Skios
Michael Frayn
Skios by Michael Frayn is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.
Read Time: ~9.1 hr
The Yips
by Nicola Barker (2012)
About this book
Storm clouds are gathering above the bar of the less-than-exclusive Thistle Hotel. Stuart Ransom, a jet-setting, supermodel-chasing pro golfer with an extravagant ego and a career nearing the end of a spectacular decline, is drinking his way through the night. Desperate for attention, he strikes up free-flowing conversations with anyone who will listen. But as he banters with Jen, the impish barmaid with a talent for telling tall tales rivaled only by Stuart's own, the night takes an extraordinary turn. Among those caught up in the unfolding drama are a tattooist with a mad mother and a love of anything from the 1940s; a free-thinking Muslim sex therapist and his considerably more conservative wife; the mysterious Vicki, the sister of Stuart's defiant yet curiously devoted manager; and a misguided female vicar of the Church of England and her husband, Gene, the Thistle's hapless bartender. They are a highly entertaining and eccentric bunch, but there's more to them than meets the eye. "There enter in questions of what it is to be consumed by love or lust, by shame, by the longing to be someone else or nobody" (The Guardian), and The Yips unites them in an absorbing, exhilarating tour de force.
Setting / LocationGlobal
Story EraContemporary
Protagonist / CoreNotable Characters
Readers who enjoyed this also loved
The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng
"On a mountain above the clouds, in the central highlands of Malaya lived the man who had been the gardener of the Emperor of Japan.” Teoh Yun Ling was seventeen years old when she first heard about him, but a war would come, and a decade would pass before she travels up to the Garden of Evening Mists to see him, in 1951. A survivor of a brutal Japanese camp, she has spent the last few years helping to prosecute Japanese war criminals. Despite her hatred of the Japanese, she asks the gardener, Nakamura Aritomo, to create a memorial garden for her sister who died in the camp. He refuses, but agrees to accept Yun Ling as his apprentice ‘until the monsoon’ so she can design a garden herself. Staying at the home of Magnus Pretorius, the owner of Majuba Tea Estate and a veteran of the Boer War, Yun Ling begins working in the Garden of Evening Mists. But outside in the surrounding jungles another war is raging. The Malayan Emergency is entering its darkest days, the communist-terrorists murdering planters and miners and their families, seeking to take over the country by any means, while the Malayan nationalists are fighting for independence from centuries of British colonial rule. But who is Nakamura Aritomo, and how did he come to be exiled from his homeland? And is the true reason how Yun Ling survived the Japanese camp connected to Aritomo and the Garden of Evening Mists? ([source][1]) [1]:
A Secret Between Us
Daniel Poliquin
"When young Lusignan sets off from Ottawa to the First World War with the Pricess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, he has already survived a tragicomic Catholic childhood and a writing career that has brought him both acclaim and disgrace. Shortly before the men depart for Europe, Lusignan has an encounter with a fellow officer, the aristocratic Essiambre d'Argenteuil, that proves to be the defining moment of his life. Returning from Europe a hollow man, Lusignan keeps the memory alive by shadowing Amalia Driscoll, a woman whose strait-laced proprieties were challenged by this same d'Argenteuil. He encounters Concorde, the untutored young maid struggling to get by in the Flats district of Ottawa, and the Capuchin monk Father Mathrun, who longs for martyrdom in a foreign land. Providing the backdrop to Poliquin's incisive character study is a vivid evocation of a pivotal era in Canadian history." --pub. desc.
Days by Moonlight
André Alexis
Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs. Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches. Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?