Search results for ""author charles lambert""

A sublime psychological thriller from Polari Prize-shortlisted Charles Lambert. Fiona, sixteen, lives a life of glittering luxury, but her relationship with her mother is strained and difficult. When she discovers an old newspaper clipping of a woman and daughter, a little girl the mirror image of her own younger self, she sets off on a mission to find her true family. Her boyfriend Patrick, a charming fraudster, tracks down the doppelganger, and Fiona drops everything to find her. When Fiona arrives in Rome, she finds Maddy, living hand to mouth with her alcoholic mother. She wants nothing to do with the strange girl wearing her face, who seems to be stalking her every move. The two girls are caught in a push and pull; both fascinated and repulsed by one another, each coveting a life that seems beyond them. But they aren't the only people trying to control their fate, and the two girls will have to learn quickly that people aren't always as they seem, and that blood is thicker than water. Birthright is a dark, gripping literary thriller for fans of Consent by Annabel Lyon and The Push by Ashley Audrain.

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Described as 'beautifully written and crafted' by Daily Mail, The Children's Home is a beguiling, disarming novel about a mysterious group of children who unexpectedly visit a disfigured recluse in his country home. 'A beautiful and uncanny novel' Jenny Offill, author of Weather In a sprawling estate, willfully secluded, lives Morgan Fletcher, the disfigured heir to a fortune of mysterious origins. Morgan spends his days in quiet study, avoiding his reflection in mirrors and the lake at the end of his garden. One day, two children, Moira and David, appear. Morgan takes them in, giving them free reign of the mansion he shares with his housekeeper Engel. Then more children begin to show up. Dr. Crane, the town physician and Morgan's lone tether to the outside world, is as taken with the children as Morgan, and begins to spend more time in Morgan's library. But the children behave strangely. They show a prescient understanding of Morgan's past, and their bizarre discoveries in the mansion attics grow increasingly disturbing. Every day the children seem to disappear into the hidden rooms of the estate, and perhaps, into the hidden corners of Morgan's mind. The Children's Home is a genre-defying, utterly bewitching masterwork, an inversion of modern fairy tales like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Golden Compass, in which children visit faraway lands to accomplish elusive tasks. Lambert writes from the perspective of the visited, weaving elements of psychological suspense, Jamesian stream of consciousness, and neo-gothic horror, to reveal the inescapable effects of abandonment, isolation, and the grotesque - as well as the glimmers of goodness - buried deep within the soul.

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'There are four ways in but no way out ...'In 'Jack Squat', unemployed Gordon and his partner Omar see a money-making opportunity helping expats buy homes in southern Italy. But their scheme catches up with them after the first home they sell, curiously built with four entrances but no connecting doors inside, is revealed to have a dark history.In 'The Niche', mercilessly bullied schoolboy Billy Lender finds a hiding place in a nook in the school corridor and begins to hear whispers: the voice of a mysterious friend who will help him to plot a devastating revenge.

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A deliciously Gothic and atmospheric novel, one for fans of Susan Hill and Andrew Michael Hurley 'A writer who never ceases to surprise' Jenny Offill, author of Weather On a November evening in Victorian London, the moneyed but listless Edward Monteith stokes the fire at his local gentlemen's club, listening to stories of supernatural experiences and theories of life after death. His curiosity leads him to a seance, where he falls under the spell of a beautiful flower seller. But Victorian society does not look kindly on love between a gentleman of means and a Romani girl, and when he faces being cut off by his family, Edward makes a decision with horrifying consequences. Two years later Edward is married and anticipating the birth of his first child, in a beautiful house lined with orange blossom trees. But the wrongs of the past are not so easily forgotten, and the boundary between the living and the dead begins to thin... A deliciously chilling Gothic novel, The Bone Flower is a deeply human story about guilt, betrayal and the cruelty of social expectations. A dark, uncanny love story from the author of Polari prize-shortlisted Prodigal and The Children's Home, The Bone Flower will delight fans of Edward Carey and Essie Fox.

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Shortlisted for the Polari Prize Charles Lambert brings us an innovative family drama exploring the nature of trust, death, and the things we do in the name of love. 'A writer who never ceases to surprise' Jenny Offill, author of Weather Meet Jeremy, a hapless fifty-something who is scraping together a living in Paris writing soft-core pornography as 'Nathalie Cray'. When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is dying, he reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the English countryside. Confronted with a life he had always sought to escape, Jeremy begins an emotionally fraught journey into his family’s chequered past – back to the unexpected death of his mother in a provincial Greek hospital years earlier, and even further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch family fell apart. A bold take on the queer coming-of-age story, Prodigal deftly reconsiders everything we think we know about the nature of trust, death, and what we do to each other in the name of love.

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A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be "neo-baroque"--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a "sign of the times" in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the "new science" to television series, video games, and "zapping" with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with a refusal to distinguish between "Donald Duck and Dante." Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between "highbrow" and "lowbrow." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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