Search results for ""author t. c. boyle""

The joyfully freewheeling, funny and profound new novel from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver) Welcome to America. On the east coast, homes are being swallowed by the ocean; on the west coast, California is engulfed with wildfire. But for one family, the impending environmental disaster is the least of their worries. Party girl Cat just impulse-purchased a snake; her pious brother Cooper is wrestling with a tic bite; and their mom Ottilie has resorted to cooking with crickets. Everyone is drinking too much – and the bugs seems to be disappearing. It seems as if it's anything but blue skies ahead... A delightfully dark comedy of manners about family life at the end of the world, Blue Skies is a masterful new adventure from one of the America’s great comic writers. _______________ 'Always enjoyable, virtually incapable of dullness or slack sentences … His stories reveal truths about modern life while still feeling beautifully invented' - NEW YORK TIMES 'A virtuoso craftsman' - ANNIE PROULX 'Boyle is a writer who chooses a large canvas and fills it to the edges' - BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Read more less

A joyful, freewheeling, funny and profound new collection from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver) For one woman, a cross-country train ride becomes a parallel journey into the dark psyche of American manhood. An old man and his neighbour enter strike up a friendship that might a more sinister battle of wits than he first thinks. A man, waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine's Day, is plagued by a stranger who claims to be clairvoyant. In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

Read more less

'Howlingly marvellous ... Gripping and inescapably bittersweet' Boston Globe 'Hits the mark ... Real and relevant' BookTrib ____________________ Guy Schermerhorn, brilliant young professor of psychology and disciple of the pioneering Dr Moncrieff, is making a name for himself on the talk show circuit with an unusual protégé in tow: a chimp by the name of Sam. Sam lives in Guy’s apartment, wears diapers and neckties, devours pizza and Macdonalds – and, through Guy’s careful training, can communicate through sign language. But living with Sam is wreaking havoc on Guy’s personal life, and when shy, meek undergraduate Aimee Villard volunteers to take on babysitting for him, he can’t believe his luck. Aimee and Sam have an immediate rapport, and before Guy knows it she’s moved in, proudly devoting herself to Sam’s care and Guy’s project. Aimee has never known purpose and happiness like this; but when Guy’s funding is imperilled, and Sam is taken away by the sinister Moncrief, her world falls apart. Aimee discovers just how far she’ll go to, and just what she’ll risk, to be united with the chimp she’s come to love so much. _____________ 'Boyle tells this story with clear-eyed, flinty intelligence' Spectrum, Sydney Morning Herald 'An engaging tale' The Blurb, Australia

Read more less

_______________________ 'A comedy with teeth ... razor sharp and darkly funny' (TIMES) 'Boyle's prose is so good and his imagination so fertile that after a while you just sit back and are swept along' (TELEGRAPH) 'Surreal, daring and compassionate. Easily one of the best books of the year' (MAIL) 'Superb ... if Boyle was from this side of the pond, this is the book they'd all have to beat for the Booker Prize' (SUNDAY TIMES) It's 2025, and 75-year-old environmentalist and retired eco-terrorist Ty Tierwater is eking out a bleak living managing a pop star's private zoo. It is the last one in southern California, and vital for the cloning of its captive species. Once, Ty was so serious about environmental causes that as a radical activist committed to Earth Forever! he endangered the lives of both his daughter, Sierra, and his wife, Andrea. Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world cursed by storm and drought, Andrea re-enters his life. Frightening, funny, surreal and gripping, T.C. Boyle's story is both a modern morality tale, and a provocative vision of the future.

Read more less

One family’s adventures in LSD: the brilliantly strange new novel from the mind of ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver) Chosen as a Book of the Year 2019 by the Herald It is Harvard in the early 1960s. Just off campus, Dr Timothy Leary plays host for his PhD students, laying on a spread of cocktails, pizza and LSD. Among the guests is Fitzhugh Loney, a psychology student, and his librarian wife Joanie. Married young, and both diligently and unglamorously toiling to support their son, they are not the sort of people one would expect to be seduced by the nascent drug culture. But their nights on LSD prove so extraordinary – so revelatory, so earth-shattering, so downright seductive – that Fitzhugh and Joanie are soon captive to the whims of the charismatic and subversive Dr Tim. Follow Fitzhugh and Joanie on their quest for transcendence, as sultry Mexican nights at Hotel Catalina give way to a ramshackle mansion in upstate New York, where thirty devotees – students, wives and children – play out the final act of a terrible, beautiful experiment. Join us, won’t you? It’s going to be one hell of a trip.

Read more less

Winner of the Prix Médicis Étranger; 'examines America's guerilla war between the haves and have-notes with a zing unequalled since The Bonfire of the Vanities'(Observer) When Delaney Mossbacher knocks down a Mexican pedestrian, he neither reports the accident nor takes his victim to hospital. Instead the man accepts $20 and limps back to poverty and his pregnant 17-year-old wife, leaving Delaney to return to his privileged life in California. But these two men are fated against each other, as Delaney attempts to clear the land of the illegal immigrants who he thinks are turning his state park into a ghetto, and a boiling pot of racism and prejudice threatens to spill over.

Read more less

BY THE WINNER OF THE JONATHAN SWIFT PRIZE 2017 A dynamic new collection from one of our most original storytellers: satirical, surreal and very much of the moment. In these stories, T. C. Boyle focuses his unerring eye on humanity’s relationship with nature, and the unintended consequences of our efforts to control it. The prize-winning ‘Are We Not Men?’ reflects on the impact of new gene-editing technologies while ‘The Relive Box’ parodies our obsession with electronic games. In ‘She’s the Bomb’, a young woman waits on her graduation day, heart in mouth, for an explosive event. A burrito-seller has a killer business idea in ‘The Five-Pound Burrito’, but learns that success comes at a price. An Italian couple moves south for a fresh start in ‘The Argentine Ant’, but finds that paradise holds a nasty sting. And in the chilling ‘The Designee’, a lonely widower can’t believe his luck when he receives a mysterious letter from England. In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

Read more less

BY THE WINNER OF THE JONATHAN SWIFT PRIZE 2017 LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2018 Eight people take part in an ecological experiment in 1990s Arizona. Inspired by real events, The Terranauts places human behaviour under the microscope to spellbinding effect Linda is desperate to be one of the lucky eight chosen to take part in the world’s most ambitious ecological experiment. She knows that she can survive for two years under the glass dome of Ecosphere II, set in the Arizona desert. Competition is fierce between the hopefuls, among them smooth-talking PR man Ramsay, and Dawn, a naïve beauty. Inside the humid microcosm, the terranauts’ labours over crops and livestock, their battles with creepy crawlies, their hostilities and sexual dalliances are all observed by tourists who come to gawp, Mission Control’s cameras and the watchful eye of the media. As they struggle to control nature, and hunger sets in, the snake in this Eden starts to look unmistakably human…

Read more less

'One of the funniest, most subtle novels we've had about the hippy era's slow fade to black ... this may be his most affecting emotionally complex novel' (New York Times Book Review) Star has travelled to Drop City - forty-seven sun-washed acres of commune in California - to be free from her home, from society's constraints, and to feel part of something important. But she starts to suspect that free love was invented by some spotty dude who couldn't get laid any other way, and that chilled out means lazy. And as for peace-living, there seems to be an ugly undercurrent of violence. Then, when rape charges are brought and the police threaten to close down Drop City, the hippies decamp to the wilds of Alaska where they intend to live off the land. But instead the community runs into trouble, unexpected friendships are made and dangerous enemies are born.

Read more less

A joyful, freewheeling, funny and profound new collection from ‘one of the most inventive, adventurous and accomplished fiction writers in the US today’ (Lionel Shriver) For one woman, a cross-country train ride becomes a parallel journey into the dark psyche of American manhood. An old man and his neighbour enter strike up a friendship that might a more sinister battle of wits than he first thinks. A man, waiting for his wife in a bar on Valentine's Day, is plagued by a stranger who claims to be clairvoyant. In electric prose T. C. Boyle explores myriad facets of society: greed and excess, parenthood and responsibility, the digital world and the way we understand our mortality. Roaming unrestrainedly through the present and near future, he inhabits his characters’ minds with a ventriloquist’s flair, skewering human motivations and revealing us to ourselves with empathy and wry humour.

Read more less

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like “jewelry, living jewelry” to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young “Burmie” she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival. “Brilliantly imaginative . . . in a terrifying way” (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle’s finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family—including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd—are struggling to adapt to the “new normal,” in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope. But there’s more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet’s future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which “the only truism seems to be that things always get worse.” An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle’s Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and “inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything.”

Read more less

There's more than one to way to take a life in this masterful thriller from one of the greatest voices in American contemporary fiction Dana sits in a courtroom with her legs shackled as a long list of charges is read out, many of them dangerous. But the panic that grips her is not because she has been caught. She knows there has been a terrible mistake - she didn't commit any of these crimes. As Dana and her lover Bridger set out to clear her name and find the person who is living a blameless life of criminal excess at her expense, they begin to test the life they have built together to its limits.

Read more less

A dazzlingly written and wickedly sexy read from one of the giants of American contemporary fictions; 'Boyle just gets better and better' (Daily Mail) In 1939, on the campus of Indiana University, a revolution has begun. The stir is caused by Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist who is determined to take sex out of the bedroom. John Milk, a freshman, is enthralled by the professor's daring lectures and over the next two decades becomes Kinsey's right hand man. But Kinsey teaches Milk more than the art of objective enquiry. Behind closed doors, he is a sexual enthusiast of the highest order and as a member of his ‘inner circle' of researchers, Milk is called on to participate in experiments that become increasingly uninhibited ...

Read more less

Welcome to the troubled, tempestuous world of Frank Lloyd Wright. Scandalous affairs rage behind closed doors, broken hearts are tossed aside, fires rip through the wings of the house and paparazzi lie in wait outside the front door for the latest tragedy in this never-ending saga. This is the home of the great architect of the twentieth century, a man of extremes in both his work and his private life: at once a force of nature and an avalanche of need and emotion that sweeps aside everything in its path. Sharp, savage and subtle in equal measure, "The Women" plumbs the chaos, horrors and uncontainable passions of a formidable American icon.

Read more less

The schooner from Santa Barbara arrives at the tiny, desolate island on New Year's Day, 1888. As the trunks are unloaded onto the wet sand, thirty-eight-year-old Marantha Waters looks at the cliffs falling away into the churning sea. This is the first day of her new life on San Miguel. Joined by her husband, a fiercely possessive Civil War veteran who will take over the operation of the sheep ranch on the island, Marantha strives to persevere in the face of brutal isolation. But the constant wind and sheep-ravaged wasteland shatter her illusions; her husband promised paradise. As he obsessively resolves to stay - and becomes increasingly distant from her and their adopted daughter Edith - Marantha's blighted lungs grow weaker in the dampness. Two years later, Edith, now a spirited teenager and an aspiring actress, will exploit every opportunity to escape the captivity her father has imposed on her. March, 1930. Another family - and another bride - arrives on San Miguel. Elise Lester, a librarian from New York City, and her husband Herbie, a World War I veteran full of manic energy, achieve a celebrity of sorts as the news cameras take an interest in these wayward people living in the wild. But the unyielding island is haunted by its history. Will the family be able to cling together as the war threatens to pull everything apart? San Miguel is a vivid and gripping story of hard lives pitched against the elements, the desires of stubborn men and the unbearable burden of love, from master American storyteller T. C. Boyle.

Read more less