Showing results for "Flower" in Literary Fiction

Violette Toussaint is the caretaker at a cemetery in a small town in Bourgogne. Casual mourners, regular visitors, and sundry colleagues - gravediggers, groundskeepers, and a priest - visit her to warm themselves in her lodge, where laughter, companionship, and occasional tears mix with the coffee she offers them. Her life is lived to the rhythms of their funny, moving confidences. But her routine is disrupted by the arrival of the local police chief, who insists on scattering the ashes of his recently deceased mother on the gravesite of a complete stranger.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of ‘Offshore’ comes this unusual romance between the poet Novalis and his fiancée Sophie, newly introduced by Candia McWilliam. The year is 1794 and Fritz, passionate, idealistic and brilliant, is seeking his father’s permission to announce his...

The Flowers of Buffoonery opens in a seaside sanitarium where Yozo Oba—the narrator of No Longer Human at a younger age—is being kept after a failed suicide attempt. While he is convalescing, his friends and family visit him, and other patients and nurses drift in and out of his room. Against this dispiriting backdrop, everyone tries to maintain a lighthearted, even clownish atmosphere: playing cards, smoking cigarettes, vying for attention, cracking jokes, and trying to make each other laugh.

A woman meets her next-door neighbor and loans her a spatula, then starts suffering horrific gaps in her memory. A man, feeling jilted by an unrequited love, becomes obsessed with sorting through his neighbors' garbage in the belief that it will teach him how to better relate to people. A landlord decides to raise the rent, and his tenants hatch a plan to kill him at a team-building retreat. In 10 captivating, unnerving stories, Flowers of Mold presents a range of ordinary individuals who have found themselves left behind by an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.

Rose and Elmer have created an idyllic sanctuary for themselves and their five daughters in Mexico's Baja California desert. Out there in the middle of nowhere, blissfully cut off from the burdens of modern society, they're free to raise their beautiful family...and preserve its secret.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY Goodreads, Essence, Sunset Magazine, SheReads, BookBub, and more! From acclaimed author Terah Shelton Harris comes a poignant story of survival and redemption that questions what it means to stop existing and start living. Leigh is the last of the...

For Kate Drake, her family has brought her peace after years of uncertainty. Now, watching her own children grow up, it seems the world is a no less complicated place. But when a secret from the past casts its shadow across four generations of the family, a stubbornly independent woman opens herself to love whilst an older one rediscovers it, and a young boy begins to understand the complexities of adult life.

In the third novel in Maya Rodale's charming Wallflower series, London's Least Likely to Be Caught in a Compromising Position finds temptation in a devilishly handsome stranger . . . Miss Prudence Merryweather Payton has a secret. Everyone knows that she's the only graduate from her finishing...

The Dark Flower has a universal theme - the positive powers and the disruptive effects of sexuality and desire. It is the story of Mark Lennan and his infatuation, adulterous affair, conventional marriage and obsession for a younger woman. The author drew on his own experiences for much of the substance of his work and was truly a free thinker with regard to the relationship between the sexes.

The Flower in the Desert is a beautiful fable about following your heart. With a depth of sensitivity, it opens its readers and listeners into the great journey we all share, a journey in truth with no beginning and no end. Whilst very much an enchanting story, it's also a meditation, simple yet profound, which will speak directly to your heart. Lovers of authors such as Khalil Gibran, Rich Bach, Paulo Coelho, Antoine St. Exupery, and Hermann Hesse are likely to love this book.

In 1920s Glasgow, Beattie Blaxland falls pregnant to her married lover Henry just before her nineteenth birthday. Abandoned by her family, Beattie and Henry set sail for a new life in Australia. In 2009, London, prima ballerina Lydia Blaxland-Hunter is also discovering that life can also have its ups and downs. Unable to dance again after a fall, Lydia returns home to Australia to recuperate.

I am Kozaisho: Fifth daughter, Woman-For-Play, teller of stories, lover, wife and Flower Samurai. In the rich, dazzling, brutal world of twelfth century Japan, one young girl begins her epic journey, from the warmth of family to the Village of Outcasts. Marked out by an auspicious omen, she is trained in the ancient warrior arts of the samurai. But it is through the power of storytelling that she learns to fight her fate, twisting her life onto a path even she could not have imagined...

Eva Leigh’s deliciously sexy Wicked Quills of London series continues as a Lady’s secret career writing erotic fiction is jeopardized by real-life romance . . . In society circles she’s known as the Watching Wallflower—shy, quiet, and certainly never scandalous. Yet beneath Lady Sarah...

The first irresistible installment in New York Times bestselling author Jennifer McQuiston's Seduction Diaries series proves that some secrets are too delicious to hide. Pretty and popular, Miss Clare Westmore knows exactly what (or rather, who) she wants: the next Duke of Harrington. But when...

Set in Iran at the end of the 19th century in the Persian royal court of the Qajars, In the Palace of Flowers is an atmospheric historical novel about Jamila, an Abyssinian slave who stands at the funeral of a Persian nobleman, watching the rites with empty eyes. In that very moment, she realizes that her life will never be acknowledged or mourned with the same significance. The fear of being forgotten, of being irrelevant, sets her and Abimelech, a fellow Abyssinian slave and a eunuch, on a path to find meaning.

The powerful Chinese novel about love and war on which Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) has based his latest film starring Christian Bale to be released in 2012. This moving short novel is based on true events that took place during the Nanjing Massacre in...

Book-smart Melissa Fletcher lives a predictable life in her hometown, working behind the scenes for her charismatic father in a financial career that makes perfect sense. But when her dad is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Missy is forced to step up and take over as his primary caregiver and the principal of the firm. After her father's death, Missy finds a letter from him in which he praises her for being a dutiful daughter but admonishes her for not taking any risks in life.

Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore seeps into his fever dreams and into his writing, and the lines between reality and myth soon start to blur. In this finely woven tale of illness and recovery, family and fable, Randolph Stow creates a unique, imaginative landscape, populated by figures from old English myths and legends, and from Clare’s present.

"The Language of Flowers" by H. G. Wells is a short essay. H. G. Wells once different, humorous social satire and ironic. During the early Victorian revival of chivalry the Language of Flowers had some considerable vogue. The Romeo of the mutton-chop whiskers was expected to keep this delicate symbolism in view, and even to display his wit by some dainty conceits in it.

Three audiobooks in one volume. This family saga follows three generations of 13-year-old girls and their families from 1941 to 1982 Appalachia.