Thirtynothing

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140279288
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 375

Book Description
Ever wondered what happened to your first love? Imagine bumping into them twelve years later and realizing you still fancy them rotten. That’s exactly what happens to Dig Ryan when he sees Delilah again. Now imagine you’re Nadine. You and Dig have been best friends for fifteen years. And you’ve finally realized that you’re in love with him. So when Delilah – who always was your nemesis – returns, you’re mad with jealousy and can’t help behaving childishly. Like phoning your first love Phil – just to get your own back ... Thirty-Nothing is a story of ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends and friends dabbling with yesterday when they really should be thinking about today.

Ralph's Party

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141916176
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
The smash-hit romantic comedy from the author of The Girls and Then She Was Gone Six people, one big house and the party that brings it all down . . . Ralph and Smith are flatmates and best mates. Nothing can come between them - until the gorgeous Jemima moves in. They're both falling for her, but which one of them does she want? Upstairs, Karl and Siobhan are happily unmarried and have been for fifteen years - until Cheri moves into the flat above, and fixes her sights on Karl. Why should a little problem like his girlfriend get in her way? Sooner or later this house is bound to implode. So when Ralph throws a party and invites the whole house, what could possibly go wrong? If you like Marian Keyes, Jane Fallon, and Sophie Kinsella, you'll love this. 'Addictively readable' The Times 'A joy . . . a fun summer read' Guardian

One-hit Wonder

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0140295968
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 381

Book Description
Bee Bearhorn had a number-one hit single in 1985 – and was never heard of again. Fifteen years later she is found dead in her flat and nobody seems to care ... But Ana Wills always day-dreamed about the exotic half-sister she hasn’t seen in years. And when she comes to London to clear Bee’s flat, she uncovers a life more exotic than she imagined: a secret country cottage, mysterious weekends away, and even a missing cat. With Bee’s closest friends – mad Lol and strong, silent Flint – Ana sets out to discover exactly what did happen to Bee Bearhorn, the one-hit wonder ...

Turning Thirty

Author: Mike Gayle
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416516263
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
What's the big deal? Unlike a lot of people, Matt Beckford is actually looking forward to turning thirty. His twenties really weren't so great...and now he has his love life, his career, his finances -- even his record collection -- pretty much in order, like any good grown-up should. But when, out of the blue, Elaine announces she "can't do this anymore," Matt is left with the prospect of facing the big three-oh alone. Compounding his misery is the fact that he has to move back in with his parents. What's it all about, Alfie? Mum and Dad immediately start driving Matt up the wall, and emails from Elaine and nights out with his old school chum Gershwin aren't enough to snap Matt out of his existential funk. So he decides to track down more old schoolmates and see how they're handling this thirty thing. One by one, he gets in touch with the rest of the magnificent seven -- Pete, Bev, Katrina, Elliot, and Ginny, his former on-off girlfriend -- and soon the old gang is back together. But they're a lot older and a lot has changed and, even if he and Ginny still seem attracted to each other, you can't have an on-off girlfriend when you're thirty. Can you?

Surrender, Dorothy

Author: Meg Wolitzer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439125740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author Meg Wolitzer, a “devastatingly on target” (Elle) novel about a young woman's accidental death and its effect on her family and friends. For years, Sara Swerdlow was transported by an unfettered sense of immortality. Floating along on loving friendships and the adoration of her mother, Natalie, Sara's notion of death was entirely alien to her existence. But when a summer night's drive out for ice cream ends in tragedy, thirty-year-old Sara—"held aloft and shimmering for years"—finally lands. Mining the intricate relationship between love and mourning, acclaimed novelist Meg Wolitzer explores a single, overriding question: who, finally, "owns" the excruciating loss of this young woman—her mother or her closest friends? Depicting the aftermath of Sara's shocking death with piercing humor and shattering realism, Surrender, Dorothy is the luminously thoughtful, deeply moving exploration of what it is to be a mother and a friend, and, above all, what it takes to heal from unthinkable loss.

Angry White Pyjamas

Author: Robert Twigger
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 0297863894
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
A brilliant and captivating insight into the bizarre nature of contemporary Japan. Adrift in Tokyo, teaching giggling Japanese highschool girls how to pronounce Tennyson correctly, Robert Twigger came to a revelation about himself: he'd never been fit. In a bid to escape the cockroach infestation and sweaty squalor of a cramped apartment in Fuji Heights, Twigger sets out to cleanse his body and his mind. Not knowing his fist from his elbow the author is sucked into the world of Japanese martial arts, and the brutally demanding course of budo training taken by the Tokyo Riot Police, where any ascetic motivation soon comes up against blood-stained dogis and fractured collarbones. In Angry White Pyjamas Robert Twigger skilfully blends the ancient with the modern - the ultra-traditionalism, ritual and violence of the dojo (training academy) with the shopping malls, nightclubs and scenes of everyday Tokyo life in the twenty-first century - to provide an entertaining and captivating glimpse of contemporary Japan.

Vince and Joy

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141012188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 419

Book Description
From teenage love in an eighties holiday park to flatshares, relationships, career crises and children, this is the story of two lives separated yet forever entwined, prompting the question 'how do you know if something is really meant to be?'

Mature Unwed Mothers

Author: Ruth Linn
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461512751
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description
I have often wondered if the opposition to women's choosing to abort a pregnancy masks a fear of women choosing to have and raise children on their own. When a woman separatesmotherhood from marriage, she claims a freedom in the realm of intimate rela tionships that may be as fundamental as Freedom of Conscience or Freedom of Association. Yet, we do not usually think about women's decisions concerning motherhood in these terms. In a pair of remarkable studies begun in the 1980s, Ruth Linn-pregnant at the time, and married to a medical officer in the Israeli army-took the study of moral psychology into two highly controversial arenas of moral action: Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in Lebanon and single women who refused to remain childless. While conscientious objection to war has long been recognized as an act ofmoral resistance and courage,women who question societal norms and values linking motherhood with marriage, are typically dismissed as bad women. Rather than approaching these questions in the abstract, Linn chose to inter view women who made the decision to have and raise children on their own. What she found was that in the course of making this decision, women came to see themselves as moral resisters. In freeing their childbearing capability from men's control,they were also freeing their capacity to love. The very title of this book, Mature Unwed Mothers, calls us to think about what we mean by maturity on the part of mothers.

Viral Dramaturgies

Author: Alyson Campbell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331970317X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 422

Book Description
This book analyses the impact of HIV and AIDS on performance in the twenty-first century from an international perspective. It marks a necessary reaffirmation of the productive power of performance to respond to a public and political health crisis and act as a mode of resistance to cultural amnesia, discrimination and stigmatisation. It sets out a number of challenges and contexts for HIV and AIDS performance in the twenty-first century, including: the financial interests of the pharmaceutical industry; the unequal access to treatment and prevention technologies in the Global North and Global South; the problematic division between dominant (white, gay, urban, cis-male) and marginalised narratives of HIV; the tension between a damaging cultural amnesia and a potentially equally damaging partner ‘AIDS nostalgia’; the criminalisation of HIV non-disclosure; and, sustaining and sustained by all of these, the ongoing stigmatisation of people living with HIV. This collection presents work from a vast range of contexts, grouped around four main areas: women’s voices and experiences; generations, memories and temporalities; inter/national narratives; and artistic and personal reflections and interventions.

After the Party

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099533685
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 63

Book Description
Eleven years ago, Jem and Ralph fell deeply in love. But then, the unimaginable has happened. Two people who were so right together are starting to drift apart. As they try to find a way back to each other, back to what they once had, they both become momentarily distracted--but maybe it's not too late to recapture happily ever after.