Bøger udgivet af Unbridled Books

Tom Johnson has turned 85 and has suffered a few “events,” though he knows his mind is sharp. His oldest son, who had Down Syndrome has died, and his remaining two children want to move him out of the homestead lake house and into a retirement home in town. What Tom wants to do is to find the only woman he ever loved, a woman he met in the Netherlands where he was stationed during World War II.And so he slips away, deftly covers his tracks, and begins his search for her in Eindhoven. While his children try to track him down and then have him extradited back home, Tom delves into love and loss and the value of memory. Soon he catches sight of a woman he believes to be Sarah, the love he lost almost a lifetime ago.He will have to fight for her affections and forgiveness, even as he fights for the legal right to stay in the Netherlands in the name of love and family and all the remaining rights of an old man.

The Legend of the Albino Farm is a horror story turned inside out. What if a thriving family were saddled with an unshakable spook tale? And what if that lore cursed them with an unending whirlwind of destruction from thrill seekers, partiers, bikers, and Goths? Hettienne Sheehy is about to inherit this devouring legacy. Last child to bear a once golden name, she is heiress to a sprawling farm in the Missouri Ozarks. During summer, childhood idylls in the late 1940s, Hettienne has foreseen all this apocalyptic fury in frightening, mystifying visions. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a property that seems to doom all who would dare own it, in the end, Hettienne will risk everything to save the family she truly loves.The Legend of the Albino Farm has haunted two generations of Sheehys and marred all memory of the familys glory days. Worse, this spooky lore now draws revelers, druggies, motorcycle gangs, hippies, and later Goths to trample the land, set bonfires, and vandalize its structures, all while Hettiennes aged aunts cling to privacy, sanity, and a rapidly deteriorating thirteen-room mansion..From her youth, throughout her marriage and her rearing of her children, the Legend of the Albino Farm and the curse of the Sheehys drag at her and her family like a vortex. Haunted by a whirling augury, by a hurtful spook tale, and by a relentlessly judgmental Ozarks city, in the end, Hettienne believes she must make decisions that might compromise her familys financial security but will severe them from an ever more dangerous legacy.

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife. The Unmade World is a story of ordinary, otherwise decent people from various backgrounds and circumstances who must learn how to live with the personal grief, sense of guilt, and the emotional consequences of violence. Along the way, the novel grapples with a spectrum of cultural and political issues. It includes a murder mystery wrapped around the corruption of major college sports, the pressures on immigrants and refugees in both the US and Poland, the fallout of political change, economic upheavals and armed conflicts--including the horrific destruction of Luhansk, Ukraine in 2014. It also references the 2016 presidential campaign, cultural politics in the American university, and the demise of print journalism, etc., though never in a dogmatic or overtly partisan way.

Sometimes Bone King cannot go through doors. He has no physical impairment, but at times his brain and muscles simply cant recall how to walk him through them. Perhaps it has something to do with his being distracted thinking about grammar and etymology all the time, or maybe its anxiety that his wife is having an affair with the yardman. But then renowned neurologist Arthur Limongello offers a diagnosis as peculiar as the ailment: Bones self is starting to dislodge from his brain. The treatment is a series of therapeutic tasks; Bone must compliment a stranger each day, do good deeds without being asked, and remind himself each morning, that Today is a good day!But first, as a temporary measure, he also suggests Bone simply try to dance through the doorways. And for a time, Bones square dancing, the only kind of dance he knows how to do, seems to more or less work.Bones condition begins to improve, but then his wife leaves him, and after a harrowing ordeal during which he nearly loses his life, Bone makes an astounding discovery about the man who has been calling himself Dr. Limongello. Is Limongellos remedy the product of a deranged imagination or the cure for a modern epidemic threatening the very self?

In this personal and revealing book, Anthony Poon takes us on a creative journey that begins with his re-envisioning of a seaside public space as a very young architect. Poon has designed hundreds of buildings across the United States and internationally, from eco-friendly homes to public schools, from intimate retail venues and restaurants to sports arenas, from university housing to retreats and places of worship.Sticks & Stones / Steel & Glass takes us inside a purposive yet open mind always hoping to “design it all,” to weave together light and material, culture and commerce, music and design, a good meal and the joy of gathering to share it.In these pages we engage the creative processes of a thoughtful and intense architect whose works—public and private—all strive to enhance his clients’ stories and identities. Poon’s goal in each commission is to reward those who will enjoy and inhabit the structures he designs. In every building designed by Anthony Poon art is shelter and architecture is a social good.

The Detective’s Garden: A Love Story and Meditation on Murder is set in Brooklyn in 1995. Originally from Slovenia, ex-NYPD Homicide Detective Emil Milosec, a man with a past poised to reclaim him is perennially on the outside. Elena, his beauty of a wife, has died, but she has filled pages of letters to him—which he has so far refused to read. Elena always remained elusive to him, and she still is.An ugly discovery among the leafy haven of their backyard garden unsettles the uneasy truce Emil has managed since Elena’s death. A lively cast of local characters, a dark history and an international mystery all inform the story. Underpinning events are a heat wave, the Brooklyn housing bubble underway, a gun that goes off, and a smattering of science. A little bit Sophocles, a dash of Shakespeare, and tablespoons of Old Testament go into a brew that is both contemplative and neo-noirish.

How can a 19-year-old, mixed-race girl who grew up in a crack house and is now pregnant be so innocent? Yslea is full of contradictions, though, seeming both young and old, innocent and wise. Her spirit is surprising, given all the pain she has endured, and that's the counterpoint this story offers-while she sees pain and suffering all around her, Yslea overcomes in her own quiet way. What Yslea struggles with is expressing her thoughts. And she wonders if she will have something of substance to say to her baby. It's the baby growing inside her that begins to wake her up, that causes her to start thinking about things in a different way. Yslea drifts into the lives of four people who occupy three dilapidated row houses along the train tracks outside of Memphis: "The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty."

Set during the Great Depression and based in part on real characters and a series of historical events, Toughs follows the story of Loretto Jones as he finds his life intertwined with the fate of Vince Coll, a 23-year-old Irish gangster who for a brief moment rose to the level of a national celebrity during his war with Dutch Schultz, Owen Madden, and Lucky Luciano. Tagged “Mad Dog Coll” after killing five-year-old Michael Vengelli in a botched assassination attempt, Coll was the subject of a shoot-to-kill order issued by New York City Police Commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney, a $50,000 bounty offered by Dutch Shultz and Owen Madden, and $30,000 in reward money from by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the city’s newspapers. Loretto and Vince are bound to each other by years spent in an orphanage and on the streets, but in the summer of 1931, with Loretto in love with newly-divorced Gina Baronti, and Vince in thrall to the beautiful Lottie Kriesberger, their world of tough guys in tough times is hurtling toward disaster, and Loretto finds himself faced with impossible choices.

In Mercy 6, David Bajos courageous new medical thriller, four people collapse dead in the same instant within a newly renovated Los Angeles hospital. Dr. Mendenhall, the woman who is head of the emergency room, isn't convinced the cause of death is a contagion. But it's in the interests of the hospital administrators and of the world at large for people to think that it is. If the world knew the truth there could only be widespread panic. The hospital is immediately locked down. Information is suddenly being strictly controlled. Government troops encircle the hospital to enforce the quarantine, and other bodies arrive in ER. Working with an ally in pathology and a colleague outside the hospital, Mendenhall develops her understanding that what has taken these lives has global implications . . . and whatever it is, its not a virus.

On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers. Grace, his young ingnue wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, where visions of her stolen child and lost husband begin to beckon to her from across the plains. The foreign couples savvy and dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again. With their Christian beliefs sorely tested, their concept of fate expanded, and their physical health rapidly deteriorating, the Reverend and Grace may finally discover an understanding between them that is greater than the vast distance they have come.

When Michael Mewshaw receives a call from a stranger who says she has reason to believe he is her biological father, Mewshaw realizes he has been half dreading, half hoping for this to happen for over thirty years. Just like the young woman who wants to find the last piece to the puzzle of her life, he thinks its possible that in the same process he will discover the answer to questions that have plagued him for decades. But first he has to make sure that she is who she claims to be.In this fascinating memoir, Mewhsaw confronts his own past, the chaos of his family, and complicated memories of the woman he once loved who went on to success as an ambassador, Under Secretary of State and a member of one of Americas most influential families. His unusual role in the babys birth, her adoption and, now, her search for her biological parents sets the stage for a revealing personal odyssey that offers a quest for identity and a journey of discovery, an obsession with recapturing the past and righting old wrongs, the constant potential for disappointment balanced against the possibility of redemption. As he finds his old flame and her old lover, rediscovering who he was and who he has become, he finds his life enriched in the process.

John Bonner is sure that anytime now he will recover from the sting of his recent separation from his wife. And hes begun to wonder if he truly wants to spend the rest of his days running the family scrap-metal business, an operation where his employees are likely to have made the very license plates they now shred. His sister, Octavia, has just returned to Ohio from Boston to nurture the pain of her own broken relationship, and she is more certain: Following in the footsteps of their imperious father is a recipe for emotional disaster.But then two of Johns more eccentric workmen discover thousands of dollars stashed in the trunk of a car, the remains of a drug deal gone bad. The question of what to do with this unexpected cash draws John and his sister into the lives of their newfound collaborators, and sends them all on a surprising journey of high jinx and the heart.In The Metal Shredders, Nancy Zafris offers up a refreshingly wise, offbeat, and thoroughly convincing look at blue-collar America. Hers is a world rich in humor, steeped in closely held traditions, and filled with gently endearing, slightly crazed characters trying to discover just who they are. In the process they discover much about love, loyalty, family obligation, classand yes, scrap.

A disillusioned and raggedy American reporterand his drunken photojournalist partner are the lastto see three Japanese schoolgirls who disappearinto Taroko Gorge, Taiwans largest national park.The journalistswho are themselves suspectsinvestigate the disappearance along with the girlshomeroom teacher, their bickering classmates,and a seasoned and wary Taiwanese detective.The conflicts between themcomplicated bythe outrageousness of the photographer and theraging hormones of the youngraise questions ofpersonal responsibility, truthfulness, and guardedself-interest.The world and its dangersboth natural andinterpersonalare real, changing, and violentlypressing. And the emotions that churn in darkrooms overnight as the players gather in the parkvisitors center are as intense as in any closetdrama. Theres enough action and furor here tokeep readers turning the pages, and the culturalrevelations of the story suggest that the humanneed for mystery outweighs the desire for answers.

The gentle-hearted Flavio Montoya returns,now as the aged scion of his family, still tendinghis sister Ramonas fields and wondering how allof his family could have died before him. Whenthe mountains surrounding Guadalupe erupt inflames, the history of the village seems to be setloose in the smoke. The dead arrive and the silentspeak. When Flavio is accused of starting the firethat quickly threatens to consume the village, thedisaster becomes one more mystery that he mustfold into his own memory, though he cannot quiteunderstand any of it.A Santo in the Image of Cristbal Garca is abeautiful, funny, even epic tale of how all history isfinally personal.

The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire is a sweeping historical novel of Mexico during the short, tragic, at times surreal, reign of Emperor Maximilian and his court. Even as the American Civil War raged north of the border, a clique of Mexican conservative exiles and clergy convinced Louis Napoleon to invade Mexico and install the Archduke of Austria, Maximilian von Habsburg, as Emperor. A year later, the childless Maximilian took custody of the two year old, half-American, Prince Agustn de Iturbide y Green, making the toddler the Heir Presumptive. Maximilians reluctance to return the child to his distraught parents, even as his empire began to fall, and the Empress Carlota descended into madness, ignited an international scandal. This lush, grand read is based on the true story and illuminates both the cultural roots of Mexico and the political development of the Americas. But it is made all the more captivating by the depth of Mayos writing and her understanding of the pressures and influences on these all too human players.

In just three years, CEO Robbie Case has grownCore Communications, a data technology company,from 30 people to over 5,000. Now a $20 billioncompany made legendary by its sudden success,Core is based on a technology no other companycan come close to copying, a revolutionarybreakthrough known as drawing blood from amainframe. And Robbie, its 35-year-old CEO, isacclaimed worldwide for his vision, leadership andwealth.Except that all of it is based on a lie. The technologydoesnt work, the finances are built on a Ponzischeme of stock sales and shell corporations, andRobbie is struggling to keep the company alive,to protect the friends who work for him and allthat theyve built. Each day, Robbie tries to pushthe catastrophe back a little further, while hisemployees believe that they are all moving closerto grace, the day their stock options vest, whenthey will be made rich for their faith and loyalty andhard work. The details of the lie are all keyed intoa shadowy interface that Robbie calls Shimmer, anomniscient mainframe that hides itself, calculatesits own collapse, threatens to outsmart its creatorand to reveal the corporations illegal, fragileunderpinnings.Shimmer is the story of a high-tech crusade nearingits end. The shell game Robbie has created is finallyrunning out of room. And Robbie is the only onewho knows or who has a chance to make thingsright. Or is he?A breathless debut novel that charges theatmosphere with suspense and surprise anddelivers complex characters you can root for inspite of their flaws, Shimmer is Robbies raceagainst the truth.

We are proud to reintroduce the classic first novel by the author of Madewell Brown.When little Jos Montoyas parents are killed one August morning by a cow, his Tia Ramona and his Tio Flavio are troubled by how best to raise the boy. After the funeral, they drive to their childhood home behind the village office, but before they reach the house, the front door swung open and Ramonas grandfather, Epolito Montoya, who had been dead for thirteen years, stood in the doorway. Why are you out in the rain? he said.Ramona has returned reluctantly to this isolated village in northern New Mexico and to the family that never lets go. As she tries to build a modern life here on her own terms, and still to care for young Jos, she discovers that she can reach through time, see the richness of her heritage, and reclaim riches, knowledge, art that disappeared generations ago. In fact, she can speak with her ancestors and learn their stories.These, finally, are the fortunes she will try to pass on to Jos.

When 22-year-old Avery Walker, a senior at Penn State, meets Grant Danko, a 37-year-old performance artist from Brooklyn whose stage name is Saint John of the Five Boroughs, her life changes radically as she leaves college to live with Grant in Brooklyn and pursue a life as an artist. Worried about Avery, her mother, Kate, and her aunt, Lindsey, and Lindseys husband, Hank, travel to Brooklyn, where they all face a crisis of their own and make life-altering choices.Grant is an angry guy with a curiously attractive personality and a coterie of bright, artistic friends. Hes used his good looks and his accomplishments, and the accomplishments of those friends, to get by while he works hauling stolen goods for his gangster uncle. He carries dark secrets that have caused his life to go off the rails. Grant is about as lost as a man can get, adept at making wrong choices. But when he finally faces his explosive moment of truth, something extraordinary happens.Saint John of the Five Boroughs is beautifully turneda stunning and layered novel about the effects of violence, both personal and cultural, on its characters lives. Its about the way violence twists character, but also about the possibilities for redemption and change, for achieving a kind of personal grace. Edward Falco once again proves to be a master of urgency and suspense, of events careening out of control, as he brilliantly explores why we make the choices we makeboth the ones that threaten to destroy our lives, and those choices that might save us.

A most unlikely life."Marc Estrin” discovers that another writer's novel - The Nose - not only has spawned a bizarre cult among the nation's youth, but is based on the extraordinary life of a real person-an outcast named Alexei Pigov."Estrin” searches Alexei out and asks him to provide annotations to The Nose.Alexei says that-although the events of the novel might, for the most part, be real-the purported reasons for them are all damnable lies.On the left-hand page of The Annotated Nose we read The Nose itself, and take in its beautifully unsettling illustrations.On the right-hand page we follow Alexei's complaints - always surprising and often far-reaching.The layers in Estrin's remarkable comic book are as multiple, eclectic, and outrageous as the sequence of masks Alexei wears to hide his face from the world over the caroming trajectory of his most unlikely life.The Annotated Nose is at once Marc Estrin's most playful and his most ambitious work to date. A signed and numbered limited edition of 75 copies is also available.

At the end of Nathaniel Hawthornes classic novel, The Scarlet Letter, we know that Pearl, the elf-child daughter of Hester Prynne, is somewhere in Europe, comfortable, well set, a mother herself now. But it could not have been easy for her to arrive at such a place, when she begins life as the bastard child of a woman publicly humiliated, again and again, in an unrelentingly judgmental Puritan world.With a brilliant and authentic sense of that time and place, Deborah Noyes envisions the path Pearl takes to make herself whole and to carve her place in the New World. Beautifully written with boundless compassion, Angel and Apostle is a heart-rending and imaginative debut in which Noyes masterfully makes Hawthornes character her own.

Caddie Blair feels everything stronglyand so she works hard to keep her distance. Its the ethical thing for a journalist to do, especially in a war-torn region like the Middle East. And Caddie wants to believe that nothing is as important as covering the story.Theres room for passion in her lifebut thats only physical. And Caddie keeps even those fleeting attachments under wraps, secretive, because she knows that when a journalist even appears to lose her detachment, she is already lost.So what is Caddie to feel when her lover dies beside hershot in an ambush on the way to the next promising political interview, across the Israeli border into Lebanon?An authentic look at the emotional and ethical chaos within a war correspondent who becomes a bit too involved, Masha Hamiltons The Distance Between Us is a straight-ahead story of human passiondesire, conviction, and the guilt of a survivorstruggling for order within the frayed justice of the Middle East conflict.A seasoned journalist herself, Masha Hamilton brings to this revealing novel the sharp eye and deep empathy that marked her debut, Staircase of a Thousand Steps (BlueHen, 2001). Beautifully turned, and peopled with an astounding cast of characters who are as true as they are perceptive, The Distance Between Us is finally the portrait of one womans search for the narrow pass between vengeance and emotional survival, when her only true attachment has been torn away from her.If we knew where we were going to fall, the novels most enigmatic character tells her, we could spread straw.

An astounding debut in which Kafka's Gregor Samsa undergoes yet another metamorphosis--one that propels him across the rocky and often ridiculous landscape of the early 20th century.

At once a chess master, a linguist, an athlete and an innocent in love, Arnold passes through the racial tensions of Mansfield, Texas (home of the author of Black Like Me) in the 1950s, the anti-war movement at Harvard, and both the Upper East Side and the Bowery, meeting Noam Chomsky, Al Gore, and Leonard Bernstein in the process, and finally learning the meaning of meaning.

A literary novel set in 1995 New York, Love Slave follows Sybil Weatherfieldher generations Dorothy Parkerand her strange friends as they defy chick-lit expectations (though theyre unaware that theyre doing so). Sybil is an office temp by day and a columnist by night for New York Shock, a chatty rag (her column is called Abscess, which is a wound that never heals). Her friends include a paper-pusher for a human rights organization, and the lead singer of a local rock band called Glass Half Empty. Full of cultural detail, mid-nineties observations, and early adulthood anxieties, its ultimately an ironic look at what it means to be a love slave.

Marilee journeys from Los Angeles to New Mexico to surprise her fianc, Larry, who has taken a job on the Alamogordo Air Force Base to gain, in one of his antithetical Zen experiments, an understanding of peace. Sympathy for Enoch, a hitchhiking dwarf, disrupts her orderly plans. In a separate voyage, Figman, an insurance claims adjuster on the run, relocates to New Mexico after surviving a lethal car crash that results in an unfair lawsuit against him. Now prone to migraines and the conviction that he is dying, Figman embarks on new adventures. Late in the novel, these two distinct love stories converge on a highway in near collision.