The Cement Garden

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: RosettaBooks
ISBN: 0795302592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this “irresistibly readable” novel by the New York Times-bestselling author (The New York Review of Books). This “powerful and disconcerting” novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement (The Daily Telegraph) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents’ deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. “[A] beautiful but disturbing novel.”—The AV Club “McEwan’s evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family.”—The New Yorker

Ian McEwan Bestsellers

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795351186
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
These three bestselling novels by the Booker Award-winning author explore the dark sides of love, family and sexuality. The Child in Time On a routine Saturday morning trip to the supermarket, a father’s brief moment of distraction turns his life upside down when his daughter is kidnapped. His spiral of guilt and bereavement has effects on his marriage, his psyche—and time itself. The Cement Garden When their mother suddenly dies, four siblings hide her body in the basement to prevent others from discovering her death and placing them in foster care. But their dark secret sets them on a path of isolation and boundary-crossing intimacy. The Comfort of Strangers Colin and Mary are vacationing in Venice in hopes of reigniting their relationship. But after losing their way in the winding streets, their acquaintance with another couple takes turns that are likewise erotic and violent in nature.

First Love, Last Rites

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795301898
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
Somerset Maugham Award winner: Dark early fiction by the author of Nutshell—“A splendid magician of fear” (The Village Voice Literary Supplement). Taut, brooding, and densely atmospheric, the stories here show us how murder can arise out of boredom, perversity from adolescent curiosity—and how sheer evil can become the solution to unbearable loneliness. These short fiction pieces from the early career of the New York Times–bestselling and Man Booker Prize–winning author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach are claustrophobic tales of childhood, twisted psychology, and disjointed family life as terrifying as anything by Stephen King—and finely crafted with a lyricism and an intensity that compels us to confront our secret kinship with what repels us. “A powerful talent that is both weird and wonderful.” —The Boston Sunday Globe “Ian McEwan’s fictional world combin[es] the bleak, dreamlike quality of de Chirico’s city-scapes with the strange eroticism of canvases by Balthus. Menace lies crouched between the lines of his neat, angular prose, and weird, grisly things occur in his books with nearly casual aplomb.” —The New York Times

Making Concrete Garden Ornaments

Author: Sherri Warner Hunter
Publisher: Lark Books
ISBN: 9781579903183
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
A celebrated teacher has gathered the tried-and-true techniques used by sculptors and folk artists, and tailored them for low-tech surroundings. Work with molds; form over armatures; model or carve with concrete; and treat concrete surfaces with mosaics, embedded objects, incising, and coloring. For dazzling outdoor embellishments, craft a birdbath, a Little Lady Fountain, and more. Twenty-five projects in all.

Capturing Nature

Author: Patsy Pittman Light
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1585446106
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Over a period of some twenty years, Mexican-born artisan Dionicio Rodríguez created imaginative sculptures of reinforced concrete that imitated the natural forms and textures of trees and rocks. He worked in eight different states from 1924 through the early 1950s but spent much of his early career in San Antonio, where several of his creations have become beloved landmarks. More than a dozen of Rodríguez’s works have been included on the National Register of Historic Places. Patsy Pittman Light has spent a decade documenting the trabajo rústico (“rustic work”) of Rodríguez, along with its antecedents in Europe and Mexico, and the subsequent work of those Rodríguez trained in San Antonio. Rodríguez’s unique and unusual art will fascinate those new to it and delight those to whom it is familiar. San Antonio sites such as the bus stop on Broadway, the faux bois bridge in Brackenridge Park, and the “rocks” on the Miraflores Gate at the San Antonio Museum of Art, along with the Old Mill at T. R. Pugh Memorial Park in North Little Rock and Memorial Park Cemetery in Memphis, are just a few of the locations covered in this volume celebrating the life and work of a Latino artisan. Students and devotees of Texas and Southwestern art will welcome this book and its long-overdue appreciation of this artist. Additionally, this book will commend itself to those interested in Latino studies, art history, and folklore.

The Innocent

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307761029
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 303

Book Description
A member of a British-American surveillance team in Cold War Berlin finds himself in too deep in this "wholly entertaining" work (The Wall Street Journal) from the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement. Twenty-five-year-old Leonard Marnham’s intelligence work—tunneling under a Russian communications center to tap the phone lines to Moscow—offers him a welcome opportunity to begin shedding his own unwanted innocence, even if he is only a bit player in a grim international comedy of errors. His relationship with Maria Eckdorf, an enigmatic and beautiful West Berliner, likewise promises to loosen the bonds of his ordinary life. But the promise turns to horror in the course of one terrible evening—a night when Marnham learns just how much of his innocence he's willing to shed. Don’t miss Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons.

Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces

Author: Jan Johnsen
Publisher: The Countryman Press
ISBN: 1682683974
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
“Gardentopia is that rare marriage of the art of landscaping and the technical knowledge of how to compose a landscape—boiled down to readily understood and easily executed actions. This book puts you in the driver’s seat and shows you how to chart the course to your own personal garden utopia.” - Margie Grace, Grace Design Associates Any backyard has the potential to refresh and inspire if you know what to do. Jan Johnsen’s new book, Gardentopia: Design Basics for Creating Beautiful Outdoor Spaces, will delight all garden lovers with over 130 lushly illustrated landscape design and planting suggestions. Ms. Johnsen is an admired designer and popular speaker whose hands-on approach to “co-creating with nature” will have you saying, “I can do that!’ This info-packed, sumptuous book offers individual tips for enhancing any size landscape using ‘real world’ solutions. The suggestions are grouped into five categories that include Garden Design and Artful Accents, Walls, Patios, and Steps and Plants and Planting, among others. Whether you are an experienced gardener or a landscaping novice, Gardentopia will inspire you with tips such as ‘Soften a Corner”, “Paint it Black”, and “Hide and Reveal”.

The Child in Time

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: RosettaBooks
ISBN: 0795304099
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
A child’s abduction sends a father reeling in this Whitbread Award-winning novel that explores time and loss with “narrative daring and imaginative genius” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Stephen Lewis, a successful author of children’s books, is on a routine trip to the supermarket with his three-year-old daughter. In a brief moment of distraction, she suddenly vanishes—and is irretrievably lost. From that moment, Lewis spirals into bereavement that effects his marriage, his psyche, and his relationship with time itself: “It was a wonder that there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none at all.” In The Child in Time, acclaimed author Ian McEwan “sets a story of domestic horror against a disorienting exploration in time” producing “a work of remarkable intellectual and political sophistication” that has been adapted into a PBS Masterpiece movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). “A beautifully rendered, very disturbing novel.” —Publishers Weekly

Cement and Concrete

Author: M.S.J Gan
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 9780412790508
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Cement and concrete are of great interest to the construction and civil engineering communities. This study provides an appreciation of the complex nature of these materials and a realization that most of the failures involving concrete constructions are preventable.

The Comfort of Strangers

Author: Ian McEwan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 140908986X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description
Rediscover the classic novel of love, violence and obsessions from Booker prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling author Ian McEwan. Colin and Mary are a couple whose intimacy knows no bounds. Away on a holiday together in a nameless city, they get lost one evening in a labyrinth of streets and canals. They happen upon Robert, a stranger with a dark history, who takes them to a bar and ushers them down into a subterranean land of violence and obsession. ‘Haunting and compelling’ The Times ‘No reader will begin The Comfort of Strangers and fail to finish it; a black magician is at work’ New York Times