If I Told You Once

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Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

"It is 1972: a group of teenagers, some from Dublin, some from Derry, are spending a month in a Donegal Gaeltacht, learning Irish language and culture from their teachers and from the local people they are boarding with. Liberated for the first time from the restricting reins of parental control, they respond to the untamed landscape of river, hill and sea, finding in it unnerving echoes of their own submerged - and now emerging - wildnesses." "In this complex new novel, Eilis Ni Dhuibhne, uses the experiences and emotions of girls on the cusp of womanhood to explore dangerous territories of sex, politics, class, and Irishness."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kirsten Bakis

Here is a first novel like no other: a spellbinding tale that both creates its own fully realized world perspective and provides an incisive look at the ways that humans and animals resemble each other. A group of elegant monster dogs in top hats, tails, and bustle skirts become instant celebrities when they come to New York in 2008. Refugees from a town whose residents had been utterly isolated for a hundred years, the dogs retain the nineteenth-century Germanic culture of the humans who created them. They are wealthy and glamorous and seem to lead charmed lives - but they find adjusting to the modern world difficult, and when a young woman, Cleo Pira, befriends them, she discovers that a strange, incurable illness threatens them all with extinction. When the dogs construct their dream home, a fantastic castle on the Lower East Side, and barricade themselves inside, Cleo finds herself one of the few human witnesses to a mad, lavish party that may prove to be the final act in the drama of the lives of the monster dogs.

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E. L. Doctorow

Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

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Iris Murdoch

The Bell is a celebrated work by Iris Murdoch (Booker Prize Winner), recognized for masterclass storytelling and lasting literary resonance.