The Glass Room

Author: Simon Mawer
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590513975
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves. As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began. Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.

The Glass Castle

Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416544666
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.

The Man in the Glass House

Author: Mark Lamster
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316453498
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 485

Book Description
A "smoothly written and fair-minded" (Wall Street Journal) biography of architect Philip Johnson -- a finalist for the National Book Critic's Circle Award. When Philip Johnson died in 2005 at the age of 98, he was still one of the most recognizable and influential figures on the American cultural landscape. The first recipient of the Pritzker Prize and MoMA's founding architectural curator, Johnson made his mark as one of America's leading architects with his famous Glass House in New Caanan, CT, and his controversial AT&T Building in NYC, among many others in nearly every city in the country -- but his most natural role was as a consummate power broker and shaper of public opinion. Johnson introduced European modernism -- the sleek, glass-and-steel architecture that now dominates our cities -- to America, and mentored generations of architects, designers, and artists to follow. He defined the era of "starchitecture" with its flamboyant buildings and celebrity designers who esteemed aesthetics and style above all other concerns. But Johnson was also a man of deep paradoxes: he was a Nazi sympathizer, a designer of synagogues, an enfant terrible into his old age, a populist, and a snob. His clients ranged from the Rockefellers to televangelists to Donald Trump. Award-winning architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson's controversial and endlessly contradictory life to tell the story of a charming yet deeply flawed man. A rollercoaster tale of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this book probes the dynamics of American culture that made him so powerful, and tells the story of the built environment in modern America.

The Glass Hotel

Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525521151
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, an exhilarating novel set at the glittering intersection of two seemingly disparate events—the exposure of a massive criminal enterprise and the mysterious disappearance of a woman from a ship at sea. “The perfect novel ... Freshly mysterious.” —The Washington Post Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star lodging on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. On the night she meets Jonathan Alkaitis, a hooded figure scrawls a message on the lobby's glass wall: Why don’t you swallow broken glass. High above Manhattan, a greater crime is committed: Alkaitis's billion-dollar business is really nothing more than a game of smoke and mirrors. When his scheme collapses, it obliterates countless fortunes and devastates lives. Vincent, who had been posing as Jonathan’s wife, walks away into the night. Years later, a victim of the fraud is hired to investigate a strange occurrence: a woman has seemingly vanished from the deck of a container ship between ports of call. In this captivating story of crisis and survival, Emily St. John Mandel takes readers through often hidden landscapes: campgrounds for the near-homeless, underground electronica clubs, service in luxury hotels, and life in a federal prison. Rife with unexpected beauty, The Glass Hotel is a captivating portrait of greed and guilt, love and delusion, ghosts and unintended consequences, and the infinite ways we search for meaning in our lives. Look for Emily St. John Mandel’s bestselling new novel, Sea of Tranquility!

Thin Air

Author: Ann Cleeves
Publisher: Minotaur Books
ISBN: 1466879351
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
Ann Cleeves is back with Thin Air, the sixth book in her beloved Shetland series, which is now a hit television show starring Douglas Henshall. A group of old university friends leave the bright lights of London and travel to Shetland to celebrate the marriage of one of their friends. But, one of them, Eleanor, disappears—apparently into thin air. It's mid-summer, a time of light nights and unexpected mists. And then Eleanor's body is discovered lying in a small loch close to the cliff edge. Detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves are dispatched to investigate. Before she went missing, Eleanor claimed to have seen the ghost of a local child who drowned in the 1920s. Her interest in the ghost had seemed unhealthy—obsessive, even—to her friends: an indication of a troubled mind. But Jimmy and Willow are convinced that there is more to Eleanor's death than they first thought. Is there a secret that lies behind the myth? One so shocking that someone would kill—many years later—to protect? Ann Cleeves' striking new novel is a quintessential whodunit with surprises at every turn.

In the Glassroom

Author: Roger McGough
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 70

Book Description

Rest and Be Thankful

Author: Emma Glass
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526643669
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
'Gorgeously written ... It's heartbreaking but beautiful, and perfect for escaping into' FLORENCE WELCH 'Haunting yet beautifully written. I couldn't put it down. A masterpiece' POPPY DELEVINGNE Laura is a nurse in a paediatric unit. On long shifts she cares for sick babies, carefully handling their exquisitely breakable bodies. Laura needs a rest. When she sleeps, she dreams of drowning; when she wakes, she can't remember getting home. And there is a strange figure dancing in the corner of her vision, with a message, or a warning. 'Blends gnawing tension and surging tenderness ... Glass's battlefield prose calls to mind the literature of the trenches. This, though, is a trauma-generating war on death and despair fought for us in every city, every day' i paper 'Touching, devastating, almost absurdly pertinent ... What, Glass asks, do we expect from our caregivers, and how do we repay them for the burdens we lay on them?' Times Literary Supplement 'The ward scenes, with their crystalline descriptions of the vertiginous business of care, exquisitely beat out the ceaseless rhythms of life on a hospital front line' Metro 'Thrusts the reader into the pulse-raising fear, frenzy and relief of work in a paediatric intensive-care unit ... A battlefield atmosphere arises from Glass's prose as she recounts the time-stopping teamwork that aims to preserve tiny, fragile lives' Economist

The Glass Room

Author: Kate Holmquist
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
"On the morning of her thirty-seventh birthday Louisa Maguire takes a long hard look at her life and doesn't much like what she sees. Her mother didn't want her. Her husband is a womanizer. Her best friend keeps trying to seduce her. All she has left are her two beloved children, a hectic career photographing Dublin's beautiful people ... and a longing to turn back time and start all over again." "When two long-forgotten faces turn up in her studio, Louisa's mind is flooded with memories of her bohemian childhood in New York and of a summer in the Hamptons when she was seventeen. When her first love also arrives in Dublin, Louisa's life is turned upside-down and she is forced to confront the devastating truth about why she has always put security before passion and sex before love."--BOOK JACKET.

Glass Houses

Author: Rachel Caine
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110112850X
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood. Watch a Windows Media trailer for this book.

Prague Spring

Author: Simon Mawer
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
ISBN: 1408711133
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 393

Book Description
'Prague Spring is a wonderfully atmospheric portrait of the city as well as a political and historical thriller with dashes of espionage. It is as brilliant as anything he has written, which is saying a lot' The Times It's the summer of 1968, the year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter. Two English students, Ellie and James, set off to hitch-hike across Europe with no particular aim in mind but a continent, and themselves, to discover. Somewhere in southern Germany they decide, on a whim, to visit Czechoslovakia where Alexander Dubcek's 'socialism with a human face' is smiling on the world. Meanwhile Sam Wareham, a first secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with a mixture of diplomatic cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Konecková, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. It seems that, for the first time, nothing is off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubcek and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?