Bøger udgivet af Unbridled Books

In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentuckys Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers troubles. Poor and single, Mazes mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeths mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter. The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Mazes earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day. Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love.This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.

One night Jim, a quiet wine steward, wakes to find two men trying to steal his car. Against the petitions of his wife, he goes outside to get the plate number of the thieves truck. Instead, something comes over him and he drives away in their truck until he recovers his wits and realizes what hes done. When Jim learns that the two would-be thieves are brothers with a history of violence, he soon finds himself over his head in a mire of sinister events and must risk everything to regain what he can of his life before that night.There are books that you cant put down, and there are books that wont go away even after you put them down, the force of their moral conundrums haunting the stories of our own lives. The Descent of Man is a spectacular showcase for both literary virtuesthe riveting tale of a modest but perfect life under assault, and a resonating challenge to our own self-knowledge, the authenticity of that knowledge, which can only be confirmed through crisis.Who are we when push comes to shove? What are we capable of? Do we have the fortitude to save ourselves from the bad things in the world, and the backbonethe strength of mind and spiritto protect those we love from harm? Kevin Desinger confronts us with these questions in the steady, quiet voice of Everyman, a decent guy sitting in a parlor chair, calmly narrating a firestorm thats consuming his house and family. He has written a novel that is flawless, masterful, unforgettable, and chilling in its dramatization of the way we live in fragile grace each day in America, our blessings balanced on the edge of violence and loss. Bob Shacochis

Timothy Schaffert has created his most memorable character yet in Essie, an octogenarian obituary writer for her familys small town newspaper. When a young country girl is reported to be missing, perhaps whisked away by an itinerant aerial photographer, Essie stumbles onto the story of her life. Or, it all could be simply a hoax, or a delusion, the child and child-thief invented from the desperate imagination of a lonely, lovelorn woman. Either way, the story of the girl reaches far and wide, igniting controversy, attracting curiosity-seekers and cult worshippers from all over the country to this dying rural town. And then it is revealed that the long awaited final book of an infamous series of YA gothic novels is being secretly printed on the newspapers presses.The Coffins of Little Hope tells a feisty, energetic story of characters caught in the intricately woven webs of myth, legend and deception even as Schaffert explores with his typical exquisite care and sharp eye the fragility of childhood, the strength of family, the powerful rumor mills of rural America, and the sometimes dramatic effects of pop culture on the way we shape our world.

In light of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, the remarkable personal story that comprises Fear Itself becomes a cautionary tale.Unwittingly exposed to low-level radiation in the 1940s, Candida Lawrence has lived courageously with its effects throughout her life. Fear Itself traces her years struggling to have a child and her slow waking to the secrets that governments and institutions withheld from the women of her generation. The task for herand for women who have shared her experiencehas always been to believe herself into wholeness and to survive her losses and her illnesses until there is nothing left to fear. As always, Lawrences writing is filled with smart, gentle anger, sweet sadness and the most private sense of what is vital and important.In Fear Itself, Lawrences deeply felt remembrances grant us an honest account of what it is to live in an unstable world. It is a truly personal account that sheds wide light on the worlds ongoing nuclear decisions.What personal life story could be more timely?

This masterful historical novel by Deborah Noyes, the lauded author of Angel & Apostle, The Ghosts of Kerfol, and Encyclopedia of the End (starred PW) is two stories:The first centers upon the strange, true tale of the Fox Sisters, the enigmatic family of young women who, in upstate New York in 1848, proclaimed that they could converse with the dead. Doing so, they unwittingly (but artfully) gave birth to a religious movement that touched two continents: the American Spiritualists. Their followers included the famous and the rich, and their effect on American spirituality lasted a full generation. Still, there are echoes. The Fox Sisters’ is a story of ambition and playfulness, of illusion and fear, of indulgence, guilt and finally self-destruction.The second story in Captivity is about loss and grief. It is the evocative tale of the bright promise that the Fox Sisters offer up to the skeptical Clara Gill, a reclusive woman of a certain age who long ago isolated herself with her paintings, following the scandalous loss of her beautiful young lover in London.Lyrical and authentic—and more than a bit shadowy—Captivity is, finally, a tale about physical desire and the hope that even the thinnest faith can offer up to a darkening heart.

As she prepares dinner for her husband andtheir extended family, Suzanne hears on the radiothat a jetliner has crashed and her lover is dead.Alex Elling was a renowned orchestra conductor.Suzanne is a concert violist, long unsatisfied withher marriage to a composer whose music turnsemotion into thought. Now, more alone thanshes ever been, she must grieve secretly. But ascomplex as that effort is, it pales with the arrival ofAlexs widow, who blackmails her into completingthe score for Alexs unfinished viola concerto.As Suzanne struggles to keep her double life asecret from her husband, from her best friend,and from the other members of her quartet, sheis consumed by memories of a rich love affairsaturated with music. Increasingly manipulated byher lovers widow and tormented by the concertosmany layers, Suzanne realizes she may loseeverything shes spent her life working for.A story of love, loss, sex, class, and betrayal,this psychologically compelling novel exploresthe ways that artists lives and work interact, thenature of relationships among women as friendsand competitors, and what it means to make a lifeof art.

No other obsession strikes as hard as the love that hits a teenaged boy especially if hes the sort of kid who is no saner than he wants to be. From the moment Adam Webb sees Francine Haggardin the van that is supposed to return them to the Institute Loiseauxthe two young mental patients are inextricably connected. Adam will never let this girl go.From hiding her in his bedroom to spiriting her away to Minnesotas north woods, Miss Entropia becomes the focus of Adams every thought and of everything he does. He believes her to be a goddess, his own goddess.But the pyromaniacal Miss Entropia will be neither worshiped nor owned. And so Adams possessiveness is destined to push her to the breaking point.Theirs is an incendiary love story, an unbalanced Romeo and Juliet, that spins and arcs its way strangely toward tragedy.

The after-death stories of Franz Joseph Haydn, Ludwig Beethoven, Swedenborg, Sir Thomas Browne and many others have never before been told in such detail and vividness.Fully illustrated with some surprising images, this is a fascinating and authoritative history of ideas carried along on the guilty pleasures of an anthology of real-after-life gothic tales.Beginning dramatically with the opening of Haydns grave in October 1820, cranioklepty takes us on an extraordinary history of a peculiar kind of obsession. The desire to own the skulls of the famous, for study, for sale, for public (and private) display, seems to be instinctual and irresistible in some people. The rise of phrenology at the beginning of the 19th century only fed that fascination with the belief that genius leaves its mark on the very shape of the head.