Search Results: Literary Fiction from Encanto Books

Comments: Very tight clean copy.Synopsis: This dazzling novel from a fiercely talented young writer — winner of the 2001 National Magazine Award for Fiction — follows a woman whose indelible crime of passion leaves no one and nothing unscathed. The City Is a Rising Tide unfolds against a stunning backdrop of history, culture, and landscape — from the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze to the refined vistas of Central Park, from the Cultural Revolution to the surreal world of moviemaking. In New York City, Justine Laxness works as a money manager at a nonprofit, the Aquinas Foundation. Justine's love for her boss, Peter, is unrequited, despite their deep friendship and extensive history: they first met in the early 1970s, when Justine was a child living in Beijing with her Christian family. Peter, then twenty-eight and stationed in China while working for Richard Nixon, had fallen in love with Justine's nanny, Su Chen — a Communist revolutionary under Mao — and still feels guilt for his part in… Read More

ISBN: 0670239097Title: Constance or Solitary PracticesAuthor: Durrell, LawrenceBinding: HardcoverPublisher: The Viking Press, New YorkPublication Date: 1982Edition: First American EditionBook Condition: FD-j Condition: F
Synopsis: Constance, published in 1982 and sub-titled Solitary Practices, is the central volume of the five novels of Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet. Although the first chapter continues in Avignon, where the previous novel, Livia, left off, and details Constance's blossoming relationship with Sam, the clouds of war are looming and with it the breakup of the group whose last summer together there was depicted in Livia. Blandford takes up a post in Egypt, kindly offered to him by the Prince. However during a visit from Sam, now a soldier, a picnic trip ends in disaster as the party comes under friendly fire, leading to the death of Sam and the crippling of Blandford. Constance, meanwhile, has moved to Geneva, where she has met Sutcliffe and Toby (despite the fact that they are… Read More

Synopsis: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actor, ex-cowboy, and musician Sam Shepard now stands revealed as a storyteller of dazzling artistry. Bleak and wildly funny, touching but stringently unsentimental, these stories give readers a most intimate view of the writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.

Comments: Very minor wear at bottom of first page. D-j has shelf wear.
Synopsis: At Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage in the English countryside, five elderly people live together in rancorous disharmony. Adela Bastable bosses the house, as her brother Bernard passes his days thinking up malicious schemes against the baby-talking Marigold and secret drinker Shorty, while kindly George lies bedridden upstairs. The mismatched quintet keep their spirits alive by bickering and waiting for grandchildren to visit at Christmas. But the festive season does not herald goodwill to all at Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage. Disaster and chaos, it seems, are just around the corner…

Synopsis: Martin Dean spent his entire life analyzing absolutely everything – from the benefits of suicide to the virtues of strip clubs – and passing on his self-taught knowledge to his son, Jasper. But now that his father's dead, Jasper can fully reflect on the man who raised him in intellectual captivity, and the irony is this: theirs was a great adventure. As he recollects the extraordinary events that led to his father's demise, Jasper recounts a boyhood of outrageous schemes and shocking discoveries – about his infamous criminal uncle, his mysteriously absent mother, and Martin's constant battle to leave his mark on the world. From the Australian bush to the cafes of Paris; from the highs of first love to the lows of failed ambition, this is an unforgettable, rollicking and deeply moving family story.

Comments: There is one small defect on back board.
Synopsis: A teacher oppressed by the futility of everyday life embarks on a dark affair in this extraordinary novel that won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In his dreams, Colin Pasmore runs an endless race. No matter how hard he pumps his legs, he loses—and not just to other runners, but to every "dullard and idler" in England. Every morning, he wakes up screaming in terror. His life should be joyful; he has a lovely wife, healthy children, and a comfortable job. But as he approaches thirty, Pasmore feels the walls closing in. He must find a way out before ordinary existence suffocates him.
In a desperate attempt to escape his routine, Pasmore rents a small room in London, intending to use it for an affair. But adultery does nothing to lessen his burden. As misery threatens to consume his soul, Pasmore will ask himself if any life—even a happy one—is worth living.

Comments: Tight copy.Synopsis: In this luminous new novel about love, loss, and the unpredictable power of memory, John Banville introduces us to Max Morden, a middle-aged Irishman who has gone back to the seaside town where he spent his summer holidays as a child to cope with the recent loss of his wife. It is also a return to the place where he met the Graces, the well-heeled family with whom he experienced the strange suddenness of both love and death for the first time. What Max comes to understand about the past, and about its indelible effects on him, is at the center of this elegiac, gorgeously written novel among the finest we have had from this masterful writer.

Synopsis: This beautiful and sad first novel, recently adapted for a major motion picture, tells of a band of teenage sleuths who piece together the story of a twenty-year old family tragedy begun by the youngest daughter's spectacular demise by self-defenstration, which inaugurates "the year of the suicides."

David Stuart's critically acclaimed first volume, The Guaymas Chronicles: La Mandadera (Southwest Books of the Year 2003, Albuquerque Alibi best book of 2003), told a little girl's story and a very personal tale of love set in Guaymas, Mexico, a fishing port and vacation destination located on Mexico's Sea of Cortez, about four hundred miles south of Tucson. Zone of Tolerance, " is about the "big girls" of the 1970s Guaymas night club district and the conflicting needs, wants, realities, and illusions at the core of the "viejas'" ("working" girls') lives.Stuart focuses on the exotic fallen angels of the once fabled Club R o Rita in Guaymas's Zona de Tolerancia (red-light district). Moving, funny, and at times tragic, the layered dimensions of their world are mesmerizing. He also continues the stories of his working class friends and compadres in Guaymas, some closer to him than his stateside family. Their struggles with life on the streets provide a rich and uplifting counterpoint to daily life in the… Read More

Comments: D-j chipped. Front board has some spots. Remainder mark on bottom edge. Faint stain on bottom edge.
Synopsis: Following the wild success of his novel, Carnovsky, Nathan Zuckerman has been catapulted into the literary limelight. As he ventures out onto the streets of Manhattan he finds himself accosted on all sides, the target of admonishers, advisers, would-be literary critics, and – worst of all – fans.
An incompetent celebrity, ill at ease with his newfound fame, and unsure of how to live up to his fictional creation's notoriety, Zuckerman flounders his way through a high-profile affair, the disintegration of his family life, and fends off the attentions of his most tenacious fan yet, as the turbulent decade of the sixties draws to a close around him.
But beneath the uneasy glamour are the spectres of the recently murdered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an unsettled Zuckerman feels himself watched…