A Single Swallow

Author: Zhang Ling
Publisher: AmazonCrossing
ISBN: 9781542041508
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The eagerly awaited English translation of award-winning author Zhang Ling's epic and intimate novel about the devastation of war, forgiveness, redemption, and the enduring power of love. On the day of the historic 1945 Jewel Voice Broadcast--in which Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender to the Allied forces, bringing an end to World War II--three men, flush with jubilation, made a pact. After their deaths, each year on the anniversary of the broadcast, their souls would return to the Chinese village of their younger days. It's where they had fought--and survived--a war that shook the world and changed their own lives in unimaginable ways. Now, seventy years later, the pledge is being fulfilled by American missionary Pastor Billy, brash gunner's mate Ian Ferguson, and local soldier Liu Zhaohu. All that's missing is Ah Yan--also known as Swallow--the girl each man loved, each in his own profound way. As they unravel their personal stories of the war, and of the woman who touched them so deeply during that unforgiving time, the story of Ah Yan's life begins to take shape, woven into view by their memories. A woman who had suffered unspeakable atrocities, and yet found the grace and dignity to survive, she'd been the one to bring them together. And it is her spark of humanity, still burning brightly, that gives these ghosts of the past the courage to look back on everything they endured and remember the woman they lost.

A Single Swallow

Author: Horatio Clare
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409076245
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
From the slums of Cape Town to the palaces of Algiers, through Pygmy villages where pineapples grow wild, to the Gulf of Guinea where the sea blazes with oil flares, across two continents and fourteen countries - this epic journey is nothing to swallows, they do it twice a year. But for Horatio Clare, writer and birdwatcher, it is the expedition of a lifetime. Along the way he discovers old empires and modern tribes, a witch-doctor's recipe for stewed swallow, explains how to travel without money or a passport, and describes a terrifying incident involving three Spanish soldiers and a tiny orange dog. By trains, motorbikes, canoes, one camel and three ships, Clare follows the swallows from reed beds in South Africa, where millions roost in February, to a barn in Wales, where a pair nest in May.

A Game for Swallows

Author: Zeina Abirached
Publisher: Graphic Universe ™
ISBN: 1467700479
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
When Zeina was born, the civil war in Lebanon had been going on for six years, so it's just a normal part of life for her and her parents and her little brother. The city of Beirut is cut in two, separated by bricks and sandbags and threatened by snipers and shelling. East Beirut is for Christians, and West Beirut is for Muslims. When Zeina's parents don't return one afternoon from a visit to the other half of the city, and the bombing grows ever closer, the neighbors in her apartment house create a world indoors for Zeina and her brother where it's comfy and safe, where they can share cooking lessons and games and gossip. Together they try to make it through a dramatic day in the one place they hoped they would always be safehome. Zeina Abirached, born into a Lebanese Christian family in 1981, has collected her childhood recollections of Beirut in a warm story about the strength of family and community.

Swallow Savannah

Author: Ken Burger
Publisher: EveningPostBooks
ISBN: 9780981873527
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Set against the backdrop of the Savannah River Site and its start in the area, this novel involves such issues as nuclear testing on humans, political corruption, civil rights, murder, exploitation, and dark family secrets.

The Swallow: A Ghost Story

Author: Charis Cotter
Publisher: Tundra Books
ISBN: 1770495924
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
A classic ghost story with twists and turns: a spooky house, a malevolent spirit and two plucky heroines. In 1960s Toronto, two girls retreat to their attics to escape the loneliness and isolation of their lives. Polly lives in a house bursting at the seams with people, while Rose is often left alone by her busy parents. Polly is a down-to-earth dreamer with a wild imagination and an obsession with ghosts; Rose is a quiet, ethereal waif with a sharp tongue. Despite their differences, both girls spend their days feeling invisible and seek solace in books and the cozy confines of their respective attics. But soon they discover they aren't alone--they're actually neighbors, sharing a wall. They develop an unlikely friendship, and Polly is ecstatic to learn that Rose can actually see and talk to ghosts. Maybe she will finally see one too! But is there more to Rose than it seems? Why does no one ever talk to her? And why does she look so ... ghostly? When the girls find a tombstone with Rose's name on it in the cemetery and encounter an angry spirit in her house who seems intent on hurting Polly, they have to unravel the mystery of Rose and her strange family... before it's too late.

The Year the Swallows Came Early

Author: Kathryn Fitzmaurice
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061624977
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
Eleanor "Groovy" Robinson loves cooking and plans to go to culinary school just as soon as she's old enough. But even Groovy's thoughtfully—planned menus won't fix the things that start to go wrong the year she turns eleven—suddenly, her father is in jail, her best friend's long-absent mother reappears, and the swallows that make their annual migration to her hometown arrive surprisingly early. As Groovy begins to expect the unexpected, she learns about the importance of forgiveness, understands the complex stories of the people around her, and realizes that even an earthquake can't get in the way of a family that needs to come together. Kathryn Fitzmaurice's lovely debut novel is distinctively Californian in its flavor. Her rich characters and strong sense of place feel both familiar and fresh at first meeting—and worth revisiting, again and again.

Swallow This: Serving Up the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets

Author: Joanna Blythman
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008157847
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
From the author of What to Eat and Shopped, a revelatory investigation into what really goes into the food we eat.

Swallow

Author: Mary Cappello
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1459607619
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 550

Book Description
An American half-dollar. A beaded crucifix. Tooth roots shaped like a tiny pair of pants. A padlock. Scads of peanut kernels and scores of safety pins. A metallic letter Z. A toy goat and tin steering wheel. A Perfect Attendance Pin. One of the most popular attractions in Philadelphia's world-famous Mtter Museum is the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection; a beguiling set of drawers filled with thousands of items that had been swallowed or inhaled, then extracted nonsurgically by a pioneering laryngologist using rigid instruments of his own design. How do people's mouths, lungs, and stomachs end up filled with inedible things, and what do they become once arranged in Jackson's aura-laden cabinet? What drove Dr. Chevalier Jackson's peculiar obsession not only with removing foreign bodies from people's upper torsos but also with saving and cataloging the items that he retrieved? Animating the space between interest and terror, curiosity and dread, award-winning author Mary Cappello explores what seems beyond understanding; the physiology of the human swallow, and the poignant and baffling psychology that compels people to ingest non-nutritive things. On a quest to restore the narratives that haunt Jackson's uncanny collection, she discovers that all things are secretly edible. Combining original research with a sympathetic and evocative sensibility, Cappello uncovers a history of racism and violence, of forced ingestion and hysteria, of class and poverty that left children to bank their family's last quarters in their mouths. Here, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who grew up to be the father of endoscopy.

The Truth Is the Hardest Pill to Swallow

Author: Shannon Branch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985511913
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

Book Description
"THE TRUTH IS THE HARDEST PILL TO SWALLOW" is a brutally honest, truthful, and accurate guide to relationships, marriages, dating, and sex from the perspective of a single black male who has experienced a lot as well as witnessed much from life. NO sugar coating, NO fairy tales, NO feminist or sexist nonsense. Just telling it how it is. The way it should be told.

Swallow

Author: Sefi Atta
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
ISBN: 1623710073
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
In the 1980s in Lagos, the government’s War Against Indiscipline and austerity measures are in full swing. A succession of unfortunate events leads Tolani, a bank secretary, to be persuaded by her roommate Rose to consider drug trafficking as a way to make a living. Tolani’s subsequent struggle with temptation forces her to reconsider her morality—and that of her mother Arike’s—as she embarks on a turbulent journey of self-discovery.