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Adrian McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to America in the early 1990s. Living first in Harlem, he found employment as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000 he moved to Denver to become a high school English teacher and it was there that he began writing fiction.
Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of cash, he tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering. There he meets Maureen McKinnon, and it's not just her piercing blue eyes that leave Teddy forever charmed but her mind - Maureen is a genuine psychic of immense and mysterious power.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - "that the hours of his life belong to himself alone". In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
Before men ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West. With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth.
Adrian McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland. He studied politics and philosophy at Oxford before moving to America in the early 1990s. Living first in Harlem, he found employment as a construction worker, barman, and bookstore clerk. In 2000 he moved to Denver to become a high school English teacher and it was there that he began writing fiction.
Teddy Telemachus is a charming con man with a gift for sleight of hand and some shady underground associates. In need of cash, he tricks his way into a classified government study about telekinesis and its possible role in intelligence gathering. There he meets Maureen McKinnon, and it's not just her piercing blue eyes that leave Teddy forever charmed but her mind - Maureen is a genuine psychic of immense and mysterious power.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove - to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife - "that the hours of his life belong to himself alone". In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears unbidden to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child.
Cyril Avery is not a real Avery - or at least that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.
Before men ruled the earth, there were wolves. Once abundant in North America, these majestic creatures were hunted to near extinction in the lower 48 states by the 1920s. But in recent decades, conservationists have brought wolves back to the Rockies, igniting a battle over the very soul of the West. With novelistic detail, Nate Blakeslee tells the gripping story of one of these wolves, O-Six, a charismatic alpha female named for the year of her birth.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.
Thomas Savage, a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, has long been a critically acclaimed author. The New Yorker calls him "a writer of the first order". This starkly elegant story details the lives of Emma Russell Sweringen and her family in the early 1900s. Emma’s daughter Beth secretly gave up a baby girl for adoption many years ago. Now, Beth’s secret life is being unraveled as her daughter comes looking for her long-lost family.
Thomas McNulty, having fled the Great Famine in Ireland and now barely 17 years old, signs up for the US Army in the 1850s and with his brother in arms, John Cole, goes to fight in the Indian Wars - against the Sioux and the Yurok - and, ultimately, in the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, they find these days to be vivid and alive, despite the horrors they see and are complicit in. Moving from the plains of Wyoming to Tennessee, Sebastian Barry's latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language.
Three years ago, Madison Culver disappeared when her family was choosing a Christmas tree in Oregon's Skookum National Forest. She would be eight years old now - if she has survived. Desperate to find their beloved daughter, certain someone took her, the Culvers turn to Naomi, a private investigator with an uncanny talent for locating the lost and missing. Known to the police and a select group of parents as "the Child Finder", Naomi is their last hope.
Based on National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates' novella about the Chappaquiddick scandal, this tragic and beautiful new opera enthralls as a handsome Senator uses power to enchant, seduce, and carelessly destroy.
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family's Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge - until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children's Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents - but they quickly realize the dark truth.
Ebenezer Le Page, cantankerous, opinionated and charming, is one of the most compelling literary creations of the late 20th century. Eighty years old, Ebenezer has lived his whole life on the Channel Island of Guernsey, a stony speck of a place caught between England and France yet a world away from either. Ebenezer himself is fiercely independent, but as he reaches the end of his life he is determined to tell his own story and the story of those he has known.
Se7en meets The Silence of the Lambs in this dark and twisting novel from the author Jeffery Deaver called "a talented writer with a delightfully devious mind". For over five years, the Four Monkey Killer has terrorized the residents of Chicago. When his body is found, the police quickly realize he was on his way to deliver one final message, one that proves he has taken another victim, who may still be alive.
How far would you go to protect your family? Single dad Ben is doing his best to raise his children, with the help of his devoted mother, Judi. And then Ben meets Amber. Everyone thinks this is a perfect match for Ben, but Judi isn't so sure.... There's just something about Amber that doesn't add up. Ben can't see why his mother dislikes his new girlfriend. And Amber doesn't want Judi anywhere near her new family. Amber just wants Ben and the children.
It's 1991. Near Checkpoint Zulu, 100 miles from the Kuwaiti border, Thomas Benton meets Arwood Hobbes. Benton is a British journalist who reports from war zones in part to avoid his lackluster marriage and a daughter he loves but cannot connect with; Arwood is a Midwestern American private who might be an insufferable ignoramus or might be a genuine lunatic with a death wish - it's hard to tell.
Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands' suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a "walking streak of sex".
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.
Thomas Savage has earned a reputation as one of the best writers of the American West. He has 13 novels to his credit, and has received a PEN/Faulkner nomination and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Power of the Dog was named the year’s best novel by the San Francisco Chronicle. It is the tale of two bachelor ranchers and the lovely widow who shifts the precarious balance of their lives. A superb storyteller, Savage spins a dramatic counterpoint of rustic tranquility and the struggle for survival.
East of Eden's Cal & Aron, Legends of the Fall's Alfred & Samuel, Shakespeare's Danish brothers King Claudius & Hamlet, Sherlock & Mycroft Holmes, Thor & Loki...since "the Lord said unto Cain, 'Where is Abel thy brother?'" sibling rivalry -- to the degree beyond simple sibling dysfunction -- has been at the heart of some of our greatest, and most entertaining, literature. Whether the feuds ended in fratricide or ride out through old age with an icy silent treatment, the exploration to the root of rivalry is more provocatively done in the hands of writers than psychologists, the latter who give us a sterilized: "Sibling rivalry is particularly intense when children are very close in age and of the same gender and/or where one or both children are intellectually gifted." [quoted from Wikipedia] Whereas authors give us The Brothers Karamazov, East of Eden, The Song of Fire and Ice, ....and Savage's The Power of the Dog... with the most magnificently complex, ambiguous, enigmatic sonovabitch you'll never forget: Phil Burbank. (A year older, the same gender, and the one that is intellectually gifted...check, check, and check with Wikipedia's identifying characteristics.)
Savage, writes a near-perfect human drama, an intense character study, creating one of the most memorable and complicated figures in American Western literature. There are really no minor characters -- only a superbly developed cast of equally dysfunctional characters could provide the heavy framework suitable for the epilogue of such a contemptible antagonist. The psychology is deeply layered and strategic, not so much unfolding with the storyline as adding an intensity to it as Phil methodically carries out his revenge. All of the hallmarks of a Shakespearean Tragedy, except The Power of the Dog is a Western with an anti-hero.
Set in the early 1900's on a prosperous cattle ranch in Montana. The Burbank boys have grown up together, slept in the same room together, eaten every meal together, and together inherited the running of the ranch when their parents retired to Colorado.
First-born, Phil, apparently sucked the deep end of the gene pool dry the year before George gestated. An Omni-being, gifted with looks, brains, talents; a voracious reader and student of philosophy, mathematics, history and geography; Phil whistles with the accuracy a flute, plays the banjo, the fiddle/the violin, “had shot, skinned and stuffed a lynx with skill that would have abashed a taxidermist,” "solved the mathematical puzzles in the Scientific American,” could carve anything full-sized to a miniature set of ornate chairs with the same hand that could “roll a perfect cigarette" or braid an intricate set of horse reins. Gloves have never been used to protect these hands from dirt, thorn, or "shit-shoveling." He is idolized, admired, and equally feared; an outspoken bully that hates minorities, society, women, charity, and negatively views businessmen and politicians. His nickname for his brother is "Fatso."
George, aka Fatso, is the polar side of this brotherhood. Sensitive, reserved, modest even self-deprecating. The young submissive brother, you sense in George an intuitive fear of his sibling. George's marriage to the widow Rose, and the new presence of her son Peter on the Burbank Ranch
Any respectable story of rivalry plants that seed of antagonism with comparison and contrast; nourishes it with conflict; foments it with dissent. Savage was unwilling to settle for that simple formula. Phil outwardly seems to suffer no pangs of his own conscience, subverting it instead into acts of hatred and jealousy. But, this is no formulaic story that you can count on to neatly unfold into a brother vs. brother smackdown.
And here I offer you the best advice when reading this novel: Find your own way into this book. Let the author throw the knockout punch. You won't see it coming, but you'll see it when you look back. Allow yourself to appreciate-in-hindsight the psychological underpinnings, to think over the possible roads you may have been lead down by the author, the modern and timely themes, and let it all settle in. I guarantee There will be aftershocks; that you will look back at a very different book than what you started with.
Written in 1967, re-published in 2001 with an afterword by Annie Proulx. Savage is a writer on par with two of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner, his style has undertones of John Williams' work of perfection, Stoner. Absolutely placed reverently on my Top Shelf.
28 of 32 people found this review helpful
A recent reissue of a 1967 ground-breaking Western novel, a high-pressurized psychological study of two brothers, George and Phil, as well as of the former's new wife Rose, who before the marriage was a widow, and her 17-year-old 'Miss Nancy,' which was brother Phil's nickname for Peter, the sensitive, 'sissy' son. The novel was set in the 1920s.
I don't want to say too much to give away the plot, which is in fact telegraphed from early on. I will say though that the novel reminds me of a merciless, blustering bully I knew growing up who expressed an absolute disgust with gay men, so much so, he said, that he refused to eat hot dogs, bananas or mayo. I was no Freudian scholar but I knew enough about human nature to figure out this dude had some major "issues" with his sexuality. This was in the early 80s, in the South and AIDS/HIV was just coming on the radar as a public scare.
This novel particularly resonated with me because I was bullied between 13 and 15 years old, as a very, very late bloomer. My voice did not start to change until I was 17, I didnt have to shave until I was 19, I was skinny as a rail until 19, and I grew 6 inches between graduating high school and turning 21. So, I was bullied without mercy and called "faggot," "sissy," and other names. Thing is, I have always been heterosexual and never questioned my sexuality. I've never had a problem with the sexuality of others. In my family--that I know of--I have a gay first cousin and 2 gay first cousins-once removed.
Looking back, I have little doubt that my torturers acted against me, as smaller and weaker, out of fear and hatred and self-repression. Though I still carry light scars from those few years, I have always been secure in my sexuality and I am probably considerably bigger than those guys are now.
Back to this brilliant 1967 book, it is a real steel-toed boot to the butt of many bullies. A compelling examination of self-hatred's hoodoo and the hold over a household that a rabid dog can have.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful
This book is just awful! I think Ethan Hawk must like this author because Ethan's books are a lot like this one. The need to explain every little detail - so much so that you forget what is being talked about or explained is just annoying! Please!! Save your money and time. Don't bother with this one!!
0 of 5 people found this review helpful