Cooking Shows

Mother and adopted daughter, Taylor and Turtle Greer, are back in this spellbinding sequel about family, heartbreak and love.Six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam during a tour of the Grand Canyon with her guardian, Taylor. Her insistence on what she has seen, and her mother's belief in her, lead to a man's dramatic rescue. The mother and adopted daughter duo soon become nationwide heroes - even landing themselves a guest appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions stemming right back to her Cherokee roots. The crisis quickly envelops not only Turtle and her guardian, but everyone else who touches their lives in a complex web connecting their future with their past.Embark on a unforgettable road trip from rural Kentucky and the urban Southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation, testing the boundaries of family and the many separate truths about the ties that bind.

The thirteenth novel in Alexander McCall Smith's much-loved ISABEL DALHOUSIE series.Isabel Dalhousie applies her moral philosopher's mind to wrongdoings in Edinburgh, and will have to call upon her powers of deduction and her unflappable moral code to unravel another mystery in the new novel from the bestselling author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series.In Edinburgh, rumours and gossip abound. But Isabel knows that such things can't be taken at face value. Still, the latest whispers hint at mysterious goings-on, and who but Isabel can be trusted to get to the bottom of them? At the same time, she must deal with the demands of her two small children, her husband and her rather tempestuous niece, Cat, whose latest romantic entanglement comes - to no one's surprise - with complications. Even with so much going on, Isabel, through the application of good sense, logic and ethics, will, as ever, triumph.

An alternate cover edition can be found here.Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past—whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.

By the Koscielski Prize-winning author of Dream and Stones, In Red is the gripping cautionary tale in which real and unreal combine explosively, making us question the nature of the work itself. Set in an imaginary fourth partition of Poland, In Red retraces the turbulent history of the Twentieth Century in a labyrinth of greed, inheritance, and entropy, enacting—word by tremulous word—the claustrophobia of a small town from which there seems to be no escape. Never have Tulli's trademark precision of language and her crystalline storytelling been put to such brilliant use.

Jay Mackintosh is trapped by memory in the old familiar landscape of his childhood, more enticing than the present, and to which he longs to return. A bottle of home-brewed wine left to him by a long vanished friend seems to provide both the key to an old mystery and a doorway into another world. As the unusual properties of the strange brew takes effect, Jay escapes to a derelict farmhouse in the French village of Lansquenet , where a ghost from the past waits to confront him, and the reclusive Marise -haunted, lovely, and dangerous- hides a terrible secret behind her closed shuters. Between them, a mysterious chemistry. Or could it be magic?

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions. "It is Dr. Sacks's gift that he has found a way to enlarge our experience and understanding of what the human is." --"The Wall Street Journal "Dubbed "the poet laureate of medicine" by "The New York Times, " Oliver Sacks is a practicing neurologist and a mesmerizing storyteller. His empathetic accounts of his patients's lives--and wrily observed narratives of his own--convey both the extreme borderlands of human experience and the miracles of ordinary seeing, speaking, hearing, thinking, and feeling. Vintage Sacks includes the introduction and case study "Rose R." from Awakenings (the book that inspired the Oscar-nominated movie), as well as "A Deaf World" from Seeing Voices; "The Visions of Hildegard" from Migraine; excerpts from "Island Hopping" and "Pingelap" from The Island of the Colorblind; "A Surgeon's Life" from An Anthropologist on Mars; and two chapters from Sacks's acclaimed memoir Uncle Tungsten.

In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.

Ma hankers for France, heat. So all ten Larkins flee cold wet England in August. Son-in-law Charley teaches bon mots for his childhood sunny seaside, bursts beachballs sent at his topless tanning Marriette. Air is stormy, tea weak, food tough, burnt. Ma's bulk bursts chair. Host Mlle Dupont eyes Pa's bachelor passport and "milord's" monogrammed Rolls.

A busy young writer struggling to cope with domestic chores, hires a housekeeper recommended by a friend. The housekeeper's reputation is one built on dependable efficiency, though she is something of an oddity. Stubborn, foul-mouthed and with a flagrant disregard for her employer's opinions she may even be crazy. She allows no-one to set foot inside her house; she masks herself with a veil and is equally guarded about her personal life. And yet Emerence is revered as much as she is feared. As the story progresses her energy and passion to help becomes clear, extinguishing any doubts arising out of her bizarre behaviour. A stylishly told tale which recounts a strange relationship built up over 20 years between a writer and her housekeeper. After an unpromising and caustic start benign feelings develop and ultimately the writer benefits from what becomes an inseparable relationship. Simultaneously we learn Emerence's tragic past which is revealed in snapshots throughout the book.

A northern gothic tale about resilience and belongingIn a boom town dominated by a man-eating lake, Renee and Danny Chance start a new life in his grandfather's cabin. Renee struggles to keep her head above water until she is drawn into the orbit of two beautifully notorious bar-singer cousins, and all three women are called to test the bonds of blood and loyalty. A polyphonic fable riddled with tall tales, Glory explores what it means to be a woman in north-central BC by flooding the shores of the human heart.

“When I was asked to choose a myth to write about, I realized I had chosen already. The story of Atlas holding up the world was in my mind before the telephone call had ended. If the call had not come, perhaps I would never have written the story, but when the call did come, that story was waiting to be written. Rewritten. The recurring language motif of Weight is ‘I want to tell the story again.’ My work is full of cover versions. I like to take stories we think we know and record them differently. In the retelling comes a new emphasis or bias, and the new arrangement of the key elements demands that fresh material be injected into the existing text. Weight moves far away from the simple story of Atlas’s punishment and his temporary relief when Heracles takes the world off his shoulders. I wanted to explore loneliness, isolation, responsibility, burden, and freedom, too, because my version has a very particular end not found elsewhere.” -- from Jeanette Winterson’s Foreword to Weight

Cameron Wolfe's life gets very complicated when he falls for his brother's girlfriend in this winning, wise novel from the dynamic author of FIGHTING RUBEN WOLFE.Cameron Wolfe is the quiet one in his family, not a soccer star like his brother Steve or a charming fighter with a new girl every week like his brother Rube. Cam would give anything to be near one of those girls, to love her and treat her right. He especially likes Rube's latest, Octavia, with her brilliant ideas and bright green eyes. But what woman like that would want a loser like him? Maybe Octavia would, Cam discovers. Maybe he'd even have something to say. And those maybes change everything: winning, loving, losing, the Wolfe brothers, and Cameron himself.

Sergeant Lester Ferris is a good man in need of a rest. After a long career of being shot at, he’s about to be retired. The mildly larcenous, backwater island of Mancreu is the ideal place to serve out his time, a former British colony in legal limbo, belching toxic clouds of waste and facing imminent destruction by an international community concerned for their own safety. The perfect place for Lester is also the perfect location for a multinational array of shady businesses. Hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: spy stations, arms dealers, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and torture centres. None of which should be a problem, since Lester's brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.Meanwhile, he befriends a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comic book fixation who will need a home when the island dies. When Mancreu's fragile society erupts in violence, Lester must be more than just an observer: he has no choice but to rediscover the man of action he once was, and find out what kind of hero the island—and the boy—will need.From the award-winning author of Angelmaker and The Gone-Away World, Tigerman is a novel at once deeply heartfelt and headlong thrilling—about parenthood, friendship and secret identities, about heroes of both the super and the everyday kind.

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins this visionary work from a storyteller. Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paradise opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation of race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present.

"My Brilliant Career" is the story of Sybylla, a headstrong young girl growing up in early 20th century Australia. Sybylla rejects the opportunity to marry a wealthy young man in order to maintain her independence. As a consequence she must take a job as a governess to a local family to which her father is indebted. "My Brilliant Career" is an early romantic novel by this popular Australian author.

The River is a coming of age novella set in India. Harriet, the daughter of a jute factory manager, is just on the cusp of growing up--one moment a child, the next thinking thoughts and asking questions that would challenge many an adult. The time is perhaps during World War II, but as Godden says in the introductory paragraphs, it could be this war, or the war before that, any war, any place. There is a timeless quality about the setting, a garden by the edge of a river. Like the garden of Eden it has a tree--a great cork tree--and it also has a snake.In the opening pages we meet Harriet, who longs to be special, to be something great in the world. She writes poetry and misses her sister Bea, who is already in her teens, beautiful and swiftly growing away. Harriet, left on her own, tries playing with her younger brother but Bogey is more interested in ants and the snake than any games Harriet might want to play. Victoria, the youngest of the siblings is too young to be much company, either. So Harriet dreams, writes in her secret book and spends long hours communing with her cork tree and the river. Into this garden comes a man--a soldier, an amputee who had been tortured as a prisoner of war and managed to escape the enemy but not the wounds to his body and spirit. Captain John finds healing in the garden and in the company of the children. And perhaps there is more....Harriet notices how often, and how carefully, John looks at Bea. The story unfolds over one winter as the garden blooms with the cooling weather. Rumer Godden has a kind of genius for taking us inside the minds of children. She also has a gift for lyrical descriptions of nature. The slow, gentle story of Harriet's growing up is well done and the darker undercurrents keep up enough suspense that I raced my way towards the finish perhaps too quickly to really savor the poetry. Three and a half stars. Not quite as strong as The Greengage Summer or An Episode of Sparrows or Godden's other India book The Peacock Spring, but still well worth a read.Content rating G. Some mild discussion of puberty and one rather terrifying event but overall a clean read.

The mind-bending miniature historical epic is Sjón's specialty, and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is no exception. But it is also Sjón's most realistic, accessible, and heartfelt work yet. It is the story of a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world--at what seems like history's most tumultuous, perhaps ultimate moment.Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats--and adventures--of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.

When ancient notebooks turn up in a Long Island garage, Peter Van Overloop, a Columbia graduate student, sets to translating them, and finds himself immersed in the life and times of the Dutch painter Frans Hals, for the notebooks seem to be Hal's diaries. They contain a fascinating portrait of a man living in the age of Rembrandt and Descartes, and bursting with a lust for the world that surrounds him. Emerging as thoroughly funny and charming, Hals reaches out from centuries past to touch and change Peter's life forever. A seamless merging of literary invention and historic fact, The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals is a remarkable, unforgettable novel.