Bøger af Mary Lee Settle

An unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture,class, identity, and the meaning of freedomPrisons, the first volume of The Beulah Quintet-Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, classs, and identity and the meaning of fredom-follows the coming-of-age of Johnny Church from English youngster to dashing Oxford adolescent to idealistic Puritan in the service of Cromwell's Parliamentary Army. Throughout his evolution, Johnny seeks emancipation from a multitude of emotional, political, and religious prisons, not realizing that with each successive grasp at freedom, he escapes one form of captivity only to be confined by another.When Cromwell, the leader Johnny has supported so staunchly, limits the freedoms for which Johnny has taken up arms, he bravely questions the commander. Shortly thereafter he finds himself in a prison of stone and mortar where, as an example to other soldiers tempted to champion their rights, he is executed. Based on a true incident of the English Civil War, Prisons captures the promise and tragedy of the conflict that led to one of the first substantial migrations to North America and lays the foundation for the next chapter in Settle's riveting saga-O Beulah Land.

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet - Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom - is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.

Set in 1912, ""The Scapegoat"" propels readers towards a fateful day in a coal miners' strike when distant relatives of the Beulah dynasty, only dimly aware of their blood ties, face off in a dispute that escalates into a frenzy of violence and ends in the slaughter of an innocent man.

In a novel that begins with accidental death and ends with deliberate murder, Mary Lee Settle tells the story of an eclectic collection of American and European expatriates who take refuge in an ancient Turkish city and, once there, wreak havoc on the Aegean paradise. At first the characters, who range from a former accountant to a petulant heiress, appear to have little in common, but as the novel progresses their motives and desires cross and blend in an eerie, sometimes comic geometry of misunderstanding. In this award-winning work of fiction, Settle reveals new life springing forth out of death and change, and blood as the only tie that endures. With her trademark versatility, Settle conveys the restlessness and ennui of the foreigners as successfully as the humanity of the native Turks. To both humorous and pitiable examples of culture clash she adds vivid scenes of archaeological digs, underwater diving, and a children's festival. Further, Settle's description of Timur, a fugitive who is lost in a cave, remains as terrifying as anything since Mark Twain placed Tom Sawyer in the same predicament.

A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001 and a Washington Post Book World 2001 Rave.

Novelist Mary Lee Settle's autobiography portrays inherited choices, old habits and quarrels, old disguises and the river that formed the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia and the mores of her childhood. She traces her childhood dreams through adulthood and ends back at her source in the Valley.

In this narrative of doomed love, Mary Lee Settle tells of a triangular affair set in the small town of Canona, West Virginia, revealing the mores of Canona's closed, upper-class society and of its less prosperous underculture.

In 1978 Hannah McKarkle returns to her hometown of Canona, West Virginia, where she sets out to remove the mystery that has surrounded her brother's murder for over 20 years. Her search for truth reveals a heritage that extends back to Johnny Church of ""Prisons"", completing ""The Beulah Quintet"".

Before the Civil War, Peregrine Catlett considers freeing his slaves but believes he can only retain his plantation by slave labour. His son, Johnny, returns to his father's farm but stays only until the outbreak of hostilities. He ends up fighting family and friends with disastrous consequences.

The novel that launched Mary Lee Settle's outstanding career, The Love Eaters is an acid satire of bedroom and community tragedy. A wealthy, small-town theatrical group finds itself at the direction of a man whose designs extend beyond the stage. As he begins to lose control, so do his players, revealing appetites they scarcely knew they had. Settle's second novel, the highly acclaimed Kiss of Kin, centers on the funeral and last testament of Anna Mary Passmore. Drawn back to the Southern homeplace, members of the Passmore clan - all of whom nurse visions that the matriarch's bequests will solve their problems - grapple with the various ties that bind them and with the disturbing appearance of an unexpected heir. Published together for the first time, these novels offer compelling tales from Settle's early career.

One of Mary Lee Settle's richest and most compassionate novels, Celebration chronicles the love affair of a widowed American anthropologist and a Scottish geologist who meet in the British Museum. Set in 1969, the novel also tells the intertwining tales of the couple's diverse cast of friends - a gay English aristocrat and his Hong Kong love, a gargantuan Dinka Jesuit, a sexually subversive editor, a former colonial civil servant, and, as comic relief, an unwitting FBI agent. Despite the fact that these characters live in the most murderous of centuries and that many of them have encountered death in intimate fashion, they all choose to celebrate life. This joyful novel ends with a wedding, a funeral, and a celebration - all in London, though the celebrants travel from countries across the globe. Together they view one of the twentieth century's strangest events - the landing on the moon - a happening which seems to presage an even more displaced future.

A literary testament showing how Mary Lee Settle's great novels followed the map of her remarkable life.

"Settle takes us along as she digs into Spain's past....Consistently compelling."-Wayne Hoffman, Washington Post Book World