Who Killed Piet Barol

Author : Richard Mason
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0385352883
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Who Killed Piet Barol? written by Richard Mason and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A haunting, wildly imagined novel by the acclaimed author of History of a Pleasure Seeker ("the best new work of fiction ... in many moons; a classic"--The Washington Post); set in the first decades of twentieth-century colonial Cape Town and in a spirit-filled forest of secrets and magic powers. It is 1914. Germany has just declared war on France. Piet Barol, the handsome, irresistible figure of Mason's much-admired, sensuous History of a Pleasure Seeker, is once again at the center of this ambitious, lush new novel. Barol, a European adventurer living as a poseur in South Africa's Cape Colony, navigates the turbulence and opportunities of this strange land in his blind quest for comfort and riches as thousands of black families have been turned out of their homes by a white government bent on confiscating 90% of the country for the exclusive use of Europeans. Piet and his wife have successfully, grandly lived a life for the past five years as colonials impersonating French aristocrats (the dazzling Vicomte and Vicomtesse Pierre de Barol of the Château de Barol on the banks of the Loire River), though in truth, he is Dutch and far from aristocratic and she is American and hardly of the railroad fortune family she so often and casually invokes. Both are wily, and both have large dreams. After years of supremely decadent living, Fortune, which has always favored Piet, has grown tired of him and the Barols' luck is about to run out. They are short of cash and on the verge of ruin. As one last grand effort they have embarked on a furniture business full of possibility. They need wood for the enterprise, and through Piet's charm and guile have come upon the source for their inventory that will make all of them rich. The wood is in a forbidden forest filled with sacred, untouchable trees of fine mahogany which Piet is sure he will be able to extract in exchange for beads and glass trickets. His pursuit of the bewitched trees of the fabled forest of Gwadana takes him deep into the Xhosa [pron. KO-sa] homelands, where unfailing charm, wit and the friendship of two black men are his only allies as he attempts an act of supreme audacity: to steal a forest from its rightful owners--a Xhosa clan who know to be true that the spirits of their ancestors reside in their magical, ageless trees"--

Author : Richard Mason
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307957527
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History of a Pleasure Seeker written by Richard Mason and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Just try to resist.... A Continental Downton Abbey plus sex, with a dash of Dangerous Liaisons tossed in.” —Seattle Times Piet Barol has an instinctive appreciation for pleasure and a gift for finding it. When his mother dies, Piet applies for a job as tutor to the troubled son of Europe's leading hotelier—a child who refuses to leave his family’s mansion on one of Amsterdam’s grandest canals. As Piet enters this glittering world, he learns its secrets and finds his life transformed. A brilliantly written portrait of the senses, History of a Pleasure Seeker is an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s Belle Époque, written with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original.

Author : Richard Mason
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1780220340
Total Pages : 229 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Drowning People written by Richard Mason and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2011-03-24 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A truly thrilling murder mystery set partly in Cornwall, in the tradition of Du Maurier's REBECCA: dark, English and very much a classic. At 21, James Farrell has the world at his feet. A gifted violinist, his successful career seems assured. Until a chance encounter with Ella changes everything. Ella, bewitching, irresistible, haunted by the ghosts of her family's past - James cannot help falling in love with her, and she with him. But as the power and dangerous fragility of their relationship overwhelm them, James can only watch helplessly as the most beautiful thing in his life is strangled by deception, betrayal and ultimately murder ...

Author : Richard Mason
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307387321
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Natural Elements written by Richard Mason and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-04-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this moving, layered novel of memory and family, celebrated author Richard Mason tells the story of a mother and daughter, one caught in the past, one racing toward the future. Joan is eighty years old, a gifted amateur pianist who can no longer play because of her arthritic hands. Joan’s daughter, Eloise, is an ambitious hedge fund manager who has decided to move her mother to an assisted-living facility. As a last hurrah, Eloise plans a trip to Joan’s childhood home in South Africa. What Joan discovers there summons long-buried secrets and opens up an entirely new world. Natural Elements is a dazzling tale of history and longing, and the high-stakes, full-tilt embrace of life.

Author : M.G. Vassanji
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307961516
Total Pages : 326 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Magic of Saida written by M.G. Vassanji and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giller Prize–winner M. G. Vassanji gives us a powerfully emotional novel of love and loss, of an African/Indian man who returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him. Kamal Punja is a physician who has lived in Canada for the past forty years, but whom we first meet in a Tanzanian hospital. He is delirious and says he has been poisoned with hallucinogens. But when Kamal finds a curious and sympathetic ear in a local publisher, his ravings begin to reveal a tale of extraordinary pathos, complexity, and mystery. Raised by his African mother, deserted when he was four by his Indian father, married to a woman of Indian heritage, and the father of two wholly Westernized children, Kamal had reached a stage of both undreamed-of material success and disintegrating personal ties. Then, suddenly, he “stepped off the treadmill, allowed an old regret to awaken,” and set off to find the girl he had known as a child, to finally keep his promise to her that he would return. The girl was Saida, granddaughter of a great, beloved Swahili poet. Kamal and Saida were constant companions—he teaching her English and arithmetic, she teaching him Arabic script and Swahili poetry—and in his child’s mind, she was his future wife. Until, when he was eleven, his mother sent him to the capital, Dar es Salaam, to live with his father’s relatives, to “become an Indian” and thus secure his future. Now Kamal is journeying back to the village he left, into the maze of his long-unresolved mixed-race identity and the nightmarish legacy of his broken promise to Saida. At once dramatic, searching, and intelligent, The Magic of Saida moves deftly between the past and present, painting both an intimate picture of passion and betrayal and a broad canvas of political promise and failure in contemporary Africa. It is a timeless story—and a story very much of our own time.

Author : Phyllis Rose
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0394725808
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parallel Lives written by Phyllis Rose and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1984-10-12 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

Author : Elie Wiesel
Publisher : Schocken
ISBN 13 : 0805210520
Total Pages : 230 pages
Book Rating : 4.21/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Beggar in Jerusalem written by Elie Wiesel and published by Schocken. This book was released on 1997-05-27 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Six-Day War began, Elie Wiesel rushed to Israel. "I went to Jerusalem because I had to go somewhere, I had to leave the present and bring it back to the past. You see, the man who came to Jerusalem then came as a beggar, a madman, not believing his eyes and ears, and above all, his memory." This haunting novel takes place in the days following the Six-Day War. A Holocaust survivor visits the newly reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall he encounters the beggars and madmen who congregate there every evening, and who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present. Weaving together myth and mystery, parable and paradox, Wiesel bids the reader to join him on a spiritual journey back and forth in time, always returning to Jerusalem.

Author : Kyoko Mori
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1429934778
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Polite Lies written by Kyoko Mori and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve essays by a Japanese-American writer about being caught between past and present, old country and new. In this powerful, exquisitely crafted book, Kyoko Mori delves into her dual heritage with a rare honesty that is both graceful and stirring. From her unhappy childhood in Japan, weighted by a troubled family and a constricting culture, to the American Midwest, where she found herself free to speak as a strong-minded independent woman, though still an outsider, Mori explores the different codes of silence, deference, and expression that govern Japanese and American women's lives: the ties that bind us to family and the lies that keep us apart; the rituals of mourning that give us the courage to accept death; the images of the body that make sex seem foreign to Japanese women and second nature to Americans. In the sensitive hands of this compelling writer, one woman's life becomes the mirror of two profoundly different societies.

Author : S. M. Molema
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bantu, Past and Present written by S. M. Molema and published by . This book was released on 1920 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Joshua Cohen
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 039959020X
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Moving Kings written by Joshua Cohen and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A propulsive, incendiary novel about faith, race, class, and what it means to have a home, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus “A Jewish Sopranos . . . utterly engrossing, full of passionate sympathy . . . Cohen is an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today.”—The New Yorker ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Vulture, Bookforum One of the boldest voices of his generation, Joshua Cohen returns with Moving Kings, a powerful and provocative novel that interweaves, in profoundly intimate terms, the housing crisis in America’s poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods with the world's oldest conflict, in the Middle East. The year is 2015, and twenty-one-year-olds Yoav and Uri, veterans of the last Gaza War, have just completed their compulsory military service in the Israel Defense Forces. In keeping with national tradition, they take a year off for rest, recovery, and travel. They come to New York City and begin working for Yoav’s distant cousin David King—a proud American patriot, Republican, and Jew, and the recently divorced proprietor of King’s Moving Inc., a heavyweight in the tri-state area’s moving and storage industries. Yoav and Uri now must struggle to become reacquainted with civilian life, but it’s not easy to move beyond their traumatic pasts when their days are spent kicking down doors as eviction-movers in the ungentrified corners of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens, throwing out delinquent tenants and seizing their possessions. And what starts off as a profitable if eerily familiar job—an “Occupation”—quickly turns violent when they encounter one homeowner seeking revenge.