The Illicit Happiness Of Other People A Novel

Author : Manu Joseph
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393344657
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel written by Manu Joseph and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-01-07 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quirky and darkly comic take on domestic life in southern India. The PEN Open Book Award called Manu Joseph "that rare bird who can wildly entertain his readers as forcefully as he moves them." In The Illicit Happiness of Other People, Joseph brilliantly brings his talents to the story of an Indian Christian family living far afield in south India. It has been three years since seventeen-year-old Unni Chacko mysteriously fell from a balcony to his death. His family—journalist father Ousep, who smokes two cigarettes at once “because three is too much”; mother Mariamma, who fantasizes gleefully about murdering her husband; and twelve-year-old love-struck brother Thoma with zero self-esteem, have coped by not coping. When the post office delivers a comic drawn by Unni that had been lost in the mail, Ousep, shocked out of his stupor, ventures on a quest to understand his son and rewrite his family’s story. Combining family drama with philosophy, social satire with satisfying storytelling, The Illicit Happiness of Other People reminds us that the greatest mystery of all—the one most worth our time and energy—is understanding the people we love.

Author : Manu Joseph
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 9780393339536
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.3X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Serious Men: A Novel written by Manu Joseph and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poignant, bitingly funny Indian satire and love story set in a scientific institute and in Mumbai’s humid tenements. Ayyan Mani will not be constrained by Indian traditions. Despite working at the Institute of Theory and Research in Mumbai as the lowly personal assistant to a brilliant but insufferable astronomer, he dreams of more for himself and his family. Ever wily and ambitious, Ayyan weaves two plots: the first to cheer up his weary, soap-opera-addicted wife by creating outrageous fictions around their ten-year-old son; the other to sabotage the married director by using his boss’s seeming romance with the institute’s first female—and very attractive—researcher. Meanwhile, as the institute’s Brahmins wage a vicious war over theories about alien life, Ayyan sees his deceptions intertwining and setting in motion a series of extraordinary events he cannot stop. Unfailingly funny and irreverent, Serious Men is at once a hilarious portrayal of runaway egos and ambitions and a moving portrait of love and its strange workings. One of 2010’s “First Novels to Savor.” —Sunday Telegraph

Author : Manu Joseph
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 9352770455
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous written by Manu Joseph and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2017-09-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A building collapses in Mumbai. In the debris is a man who is mumbling something in delirium. It appears that he is passing on the real-time movements of a young Muslim couple. Elsewhere, a young intelligence agent is assigned to shadow two terror suspects, one of whom is a teenager and the sweetheart of her street, Laila.Taking up a slice of recent history, the novel glares at the entire system - not just politicians, the bureaucracy, the police and lackeys, but also the good folks. Pervasive in its satire, wicked in its humour and broad-based in its canvas, Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous is one of the most stylish and honest works of fiction about India ever written.

Author : Manu Joseph
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393338622
Total Pages : 351 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Illicit Happiness of Other People: A Novel written by Manu Joseph and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ousep Chacko, journalist and failed novelist, prides himself on being the last of the real men. This includes waking neighbors upon returning late from the pub. His wife Mariamma stretches their money, raises their two boys, and, in her spare time, gleefully fantasizes about Ousep dying. One day, their seemingly happy seventeen-year-old son Unni an obsessed comic-book artist falls from the balcony, leaving them to wonder whether it was an accident. Three years later, Ousep receives a package that sends him searching for the answer, hounding his son s former friends, attending a cartoonists meeting, and even accosting a famous neurosurgeon. Meanwhile, younger son Thoma, missing his brother, falls head over heels for the much older girl who befriended them both. Haughty and beautiful, she has her own secrets. The Illicit Happiness of Other People a smart, wry, and poignant novel teases you with its mystery, philosophy, and unlikely love story."

Author : Penelope Fitzgerald
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780395478042
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Offshore written by Penelope Fitzgerald and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1998 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the Battersea Reach of the Thames, a mixed bag of eccentrics lives in houseboats. Belonging to neither land nor sea, they belong to one another. How each of their lives complicates the others is the stuff of this perfect little novel. Winner of a 1997 Booker Prize.

Author : Sharon Biggs Waller
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101614412
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Mad, Wicked Folly written by Sharon Biggs Waller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Edwardian London, a girl dreams of being an artist, despite her family's disapproval. Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl. After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy who may be her muse—or may be the love of her life. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky must figure out: just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?

Author : Karen Tucker
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1646221265
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.64/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bewilderness written by Karen Tucker and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in rural, poverty-stricken North Carolina, this "beautiful, gritty, and piercing" novel follows two young women—best friends—as they "journey through the highs and lows of friendship, love, and addiction," perfect for readers of Julie Buntin's Marlena (Erika Carter, author of Lucky You). Irene, a lonely nineteen-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joy ride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high. Together, Irene and Luce run nickel-tossing scams at the county fair and trick dealers into trading legit pharms for birth-control pills. Everything is wild and wonderful until Luce finds a boyfriend who wants to help her get clean. Soon the two of them decide to move away and start a new, sober life in Florida—leaving Irene behind. Told in a riveting dialogue between the girls' addicted past and their hopes for a better future, Bewilderness is not just a brilliant, funny, heartbreaking novel about opioid abuse, it's also a moving look at how intense, intimate friendships can shape every young woman's life.

Author : Julian Barnes
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307957330
Total Pages : 158 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sense of an Ending written by Julian Barnes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-05 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Author : Yan Lianke
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 1555848885
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Serve the People! written by Yan Lianke and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2008-03-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A satirical novel set in 1967 China from the Franz Kafka Prize-winning author of Lenin’s Kiss—“one of China’s greatest living authors” (The Guardian). Serve the People! is the story of a forbidden love affair between Liu Lian, the young wife of a Division Commander in Communist China, and a servant in her household, Wu Dawang. Left to idle at home while her husband furthers the revolution, Liu Lian establishes a rule for her orderly: whenever the household’s wooden Serve the People! sign is removed from its usual place on the dinner table and placed elsewhere, Wu Dawang is to stop what he is doing and attend to her needs upstairs. What follows is a “steamy and subversive” story and comic satire on Mao’s slogan and the political and sexual taboos of his regime (The Guardian). Originally banned in China, Serve the People! is the first work from Yan Lianke to be translated into English, and “a scathing sendup of life in 1960s China during the chaos of the country’s Cultural Revolution” (LA Times).

Author : Pat Conroy
Publisher : Dial Press
ISBN 13 : 0385532148
Total Pages : 546 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book South of Broad written by Pat Conroy and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2009-08-11 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage” (The Washington Post) by the celebrated author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini Leopold Bloom King has been raised in a family shattered—and shadowed—by tragedy. Lonely and adrift, he searches for something to sustain him and finds it among a tightly knit group of outsiders. Surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, as well as Charleston, South Carolina’s dark legacy of racism and class divisions, these friends will endure until a final test forces them to face something none of them are prepared for. Spanning two turbulent decades, South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest: a masterpiece from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds. Praise for South of Broad “Vintage Pat Conroy . . . a big sweeping novel of friendship and marriage.”—The Washington Post “Conroy remains a magician of the page.”—The New York Times Book Review “Richly imagined . . . These characters are gallant in the grand old-fashioned sense, devoted to one another and to home. That siren song of place has never sounded so sweet.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune “A lavish, no-holds-barred performance.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “A lovely, often thrilling story.”—The Dallas Morning News “A pleasure to read . . . a must for Conroy’s fans.”—Associated Press