Office, the Public Record Office at Kew, local council archives and libraries across the country. Like an archaeologist, she found herself blowing the dust off files that no-one had touched since the last sheet of paper in them was typed. detective hunt as, bit by bit, she started to piece together the story of her house, built in 1877, as told by its former occupants in their own words and deeds. And so she met the bigamist, the Tottenham Hotspur fanatic, the Royal Servent, the Jamaican family and all the rest of the eccentric and entertaining former occupents of 34 Lillieshall Road. The book uncovers a lost 130-year history of happiness and grief, change and prudence, poverty and affluence, social upheaval and technological advance. our front door lock, yet we rarely confront the shadows that inhabit our homes. But once you do -- and Julie Myerson shows you how -- you will never bear to part from their company again. This is your home's story too.
In England, a man and two women rescue a bum from a mugging. He turns out to be a healer and cures the back problem of one of the women. The novel explores their relationship and the complications that ensue. By the author of Sleepwalking.
On a humid, thundery afternoon, Laura Blundy murders the man who saved her life. He is her husband, but she has a lover: one of thousands of faceless men installing the sewers in the city of London in the mid-1800s. He is the only passion Laura has ever known, and so she pursues her obsessive dream of their life together to its dire extremes.
This is the true story of what it's like to be an achingly careful parent, with hopes and dreams for your precious progeny, and what happens when those same bundles of joy grow up into adolescents stuffed full of angst, attitude, Alcopops and amphetamines.
“Glitteringly painful.”—Rachel Cusk “Powerful, and utterly compelling.”—Sarah Waters This is definitely not a ghost story. But for a while after you’re gone, I see you everywhere. Every ragged young person sitting huddled on a pavement, every stretched-out body under cardboard in a shop doorway. Two parents stand by powerlessly as their only child seems intent on destroying herself. As the mother—a novelist—attempts to understand her daughter, she finds herself revisiting her own uneasy, unresolved relationship with her mother. Weaving between childhoods past and present, laced with temptation and betrayal, Nonfiction: A Novel is an unflinching account of a mother, daughter, wife, and author reckoning with the world around her. But can a writer ever be trusted with the truth of her own story? Clear-eyed, lacerating, and fearless, Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction: A Novel explores maternal love as an emotional foundation to both crave and fear. A hauntingly beautiful and deeply moving love letter from a mother to a daughter, this is a tale of damage and addiction, recovery and creativity, compassion and love.
The most controversial book in Britain' 'Urgent and vivid ... A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you.' Daily Telegraph 'An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown, whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love - and control' The Times One bleak, late winter's day, Julie Myerson finds herself in a graveyard, looking for traces of a young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly painted an exquisite album of watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential never realised, the barely-lived life cut short. And most of all, she is reminded of her own child. Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to this? After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for this bright, sweet, good-humoured boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and was now smoking it everyday - and nothing they could say or do, no help they could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie - whose emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better - had to accept that she was, for the moment at least, powerless to bring back the boy she had known. Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, this is the parallel story of a girl and a boy separated by centuries. The circumstances are very different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What happens when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in memory or in history? And how is a mother to cope when love - however absolute, however unconditional - is not enough to save her child?
Oscar-nominated star of Educating Rita and Billy Elliot's darkly funny debut novel. Cissie is a stand-up comedienne and national darling. Helena is the toast of Broadway. Maggie is an extremely beautiful but troubled actress - and she's cracking up fast, in fact she's 'out of her tree'. When Cissie takes Maggie to see Helena in New York, it leads to trouble straight away: Maggie disappears into the freezing February night, no one knows where. As the search for their friend continues, alarming divisions occur in the lifelong friendships of Cissie, Helena and her stoic husband Luke. And then Cissie disappears too. So, two of the closest of friends are lost separately somewhere in snowbound Manhattan.
In Cry of Murder on Broadway, Julie Miller shows how a woman's desperate attempt at murder came to momentarily embody the anger and anxiety felt by many people at a time of economic and social upheaval and expanding expectations for equal rights. On the evening of November 1, 1843, a young household servant named Amelia Norman attacked Henry Ballard, a prosperous merchant, on the steps of the new and luxurious Astor House Hotel. Agitated and distraught, Norman had followed Ballard down Broadway before confronting him at the door to the hotel. Taking out a folding knife, she stabbed him, just missing his heart. Ballard survived the attack, and the trial that followed created a sensation. Newspapers in New York and beyond followed the case eagerly, and crowds filled the courtroom every day. The prominent author and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child championed Norman and later included her story in her fiction and her writing on women's rights. The would-be murderer also attracted the support of politicians, journalists, and legal and moral reformers who saw her story as a vehicle to change the law as it related to "seduction" and to advocate for the rights of workers. Cry of Murder on Broadway describes how New Yorkers, besotted with the drama of the courtroom and the lurid stories of the penny press, followed the trial for entertainment. Throughout all this, Norman gained the sympathy of New Yorkers, in particular the jury, which acquitted her in less than ten minutes. Miller deftly weaves together Norman's story to show how, in one violent moment, she expressed all the anger that the women of the emerging movement for women's rights would soon express in words.
Pranklopedia is the young practical joker’s secret weapon, a boisterous collection of over 70 guaranteed-to-amuse (or annoy) pranks to be pulled on friends, siblings, and parents. Discover the Homework Hoax, the Squirting Blister, the Movie Popcorn That Grabs You Back. Pull classic pranks on your siblings, like short-sheeting the bed. Freak out your friends with food pranks: a self-peeling banana, “misfortune” cookies, or ice cream that will make them scream (here’s a hint—it involves instant mashed potatoes). And there are perfect pranks to pull on your parents, including a scheme to “freeze” the family computer. The book includes recipes for fake bird poop, fake dog poop, fake vomit, and fake snot (regular, nosebleed, and wormy varieties). Plus you’ll find 40 pages of cutout pranks: fake labels (mmm…Cream of Sparrow Soup!), a “winning” lottery ticket, bogus bathroom signs, and letters from school that will make your parents cringe. A complete prankster’s guide, Pranklopedia also provides a four-part lesson on how to pull the perfect prank and tells you what to do when pranks go bad: 1. Disappear for a while . . .
Introduction: living, not merely surviving -- The communication landscape -- Display and disguise -- Crime and carelessness -- Love and deceit -- Sex and money -- Truth and willful blindness -- Conclusion: mobile phones and the demands of intimacy
After fourteen years as the perfect suburban housewife, soccer mom, and political wife, Kate Connor secretly returns to her old profession as a demon hunter, fending off demon attacks, trying to keep an eye on a mysterious new high school teacher who looks strangely familiar, and dealing with her teenage daughter's infatuation with a surfer dude. Reprint.
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