Books With Flair

National Book Award Finalist A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known. From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.

Set in Kent Haruf's fictional landscape of Holt County, Colorado, Plainsong is a story of simple lives told with extraordinary empathy. Tom Guthrie is struggling to bring up his two young sons alone, and in the same town, school girl Victoria Roubideaux is pregnant and homeless. Whilst Tom's boys find their way forward without their mother, brothers Harold and Raymond McPheron, gentle, solitary, gruff and unpolished agree to take Victoria in, unaware that their lives will change for ever.

In Holt, Colorado, Tom Guthrie is struggling to bring up his two young sons alone. In the same town, school girl Victoria Roubideaux finds herself pregnant and homeless. Whilst Tom's sons find their way forward without their mother, quiet and gentle Harold and Raymond McPheron agree to take Victoria in, unaware that their lives are about to change forever. A novel of haunting beauty, Plainsong explores the grace and hope of every human life and mankind's infinity capacity for love.

From at least the eighth century and for about a thousand years the repertory of music now known as Gregorian chant, or plainsong, formed the largest body of written music, and was the most frequently performed and the most assiduously studied music in Western civilisation. It lay at the root of all instruction in practical music, and in some sense was at the core of the enormous portion of notated music that survives today. But plainsong did not follow rigid conventions. It seems increasingly clear that, whatever may have been intended with respect to uniformity and tradition, the practice of plainsong varied considerably within time and place. It is just this variation, this living quality of plainsong, that these essays address. In addition, much new information is made available on the study of local rites and practices, and on the liturgical matrix of important polyphonic repertories. The contributors - leading scholars in their field - have sought information from a wide variety of areas: liturgy, architecture, art history, secular and ecclesiastical history, and hagiography, as a step towards reassembling the fragments of cultural history into the rich mosaic from which they came.

One of The Best Books of The Year: Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, The Plain Dealer, and Rocky Mountain News Kent Haruf, award-winning, bestselling author of Plainsong returns to the high-plains town of Holt, Colorado, with a novel of masterful authority. The aging McPheron brothers are learning to live without Victoria Roubideaux, the single mother they took in and who has now left their ranch to start college. A lonely young boy stoically cares for his grandfather while a disabled couple tries to protect their a violent relative. As these lives unfold and intersect, Eventide unveils the immemorial truths about human beings: their fragility and resilience, their selfishness and goodness, and their ability to find family in one another.

Piecing together her family history from her grandfather's journal, Paula Sterling learns about how her ancestors endured the hardships of early frontier life through the boom times of the 1950s and comes to better understand her grandfather's character through the challenges he faced. Original.

A mysterious plague, which seems the precursor of even more astounding events, wipes out most all adults, leaving only the young and the animals alive, who develop an uncanny ability to communicate with each other

This vivid novel, set against a backdrop of apartheid, tells the story of Ada, an illegitimate, unschooled but brilliant pianist who grows up in service to a family of Irish immigrants. As apartheid tightens its grip, she is seduced into an illegal relationship and bears a mixed race child. Forced to flee from the only home she knows, she must carve a life for herself, her daughter and her music in the bleak township that squats on the edge of the Karoo. Torn between love for her surrogate family and outrage at apartheid's sins, she embarks on a dangerous double life as friend - and potential foe - of both black and white. A powerful tale of love, loss and redemption, this is a journey into the soul of a fractured nation. It illustrates two simultaneous but contrasting views of South Africa under apartheid – seen through the eyes of a remarkable black woman who holds on for the miracle. Fans of romance, fiction and history will enjoy this personal tale of woman’s survival in a time of turmoil.