Search results for ""author john toomey""

Stuart Byrne is a young, beautiful, single businessman who finds his perfect life sabotaged by a growing awareness of his own superficiality. Nauseated by his own helplessness, struck by a creeping lethargy, Stuart tumbles through a tumultuous week of excess, promiscuity, deception, cowardice, and regret, and in the process manages to trade his slick perfection for a fantastic, and darkly hilarious, catastrophe. A deadpan comedy about the rather unfunny void in the center of many modern lives, "Sleepwalker" explores how our trying to fill that void can be just as destructive as ignoring it, and how the world will always let the beautiful get away with murder.

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When Albert Jackson, a middle-aged school teacher, catches a glimpse of the infinite universe and his own tiny insignificance he cannot shake himself free of regret for a life all but squandered. In a blind and demented attempt to salvage something from his life, he sets off, half-lucidly, on a libertine mission to reclaim life, to live it exclusively on his terms. But the wild and sinister crime he plots, so characterised by delusion, sets him on a path to irreversible destruction. Incarcerated after his crime, at the once prestigious Reil Institute, and in a bid to make spiritual and cosmic amends, Albert Jackson employs the guile of a local novelist, Charlie Vaughan, to tell his story. In the telling of Albert’s story, Charlie drives the narrative onward and backward, forcing Albert to confront the horrors of his crime. When the inadequacy of Albert’s initial confession forces Charlie to search further afield, he must cede control of the narrative to a range of other narrators too, among them key witnesses to the events leading up to Albert’s crime and a strange third-person account composed by Albert himself. Slipping is a darkly humorous novel about life and love, ambition, bitter disappointment and the cost of committing the unforgivable.

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When Vic meets Lali, they stumble into a dysfunctional ten-year relationship that leaves him in ruins and raising a child on his own. As Vic strives to protect their daughter from the cruel truths of his relationship with her mother, he finds himself hopelessly submerged in Lali's seemingly inexplicable contradictions, and their implications concerning his own inability to move on. "Huddleston Road" is an honest, often brutal examination of the loneliness that results from our inability to truly know the people who share our lives-and about our need to reach out and try nonetheless.

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In 1973 there were approximately 150 Fire Brigades protecting the United Kingdom – all with their own ideas on how to design and specify fire engines. However, local government reorganisation the following year was about to change that. This book is a unique photographic record by distinguished fire engine photographers John Toomey, who came especially from New York, and Andrew Henry. It documents the amazing diversity of British post-war fire engines. Captions and an expert commentary are provided by the highly respected Fire Brigade author and historian Ron Henderson.

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