Author: Sara Flannery Murphy
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062458337
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
"A gripping, chilling read that’s part love story, part mystery, and completely original, it’s sensuous, scary, and utterly thrilling." —Anton DiSclafani, author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls In this electrifying literary debut, a young woman who channels the dead for a living crosses a dangerous line when she falls in love with one of her clients, whose wife died under mysterious circumstances. In an unnamed city, Eurydice works for the Elysian Society, a private service that allows grieving clients to reconnect with lost loved ones. She and her fellow workers, known as "bodies", wear the discarded belongings of the dead and swallow pills called lotuses to summon their spirits—numbing their own minds and losing themselves in the process. Edie has been a body at the Elysian Society for five years, an unusual record. Her success is the result of careful detachment: she seeks refuge in the lotuses’ anesthetic effects and distances herself from making personal connections with her clients. But when Edie channels Sylvia, the dead wife of recent widower Patrick Braddock, she becomes obsessed with the glamorous couple. Despite the murky circumstances surrounding Sylvia’s drowning, Edie breaks her own rules and pursues Patrick, moving deeper into his life and summoning Sylvia outside the Elysian Society’s walls. After years of hiding beneath the lotuses’ dulling effect, Edie discovers that the lines between her own desires and those of Sylvia have begun to blur, and takes increasing risks to keep Patrick within her grasp. Suddenly, she finds her quiet life unraveling as she grapples not only with Sylvia’s growing influence and the questions surrounding her death, but with her own long-buried secrets. A tale of desire and obsession, deceit and dark secrets that defies easy categorization, The Possessions is a seductive, absorbing page-turner that builds to a shattering, unforgettable conclusion.
Author: Sara Flannery Murphy
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1925307964
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2017 CWA NEW BLOOD DAGGER Who will prevail – the woman or the ghost? For five years Edie has worked for the Elysian Society, a secretive organisation that provides a very specialised service: its clients come to reconnect with their dead loved ones by channelling them through living 'Bodies'. Edie is one such Body, perhaps the best in the team, renowned for her professionalism and discretion. But everything changes when Patrick, a distraught husband, comes to look for traces of his drowned wife in Edie. The more time that Edie spends as the glamorous, enigmatic Sylvia, the closer she comes to falling in love with Patrick … and the more mysterious the circumstances around Sylvia's death appear. As Edie falls under Sylvia's spell, she must discover not only the couple's darkest secrets, but also her own long-buried memories and desires — before it's too late. PRAISE FOR SARA FLANNERY MURPHY ‘[S]upernatural romance that thrives on imaginative world-building.’ The Saturday Age ‘A more-than-slightly-spooky tale of spiritualists and sexual obsession.’ The Irish Times
Author: Nancy Holder
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101140232
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
The It Girl meets The Exorcist in this chilling, haunted boarding school tale New-girl Lindsay discovers all is not right at the prestigious Marlwood Academy for Girls. Ethereal, popular Mandy and her clique are plotting something dangerous. Lindsay overhears them performing strange rituals, and sees their eyes turn black. It doesn?t help that the school itself is totally eerie, with ancient, dilapidated buildings tucked into the Northern California woods, a thick white fog swirling through campus. There are hidden passageways, odd reflections in the windows at night, and scariest of all is the vast lake rumored to have captured the ghost of a girl who drowned many years ago. What Lindsay doesn?t yet realize is that Mandy and her cohorts are becoming possessed by spirits who have haunted the school for two hundred years. Spirits who want someone dead... And that someone is Lindsay.
Author: Judith Richardson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018525
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Possessions asks why this region just outside New York City became the locus for so many ghostly tales, and shows how these hauntings came to operate as a peculiar type of social memory whereby things lost, forgotten, or marginalized returned to claim possession of imaginations and territories. Reading Washington Irving's stories along with an array of narratives from local folklore and regional writings, Judith Richardson explores the causes and consequences of Hudson Valley hauntings to reveal how ghosts both evolve from specific historical contexts and are conjured to serve the needs of those they haunt. These tales of haunting, Richardson argues, are no mere echoes of the past but function in an ongoing, contentious politics of place."The author traces changing versions of several ghostly tales that mutated over time to reflect local conditions and controversies as well as national political issues like abolitionism. Richardson shows that, thanks to the Hudson Valley's long history of settlement, the 'legendizing impetus' created by Washington Irving, and the area's established position as a tourist destination, it inspired at least three sometimes overlapping traditions of hauntings: the 'aboriginal' Dutch and Indian hauntings, the Revolutionary War hauntings, and industrial hauntings, which are traced in Maxwell Anderson's High Tor and T. Coraghessan Boyle's World's End."-J. J. Benardete, Choice
Author: Nancy Carlisle
Publisher: Historic New England
ISBN:
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 456
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Book Description
Catalogue of a traveling exhibition from the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). This exhibition, drawn from their collections, features over 175 objects - furniture, costumes, paintings, and household furnishings, chosen not only for their visual appeal, but also for the stories they tell about three hundred years of life in the region.
Author: Lydia Syson
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction Ltd.
ISBN: 147140370X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 382
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Book Description
An intimate, intense and beautifully realised novel of possession, power and the liberating loss of innocence, this will delight fans of MISTER PIP and THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. Oceania, 1879. For two years the Peacocks, a determined family of settlers, have struggled to make a remote volcanic island their home. At last, a ship appears. The six Pacific Islanders on board have travelled over eight hundred miles in search of new horizons. Hopes are high, until a vulnerable boy vanishes. In their search for the lost child, settlers and newcomers together uncover far more than they were looking for. The island's secrets force young Lizzie Peacock to question her deepest convictions, and slowly this tiny, fragile community begins to fracture . . . 'Intelligent, beautifully written' The Times 'Historical fiction fans, meet your new favourite author' Stella Magazine 'Beautifully written, immaculately researched and powerfully imagined' Lancashire Evening Post
Author: Sara Flannery Murphy
Publisher: MCD
ISBN: 0374601755
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Orphan Black meets Margaret Atwood in this twisty supernatural thriller about female power and the bonds of sisterhood Josephine Morrow is Girl One, the first of nine Miracle Babies conceived without male DNA on an experimental commune known as the Homestead. The Girls were raised in the shadow of controversy—plagued by zealots calling them aberrations and their mothers demons—until a devastating fire at the Homestead claimed the lives of three people, leaving the survivors to scatter across the United States. Years later, upon learning that her mother has gone missing, Josie sets off on a desperate road trip, tracking down the only people who might help: her estranged sisters. Tracing clues her mother left behind, Josie joins forces with two of the Girls, and they journey back through their past, uncovering secrets about their origins and unlocking devastating abilities they never knew they had. Girl One combines the provocative imagination of Naomi Alderman’s The Power with the propulsive, cinematic storytelling of a Marvel movie. In her electrifying, wildly entertaining new novel, Sara Flannery Murphy delivers a rousing tale of love, ambition, power, and the extraordinary bonds of sisterhood.
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022652518X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
A masterwork of history and cultural studies, Marvelous Possessions is a brilliant meditation on the interconnected ways in which Europeans of the Age of Discovery represented non-European peoples and took possession of their lands, particularly in the New World. In a series of innovative readings of travel narratives, judicial documents, and official reports, Stephen Greenblatt shows that the experience of the marvelous, central to both art and philosophy, was manipulated by Columbus and others in the service of colonial appropriation. Much more than simply a collection of the odd and exotic, Marvelous Possessions is both a highly original extension of Greenblatt’s thinking on a subject that has permeated his career and a thrilling tale of wandering, kidnapping, and go-betweens—of daring improvisation, betrayal, and violence. Reaching back to the ancient Greeks, forward to the present, and, in his new preface, even to fantastical meetings between humans and aliens in movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Greenblatt would have us ask: How is it possible, in a time of disorientation, hatred of the other, and possessiveness, to keep the capacity for wonder—for tolerant recognition of cultural difference—from being poisoned?
Author: Anne Tyler
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1446419088
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
'A skilful novel by a writer in full flight from the obvious' Observer For thirty-five year old Charlotte Emory, leaving her husband seems to offer the only way out from the mundaneness of every day life's earthly possessions and emotional complications. In the bank, she withdraws enough money to escape a life and a marriage gone sour. But Charlotte is about to escape in a way she never expected, as a young bank robber takes her hostage, and they head south for Florida in a stolen car. **ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 8 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE** 'Anne Tyler takes the ordinary, the small, and makes them sing' Rachel Joyce 'She knows all the secrets of the human heart' Monica Ali 'A masterly author' Sebastian Faulks 'I love Anne Tyler. I've read every single book she's written' Jacqueline Wilson
Author: Michel de Certeau
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226100359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
It is August 18, 1634. Father Urbain Grandier, convicted of sorcery that led to the demonic possession of the Ursuline nuns of provincial Loudun in France, confesses his sins on the porch of the church of Saint-Pierre, then perishes in flames lit by his own exorcists. A dramatic tale that has inspired many artistic retellings, including a novel by Aldous Huxley and an incendiary film by Ken Russell, the story of the possession at Loudun here receives a compelling analysis from the renowned Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau. Interweaving substantial excerpts from primary historical documents with fascinating commentary, de Certeau shows how the plague of sorceries and possessions in France that climaxed in the events at Loudun both revealed the deepest fears of a society in traumatic flux and accelerated its transformation. In this tour de force of psychological history, de Certeau brings to vivid life a people torn between the decline of centralized religious authority and the rise of science and reason, wracked by violent anxiety over what or whom to believe. At the time of his death in 1986, Michel de Certeau was a director of studies at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He was author of eighteen books in French, three of which have appeared in English translation as The Practice of Everyday Life,The Writing of History, and The Mystic Fable, Volume 1, the last of which is published by The University of Chicago Press. "Brilliant and innovative. . . . The Possession at Loudun is [de Certeau's] most accessible book and one of his most wonderful."—Stephen Greenblatt (from the Foreword)
