Search results for ""Author Helen Phillips""

A New York Times Notable Book Best book of the year in the New York Times, Bustle, Time Out, The Atlantic, Slate, Electric Literature'Funny, sad, scary and beautiful. I love it' Ursula K. Le Guin If the job market hadn't been so bleak during that long, humid summer, Josephine might have been discouraged from taking the administrative position in a windowless building in a remote part of town. As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings - the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls, her boss has terrible breath, and there are cockroaches in the bath of her sublet. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. Both chilling and poignant, this novel asks the biggest questions about marriage and fidelity, birth and death. Helen Phillips twists the world we know and shows it back to us full of meaning and wonder - luminous and new.

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Named Most Anticipated by Goodreads, LitHub, and Book Riot, this “tense dystopian thriller” (Time) captures an urgent and unflinching portrayal of a woman’s fight for her family’s security in a world shaped by global warming and rapid technological progress.In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband

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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2019 A New York Times 2019 Notable Book2019 BOOK OF THE YEAR: Oprah Magazine, Time, Vulture, and Entertainment Weekly 'The Need is a profound meditation on the nature of reality, a fearless examination of parenthood, and also somehow a thriller. This is an extraordinary and dazzlingly original work from one of our most gifted and interesting writers' Emily St. John MandelShe crouched in front of the mirror in the dark, clinging to them. The baby in her right arm, the child in her left. There were footsteps in the other room...Molly is exhausted, anxious, losing her grip on reality. Her husband is away and she is running between her children and her job, where things are unravelling. She’s a paleobotanist, working at a fossil quarry, and has recently unearthed artefacts that defy understanding; the coke bottle with the lettering that leans the wrong way, an alternate version of the Bible. Where do these things come from?At home, as dusk falls, she gets jumpy. Are those footsteps out in the hall? What was that noise? She holds her two small children close to her, and tries to pull herself together. But her worlds of work and home are about to collide. She discovers that the stranger in her sitting room knows everything about her life and, as their identity becomes chillingly clear, this intruder makes a demand of Molly that upends everything, forcing her to reckon with her most unspeakable fears. The Need is a gripping, unsettling and stunningly original story that probes deep truths about motherhood, and explores grief, loss and how we treat others. It's a compulsive, reality-warping novel that makes us rethink our world, and question how far we would go to protect the ones we love.'The atmosphere is as close and taut as a thriller, but this is, in fact, both a highly original examination of grief and an extraordinarily vivid evocation of motherhood -- the moments of terror and hilarity, the visceral burden of it, and the fleeting, but almost transcendent, joy' Daily Mail'A chilling novel from a blazing talent' Observer

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''This sleek ride of a novel further cements Phillips''s position as one of our most profound writers of speculative fiction.'' New York TimesIn a hot and gritty city populated by super-intelligent robots called ''Hums'', May seeks some reprieve from recent hardships and from her family''s addiction to their devices. She splurges on a weekend away at the Botanical Garden - a rare, green refuge in the heart of the city, where forests, streams and animals flourish. But when it becomes clear that the Garden is not the idyll she hoped it would be, and her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a Hum of uncertain motives in order to restore the life of her family.Gripping and unflinching, Hum is about our most cherished human relationships in a world compromised by climate change and dizzying technological revolution, a world with both dystopian and utopian possibilities.

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Offers research and critical interpretations about British outlaw traditions and the way they have been imagined and presented in both the Middle Ages and the centuries since. This volume focuses on the ways in which rogue-heroes have been used by literature, film, and other areas of popular culture and imagination.

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A totally brilliant, escapist and uplifting read that will break your heart and put it back together again, perfect for fans of Cathy Kelly, Jill Mansell and Debbie Macomber.I always thought I was going to be a girl who did something. I was going to run my own business and find fame and fortune! Fall in love…But here I am. Still waiting for it all to happen, sitting on the floor, surrounded by lilies and roses, trying to do my best friend’s wedding flowers because – in her words – ‘how hard can it be, Frankie?’. The answer is actually ‘very hard’ but it’s not the only thing that’s tough right now. My boyfriend won’t commit, I barely have a job, and once again I have the hangover from hell…What I don’t know is that life’s about to throw me a curveball. A new friend I will make with a beautiful, sad-eyed little boy who is so very tragically ill. I still don’t know about that heartbreak.Even so, in this moment, I know that it’s time for some changes. Maybe it’s time to make my dreams come true? To try to become a marathon-running, healthy-living, wildly-in-love florist-to-the-stars!Because I’m beginning to realise that you only get one chance at life. I don’t yet know how you change everything, all at once, but what I do know is it all starts with me…Previously published as Wildflowers by Debbie Howells.

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A lively and popular introductory textbook teaching French to absolute beginners working in a classroom setting. A diverse range of dialogues, video clips, and reading passages deliver new material which is carefully practised in a wide variety of imaginative exercises, both individually and in pair- and groupwork, and backed up by structured grammatical underpinning and exercises. Foundations Languages courses are tailor-made for undergraduates and other students on Institution-wide Languages Programmes (IWLPs), languages options and electives, ab initio and minor routes in languages, and open learning programmes at universities and in Adult Education. Foundations French 1 assumes no previous knowledge. Accompanying online resources for this title can be found at bloomsburyonlineresources.com/macmillan-foundations. These resources are designed to support teaching and learning when using this textbook and are available at no extra cost. Included are: accompanying audio and video, a substantial self-study section with practice material for homework and revision, and for extension purposes.

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New essays on Chaucer's engagement with religion and the religious controversies of the fourteenth century. How do critics, religious scholars and historians in the early twenty-first century view Chaucer's relationship to religion? And how can he be taught and studied in an increasingly secular and multi-cultural environment? The essays here, on [the Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, lyrics and dream poems, aim to provide an orientation on the study of the the religions, the religious traditions and the religious controversies of his era - and to offer new perspectives upon them. Using a variety of theoretical, critical and historical approaches, they deal with topics that include Chaucer in relation to lollardy, devotion to the saint and the Virgin Mary, Judaism andIslam, and the Bible; attitudes towards sex, marriage and love; ethics, both Christian and secular; ideas on death and the Judgement; Chaucer's handling of religious genres such as hagiography and miracles, as well as other literary traditions - romance, ballade, dream poetry, fablliaux and the middle ages' classical inheritance - which pose challenges to religious world views. These are complemented by discussion of a range of issues related to teachingChaucer in Britain and America today, drawn from practical experience. Contributors: Anthony Bale, Alcuin Blamires, Laurel Broughton, Helen Cooper, Graham D. Caie, Roger Dalrymple, Dee Dyas, D. Thomas Hanks Jr., Stephen Knight, Carl Phelpstead, Helen Phillips, David Raybin, Sherry Reames, Jill Rudd.

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