Search results for ""Author Adam O'Riordan""

This startling debut from a young British poet traces the paths from past to present, the lost to the living, seeking familiarity in a world of “false trails and disappearing acts.” Here, relatives, friends, and other absences are coaxed into life and urgently pressed on the reader as they surface, in the flesh. At the heart of the collection lies the sonnet sequence “Home,” a slant look at the lives of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, intersected by more recent, sometimes unsettling, personal portraits. Clear-eyed and sensuous, these are poems linked by a strong sense of place and presence, of history captured in an irrevocable moment.

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Moving from remote, sun-scorched towns to the charged hum of Venice Beach, The Burning Ground is a collection of eight stories populated by men haunted by their past and by their dreams, set against the canvas of California, where beauty and bleakness go hand in hand. In “A Thunderstorm in Santa Monica,” a man’s unmoored lifestyle is reflected back at him after a long flight. In “Black Bear in the Snow,” a divorced advertising executive tries to rekindle a relationship with his son. And in the title story, “The Burning Ground,” a painter is haunted by memories of his former lover. The stories take familiar roles—the deadbeat dad, the drifting divorcé, the wayward man—and bring them new emotional depth, peeling back the layers to reveal interiors both unexpected and arresting in their complexity. Written with a poet’s lyricism and an outsider’s keen eye, Adam O’Riordan’s insightful work paints an intimate portrait of diverse male lives contending with the potential of the West Coast.

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'Super-assured ... Wholly convincing' WILLIAM BOYD 'Deeply satisfying' Guardian 'O’Riordan imbues his narrative with an acutely modern awareness of power and capitalism’ The Times __________________ Manchester, the summer of 1890. A city humming with industry and gleaming with affluence. But for Charles, cloistered in his middle-class parents' suburban villa on holiday from university, the city's vibrancy holds no charms. Bored and a little listless, he spends the summer in pursuit of his little sisters' governess, Hettie. Before the summer's end, both must face the consequences of their affair - consequences they will live with for the rest of their lives. Charles's sisters come of age as women of the new century - and experience a very different Manchester from their brother and guardian. In the smog and glitter of the city, both sisters will discover the very different things they seek, and the very different women they will become. But as a new era springs into being, a darker shadow stretches, threatening to engulf the whole world... A captivating portrait of a family in time, The Falling Thread is a hauntingly evocative debut novel from one of our most exciting literary talents.

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