Search results for ""Author David Park""

'I loved this book' Daily Mail Strangers come together to run. Angela and Brendan are racing towards a wedding day that is increasingly tainted by doubts. Yana runs to free herself from the darkness of the past and to remember her missing brother. Cathy thinks about the secret she has been unable to share. Running takes Maurice past his daughter’s house, the place he is not allowed to enter. Over the nine weeks unexpected friendships are forged, challenges faced and by the time of their final run together all will grasp a new commitment to life itself.

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Having survived a brutal childhood in the heart of Belfast, Martin has built a life that he never imagined, and always fears he does not deserve. He has a devoted wife, a son and a daughter whose academic success is launching her out of her proud father's orbit. Returning home one night to find police cars waiting, he thinks his sins have finally caught up with him, but instead the news is wholly unexpected; a senseless and devastating tragedy. And in the face of the trauma, which tears his fragile family apart, Martin finds that the violence of his past has not gone but is merely dormant; its call must be answered.

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The Grand Contraption tells the story of humanity's attempts through 4,000 years of written history to make sense of the world in its cosmic totality, to understand its physical nature, and to know its real and imagined inhabitants. No other book has provided as coherent, compelling, and learned a narrative on this subject of subjects. David Park takes us on an incredible journey that illuminates the multitude of elaborate "contraptions" by which humans in the Western world have imagined the earth they inhabit--and what lies beyond. Intertwining history, religion, philosophy, literature, and the physical sciences, this eminently readable book is, ultimately, about the "grand contraption" we've constructed through the ages in an effort to understand and identify with the universe. According to Park, people long ago conceived of our world as a great rock slab inhabited by gods, devils, and people and crowned by stars. Thinkers imagined ether to fill the empty space, and in the comforting certainty of celestial movement they discerned numbers, and in numbers, order. Separate sections of the book tell the fascinating stories of measuring and mapping the Earth and Heavens, and later, the scientific exploration of the universe. The journey reveals many common threads stretching from ancient Mesopotamians and Greeks to peoples of today. For example, humans have tended to imagine Earth and Sky as living creatures. Not true, say science-savvy moderns. But truth isn't always the point. The point, says Park, is that Earth is indeed the fragile bubble we surmise, and we must treat it with the reverence it deserves.

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WINNER OF THE KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR ‘I loved this delicate, beautifully written novella about fathers and sons’ David Nicholls ‘One of Ireland's great novelists’ Roddy Doyle ‘Wrings the heart’ Bernard MacLaverty ‘A mighty book’ Frank McGuinness ‘Extraordinary, raw and moving a chronicle of pain and powerlessness as could be written’ Lisa McInerney AN IRISH TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR The world is shrouded in snow. With transport ground to a halt, Tom must venture out into a transformed and treacherous landscape to collect his son, sick and stranded in student lodgings. But on this solitary drive from Belfast to Sunderland, Tom will be drawn into another journey, one without map or guide, and is forced to chart pathways of family history haunted by memory and clouded in regret. Travelling in a Strange Land is a work of exquisite loss and transformative grace. It is a novel about fathers and sons, grief, memory, family and love; about the gulfs that lie between us and those we love, and the wrong turns that we take on our way to find them.

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From award-winning writer David Park, an absorbing account of the lives of the women most important to three poets: William Blake, Osip Mandlestam and an imagined contemporary Irish poet 'An outstanding novel, written in luminous accessible prose, thoroughly enjoyable and much deeper even than the sum of its excellent parts' Irish Times 'The Poets’ Wives is a marvellous triptych: lyrical, respectful of creativity but also sharply sceptical' Sunday Times __________________ Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet’s wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin’s terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband’s death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another’s creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands’ work, work that has been woven with love’s intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways. Deeply insightful and beautifully wrought, The Poets’ Wives is David Park at his best – a novelist whose work has the power to bring the hidden from the shadows, into a delicate and shimmering light.

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'Subtle, understated, not without a hint of menace and always courageous ... An important book' Irish Times 'Marvellously compelling ... Park takes that most difficult of subjects - recent history - and with graceful integrity explores the difficulties involved in coming to terms with the legacies of the past ... beautifully described in Park's crystalline prose' Daily Mail It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam. Alan, a university art teacher, goes on a pilgrimage to the city of his youth with troubled teenage son Jack; middle-aged couple Marion and Richard take a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday; and Karen, a single mother struggling to make ends meet, joins her daughter's hen party. As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before.

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'It is seldom that one can say a book is perfect, but this is as close as I've seen in a very long time' SUNDAY INDEPENDENT 'A bold and unsettling parable about guilt, atonement and redemption' IRISH TIMES Michael has travelled a long way from his boyhood under the endless skies of the Midwest. His retirement is peaceful, if solitary. But one day there is a visitation: a mysterious car on the seafront, and a package delivered. From its contents, Michael understands that he has been commissioned to undertake a final journey. As Michael makes his way deep into a distant desert – a strange and liminal landscape that lies between hell and redemption – he undertakes another journey, into long-suppressed memories: of Vietnam and the dying days of war, and to face a final accounting for what was done. ‘Another compact marvel … This is a meditative novel that, while investing heavily in a patient build-up of atmosphere, never forgets the need to put a foot on the gas’ DAILY MAIL ‘David Park’s novels are always elegantly written’ INDEPENDENT 'Unflinching, courageous, wise, alert to the thrill and sorrow of violence ... Adds to David Park's status as a superb novelist' FRANK MCGUINNESS

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An in-depth look at Whistler’s city streets and storefronts, addressing the phenomena of urbanization and gentrification, past and present James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) created hundreds of works that depicted urban contexts undergoing rapid transformation. This handsome volume sheds new light on his picturesque representations of London’s shifting urban landscape during the Victorian era. Despite Whistler’s aversion to overtly political themes, his artworks reveal a long-term engagement with social change. Properties for the newly rich replaced historic buildings and shops, forcing many into squalid conditions. The images featured here, primarily drawn from the permanent collections of the Colby College Museum of Art and the National Museum of Asian Art, bear witness to the uncertainties of modern metropolitan life that Whistler saw firsthand. However, his streetscapes also reflect the modern practice of “artwashing,” wherein the negative consequences of gentrification are hidden by aesthetic screens. This book asks the reader to consider the intention and function of these engaging images: to memorialize the new struggles of the urban poor or to romanticize poverty for a rising middle-class art market.

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The Volatility Smile The Black-Scholes-Merton option model was the greatest innovation of 20th century finance, and remains the most widely applied theory in all of finance. Despite this success, the model is fundamentally at odds with the observed behavior of option markets: a graph of implied volatilities against strike will typically display a curve or skew, which practitioners refer to as the smile, and which the model cannot explain. Option valuation is not a solved problem, and the past forty years have witnessed an abundance of new models that try to reconcile theory with markets. The Volatility Smile presents a unified treatment of the Black-Scholes-Merton model and the more advanced models that have replaced it. It is also a book about the principles of financial valuation and how to apply them. Celebrated author and quant Emanuel Derman and Michael B. Miller explain not just the mathematics but the ideas behind the models. By examining the foundations, the implementation, and the pros and cons of various models, and by carefully exploring their derivations and their assumptions, readers will learn not only how to handle the volatility smile but how to evaluate and build their own financial models. Topics covered include: The principles of valuation Static and dynamic replication The Black-Scholes-Merton model Hedging strategies Transaction costs The behavior of the volatility smile Implied distributions Local volatility models Stochastic volatility models Jump-diffusion models The first half of the book, Chapters 1 through 13, can serve as a standalone textbook for a course on option valuation and the Black-Scholes-Merton model, presenting the principles of financial modeling, several derivations of the model, and a detailed discussion of how it is used in practice. The second half focuses on the behavior of the volatility smile, and, in conjunction with the first half, can be used for as the basis for a more advanced course.

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First full-length survey of the Temple Church, from its foundation in the twelfth century to the Second World War. Founded as the main church of the Knights Templar in England, at their New Temple in London, the Temple Church is historically and architecturally one of the most important medieval buildings in England. Its round nave, modelled on the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, is extraordinarily ambitious, combining lavish Romanesque sculpture with some of the earliest Gothic architectural features in any English building of its period. It also holds one of the most famous series of medieval effigies in the country. Major developments in the post-medieval period include the reordering of the church in the 1680s by Sir Christopher Wren, and a substantial restoration programme in the early 1840s. Despite its extraordinary importance, however, it has until now attracted little scholarly or critical attention, a gap that is remedied by this volume. It considers the New Temple as a whole in the Middle Ages, and allaspects of the church itself from its foundation in the twelfth century to its war-time damage in the twentieth. Richly illustrated with numerous black and white and colour plates, it makes full use of the exceptional range and quality of the antiquarian material available for study, including drawings, photographs, and plaster casts. Contributors: Robin Griffith-Jones, Virginia Jansen, Philip Lankester, Helen Nicholson, David Park, Rosemary Sweet, William Whyte, Christopher Wilson. Robin Griffith-Jones is Master of the Temple at the Temple Church; David Park is a Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

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