Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101873019
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 117

Book Description
An all-new, never-before-published original short novel by the bestselling author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, about a hapless American tourist’s larger-than-life comical trip to Ireland. Shortlisted for the 2015 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction Cornelius P. “Fatty” O'Leary and his wife, Betty, plan a vacation in Ireland for his fortieth birthday, where they will tour his ancestral homeland and relax in the countryside. Almost immediately, things go terribly wrong: the seats in economy class on the plane are too small; the country hotel’s dinner spread and bathroom fixtures leave much to be desired; and the down-to-earth O’Learys find their fellow guests are more than a little snobbish. In this amusing and touching portrayal of a kindly, misunderstood soul, McCall Smith has created yet another memorable character who will become an instant favorite to his many fans. An eBook short.

Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Polygon
ISBN: 9781846974519
Category : Humorous stories
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
It takes a lot to get under the skin of Cornelius 'Fatty O'Leary, but then there is a lot of skin to get under. The heroically proportioned Fatty can normally take life as it comes. Right at home in easy-going Fayetteville, Arkansas, he is happily married to his childhood sweetheart Betty, and likes nothing better than the company of good friends Tubby O'Rourke and Porky Flanagan. But when Fatty and Betty head off to Ireland on the trip of a lifetime, they find that they have left their comfort zone far behind. Calamity and mayhem ensue as one mishap after another befalls the beleaguered couple. Can Fatty's broad shoulders take the strain or will he suffer one indignity too many? Will he get his just deserts, or just dessert?

The Forever Girl

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1405516038
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
Clover has loved James for as long as she can remember, since before she knew what what love was. But fate seems determined to keep them apart. As children, Clover and James played beside a turquoise sea under cloudless skies, their Caribbean island home a place of pleasure and privilege, of lush lawns and tennis parties. In such a paradise nothing should obstruct the kind of happiness Clover dreams of, except that, as she discovers, true love is often harder than paradise allows for. And when Clover's mother falls out of love with her husband, a web of complications is woven that may take Clover a lifetime to unravel. If she ever can . . . Tender and true, The Forever Girl traces love's unpredictable path to maturity with style, wit and feeling.

Trains and Lovers

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307908550
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
The rocking motion of the train as it speeds along, the sound of its wheels on the rails . . . There’s something special about this form of travel that makes for easy conversation, which is just what happens to the four strangers who meet in Trains and Lovers. As they journey by rail from Edinburgh to London, the four travelers pass the time by sharing tales of trains that have changed their lives. A young, keen-eyed Scotsman recounts how he turned a friendship with a female coworker into a romance by spotting an anachronistic train in an eighteenth-century painting. An Australian woman shares how her parents fell in love and spent their life together running a railroad siding in the remote Australian Outback. A middle-aged American patron of the arts sees two young men saying goodbye in a train station and recalls his own youthful crush on another man. And a young Englishman describes how exiting his train at the wrong station allowed him to meet an intriguing woman whom he impulsively invited to dinner—and into his life. Here is Alexander McCall Smith at his most enchanting, exploring the nature of love—and trains—in a collection of romantic, intertwined stories. This eBook edition includes a Reading Group Guide.

Archibald Lawless, Anarchist at Large

Author: Walter Mosley
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 1101973536
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 110

Book Description
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection Young journalism student Felix Orlean is in over his head. Against his better judgment, he is temporarily under the employ of the mad yet charismatic anarchist detective Archibald Lawless, a witness to murder, and under investigation for the theft of millions of dollars in red diamonds. Caught in an impossible predicament, Orlean plunges into an underworld populated by shady denizens. With Lawless, he unravels a big-money conspiracy involving cold-blooded assassination, hide-away real estate in Manhattan, a network of international criminals, a lethal siren named Lana Drexel, and the richest man in Canada. A brilliant, absurdist novella and a biting work of political commentary, Walter Mosley’s “Archibald Lawless” is a masterpiece of contemporary American crime fiction. An ebook short.

A Conspiracy of Friends

Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307907244
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
CORDUROY MANSIONS - Book 3 In the Corduroy Mansions series of novels, set in London’s hip Pimlico neighborhood, we meet a cast of charming eccentrics, including perhaps the world’s most clever terrier, who make their home in a handsome, though slightly dilapidated, apartment block. It seems the universe itself is conspiring against the residents of Corduroy Mansions, as they all find themselves struggling with their nearest and dearest. Oedipus Snark’s mother, Berthea, is still at work on her scathing biography of her son—the only loathsome Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament; literary agents Rupert Porter and Barbara Ragg are still battling each other for first crack at the manuscript of Autobiography of a Yeti; fine arts graduate Caroline Jarvis is busy exploring the blurry line between friendship and romance; and William French is still worrying that his son, Eddie, may never leave home, even though Eddie’s got a new wealthy girlfriend. But uppermost in everyone’s mind is William’s faithful terrier, Freddie de la Hay—without a doubt the only dog clever enough to have been recruited by MI6—who has disappeared while on a mystery tour around the Suffolk countryside. Will Freddie find his way back to Pimlico? Is Corduroy Mansions starting to crumble? Readers will be captivated once again by McCall Smith’s genius for storytelling, his insight into his beautifully crafted characters and his eye for the quirky details of modern life.

California 1901

Author: Clifford Jackman
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101970286
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
A Vintage Shorts Original The explosive companion piece to Clifford Jackman’s The Winter Family: when a burned man appears on a farm in rural California, looking for work and somewhere to die, the good folks there take him in. But the burned man has a past, and it’s about to catch up with him. “California 1901” captures the old West in its death throes—a psychotic Pinkerton agent searching for oil, a sharpshooter with his hands tied, a gambler lost in San Francisco’s Chinatown, and a burned man, not quite dead and not who he says he is, bracing for one last fight. In a new century, on the edge of America, a final reckoning awaits. An eBook short.

Marseille

Author: M.F.K. Fisher
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101972874
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 27

Book Description
A Vintage Shorts Travel Selection Nowhere in the world did the beloved food and travel writer M.F.K Fisher feel more at ease than in the port of Marseille. From her timeless A Considerable Town, published as part of Two Towns in Provence, here is her affectionate introduction to the old streets and bustling waterfront of France’s second city. “I first spent a night there in late 1929, and since then I have returned even oftener than seems reasonable,” says Fisher of her long-term love affair with the city by the sea. In these recollections she paints a vibrant, sun-drenched portrait of the distinctive character of Marseille and its residents, the insolite or “indefinable” identity that makes it unlike anywhere else. As she reflects on the history, the culture and, of course, the foods, that make Marseille what it is, Fisher brings the city to life as only she can. An eBook short.

Accompany Me

Author: Nora Gallagher
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525435166
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 39

Book Description
In her deeply affecting and profound portrait of illness and how it can dramatically alter the fabric of our lives and our faith, Nora Gallagher depicts the process of alienation she experienced when she encountered her first major crisis of health. Learning to suddenly have to ask for help, to heal, and to find her own capacity for wellness and resilience—Gallagher makes a powerful call for a more meditative, shared existence in which we can sit quietly with one another, open our hearts, listen, accept, and throw off the narrative of business and function that pervades our lives and blinds us to compassion. Meditative, touching, and an inspiration—Accompany Me welcomes people from all walks of life and tradition to join Gallagher on her journey to rediscover her faith, her home and her comfort in a community of all of the other souls who spend their days with one another in the land of the vulnerable. A Vintage Shorts Original. An ebook short.

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101912022
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 53

Book Description
A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” Selection The fantastical story by beloved Jazz Age writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald—a dark and gleaming fairy tale about the excesses of wealth and the promise of the American West—selected from Fitzgerald’s exuberant collection, Tales of the Jazz Age. On a summer break from his New England education, John T. Unger of Hades, accompanies a new friend to his father’s private estate—a hidden palace carved out of one solid diamond mountain where extravagance knows no bounds, and everything feels a spectacular dream to modest Unger until he discovers the frightful lengths to which the family will go to protect their secret and their treasure. An ebook Short.