A Net for Small Fishes

Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526616610
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
Longlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel AwardA GUARDIAN SUMMER READING PICK'Sumptuous ... If you're feeling bereft after finishing The Mirror and the Light, let Jago transport you to the Jacobean court' Telegraph 'A bravura historical debut ... a gloriously immersive escape' Guardian -------------------------------------------------Frances Howard has beauty and a powerful family - and is the most unhappy creature in the world.Anne Turner has wit and talent - but no stage on which to display them. Little stands between her and the abyss of destitution.When these two very different women meet in the strangest of circumstances, a powerful friendship is sparked. Frankie sweeps Anne into a world of splendour that exceeds all she imagined: a Court whose foreign king is a stranger to his own subjects; where ancient families fight for power, and where the sovereign's favourite may rise and rise - so long as he remains in favour.With the marriage of their talents, Anne and Frankie enter this extravagant, savage hunting ground, seeking a little happiness for themselves. But as they gain notice, they also gain enemies; what began as a search for love and safety leads to desperate acts that could cost them everything. Based on the true scandal that rocked the court of James I, A Net for Small Fishes is the most gripping novel you'll read this year: an exhilarating dive into the pitch-dark waters of the Jacobean court.-------------------------------------------------'Full of colour and intrigue ... Historical fiction at its scintillating best and most filmic' Susan Elderkin 'The Thelma and Louise of the seventeenth century ... Gut-wrenching' Lawrence Norfolk'Terrific, rich in colour, character, place and time' Sarah Dunant 'A fabulous book. Frankie and Anne's world is not just brilliantly evoked but brilliantly sustained' Andrew Miller 'Dazzling' Sunday Independent

The Founding Fish

Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706344
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after--its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.

Gould's Book of Fish

Author: Richard Flanagan
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191991
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 424

Book Description
Winner of the Commonwealth Prize New York Times Book Review—Notable Fiction 2002 Entertainment Weekly—Best Fiction of 2002 Los Angeles Times Book Review—Best of the Best 2002 Washington Post Book World—Raves 2002 Chicago Tribune—Favorite Books of 2002 Christian Science Monitor—Best Books 2002 Publishers Weekly—Best Books of 2002 The Cleveland Plain Dealer—Year’s Best Books Minneapolis Star Tribune—Standout Books of 2002 Once upon a time, when the earth was still young, before the fish in the sea and all the living things on land began to be destroyed, a man named William Buelow Gould was sentenced to life imprisonment at the most feared penal colony in the British Empire, and there ordered to paint a book of fish. He fell in love with the black mistress of the warder and discovered too late that to love is not safe; he attempted to keep a record of the strange reality he saw in prison, only to realize that history is not written by those who are ruled. Acclaimed as a masterpiece around the world, Gould’s Book of Fish is at once a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia and a contemporary fable, a tale of horror, and a celebration of love, all transformed by a convict painter into pictures of fish.

The Northern Lights

Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780140290158
Category : Auroras
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Just over one hundred years ago Kristian Birkeland looked into the night sky of his native Norway and saw in the beautiful Northern Lights a mystery waiting to be solved. Determined to prove to the world his bold theory about the heavens above, this misunderstood genius began a quest that would take him from Norway's ice mountains to the deserts of Africa, and across a continent ravaged by war. It was a quest that alienated friends and family, ruined his health and sanity, and ended in his mysterious death in a Japanese hotel in 1917. Lucy Jago brilliantly tells the fascinating and tragic story of Kristian Birkeland, the man who saw in the night sky a secret that no one else could see, but who died trying to convince the world of his vision.

Casting Forward

Author: Steve Ramirez
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493051466
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
In Casting Forward, naturalist, educator, and writer Steve Ramirez takes the reader on a yearlong journey fly fishing all of the major rivers of the Texas Hill Country. This is a story of the resilience of nature and the best of human nature. It is the story of a living, breathing place where the footprints of dinosaurs, conquistadors, and Comanches have mingled just beneath the clear spring-fed waters. This book is an impassioned plea for the survival of this landscape and its biodiversity, and for a new ethic in how we treat fish, nature, and each other.

Little Fish

Author: Casey Plett
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527219
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
WINNER, Lambda Literary Award; Firecracker Award for Fiction; $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award When thirty-year-old trans woman Wendy Reimer comes across evidence that her late grandfather—a devout Mennonite farmer—might have been transgender himself, she dismisses this revelation, having other problems at hand. But as she and her friends struggle to cope with their increasingly volatile lives—which range from alcoholism, to sex work, to suicide—Wendy grows increasingly drawn to the lost pieces of her grandfather’s life, becoming determined to unravel the mystery of his truth. Alternately warm-hearted and dark-spirited, desperate and mirthful, Little Fish explores the winter of discontent in the life of one transgender woman as her past and future become irrevocably entwined. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.

The Judge Hunter

Author: Christopher Buckley
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501192531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
The latest comic novel from Christopher Buckley, in which a hapless Englishman embarks on a dangerous mission to the New World in pursuit of two judges who helped murder a king. London, 1664. Twenty years after the English revolution, the monarchy has been restored and Charles II sits on the throne. The men who conspired to kill his father are either dead or disappeared. Baltasar “Balty” St. Michel is twenty-four and has no skills and no employment. He gets by on handouts from his brother-in-law Samuel Pepys, an officer in the king’s navy. Fed up with his needy relative, Pepys offers Balty a job in the New World. He is to track down two missing judges who were responsible for the execution of the last king, Charles I. When Balty’s ship arrives in Boston, he finds a strange country filled with fundamentalist Puritans, saintly Quakers, warring tribes of Indians, and rogues of every stripe. Helped by a man named Huncks, an agent of the Crown with a mysterious past, Balty travels colonial America in search of the missing judges. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Samuel Pepys prepares for a war with the Dutch that fears England has no chance of winning. Christopher Buckley’s enchanting new novel spins adventure, comedy, political intrigue, and romance against a historical backdrop with real-life characters like Charles II, John Winthrop, and Peter Stuyvesant. Buckley’s wit is as sharp as ever as he takes readers to seventeenth-century London and New England. We visit the bawdy court of Charles II, Boston under the strict Puritan rule, and New Amsterdam back when Manhattan was a half-wild outpost on the edge of an unmapped continent. The Judge Hunter is a smart and swiftly plotted novel that transports readers to a new world.

Montacute House

Author: Lucy Jago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408803771
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
Cess works caring for the chickens at Montacute House but on her thirteenth birthday everything changes. She finds a precious locket hidden in the chicken coop and is convinced someone has placed it there for her to find. But the day is overshadowed by fear as a boy's body is found by the river, and then when William disappears, Cess is accused by the villagers of bewitching her best friend. Cess is determined to find William and prove the villagers wrong, but is soon embroiled in a plot that threatens her world and forces Cess to draw on powers she never knew she possessed, powers that will place her life in danger if they are discovered by the villagers. Witchcraft, politics and religious ambition combine in this gripping and wonderfully realised novel set in the Somerset of the 1500s.

Striper Wars

Author: Dick Russell
Publisher: Island Press
ISBN: 1610911105
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
When populations of striped bass began plummeting in the early 1980s, author and fisherman Dick Russell was there to lead an Atlantic coast conservation campaign that resulted in one of the most remarkable wildlife comebacks in the history of fisheries. As any avid fisherman will tell you, the striped bass has long been a favorite at the American dinner table; in fact, we've been feasting on the fish from the time of the Pilgrims. By 1980 that feasting had turned to overfishing by commercial fishing interests. Striper Wars is Dick Russell's inspiring account of the people and events responsible for the successful preservation of one of America's favorite fish and of what has happened since. Striper Wars is a tale replete with heroes--and some villains--as the struggle to save the striper migrated down the coast from Massachusetts to Maryland. Russell introduces us to a postman at arms against a burly trap-net fisherman, a renowned state governor caving to special interests, and a fishing-tackle maker fighting alongside marine biologists. And he describes how champions of this singular fish blocked power plants and New York's Westway Project that would otherwise compromise its habitat. Unfortunately, those who cheered the triumphant ending to the campaign, as the coastal states enacted measures that enabled the striped bass to make its comeback, have found the peace transitory--there is now a new enemy emerging on the front. In recent years a chronic bacterial disease has struck more than seventy percent of the striped bass population in the primary spawning waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Malnutrition seems to be a significant factor, brought on by the same overfishing that plagued the bass in the first battle--only this time, the overfishing is devastating menhaden, the silvery little fish upon which the bass feed. Lessons learned during the first conservation battle are being applied here, highlighting a need for a whole new ecosystem-based approach to conserving species. Only with constant vigilance by concerned citizens, Dick Russell reminds us, can environmental victories be sustained. This particular fish story is a personal one for him, and he follows the striper's saga today all the way to California, where the fish was introduced in 1879 and where agribusiness now threatens its future. For his conservation work during the 1980s Russell received a citizen's Chevron Conservation Award.

Why Fish Don't Exist

Author: Lulu Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501160370
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
A Best Book of 2020: The Washington Post * NPR * Chicago Tribune * Smithsonian A “remarkable” (Los Angeles Times), “seductive” (The Wall Street Journal) debut from the new cohost of Radiolab, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a dark and astonishing tale of love, chaos, scientific obsession, and—possibly—even murder. “At one point, Miller dives into the ocean into a school of fish…comes up for air, and realizes she’s in love. That’s how I felt: Her book took me to strange depths I never imagined, and I was smitten.” —The New York Times Book Review David Starr Jordan was a taxonomist, a man possessed with bringing order to the natural world. In time, he would be credited with discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day. But the more of the hidden blueprint of life he uncovered, the harder the universe seemed to try to thwart him. His specimen collections were demolished by lightning, by fire, and eventually by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake—which sent more than a thousand discoveries, housed in fragile glass jars, plummeting to the floor. In an instant, his life’s work was shattered. Many might have given up, given in to despair. But Jordan? He surveyed the wreckage at his feet, found the first fish that he recognized, and confidently began to rebuild his collection. And this time, he introduced one clever innovation that he believed would at last protect his work against the chaos of the world. When NPR reporter Lulu Miller first heard this anecdote in passing, she took Jordan for a fool—a cautionary tale in hubris, or denial. But as her own life slowly unraveled, she began to wonder about him. Perhaps instead he was a model for how to go on when all seemed lost. What she would unearth about his life would transform her understanding of history, morality, and the world beneath her feet. Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist is a wondrous fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.