Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
Recruited into MI5 against a backdrop of the Cold War in 1972, Cambridge student Serena Frome, a compulsive reader, is assigned to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer whose politics align with those of the government, a situation that is compromised when she falls in love with him.
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2012
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In 1995, on a four-hour-delayed train from Manchester to London, J. K. Rowling conceived of the idea of a boy wizard named Harry Potter. Upon arriving in London, she began immediately writing the first book in the saga. Rowling's true-life, rags-to-riches story is as compelling as the world of Hogwarts that she created. This biography details not only Rowling's life and her love of literature but the story behind the creation of a modern classic"--...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Margaret Cavendish, then Lucas, was born in 1623 to an aristocratic family. In 1644, as England descended into civil war, she joined the court of the formidable Queen Henrietta Maria at Oxford. With the rest of the court she went into self-imposed exile in France. Her family's wealth and lands were forfeited by Parliament. It was in France that she met her partner, William Cavendish, Marquess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a marriage that made her the Duchess...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died--an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit...
Author
Language
English
Description
When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring...
Author
Language
English
Description
"After sixteen novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her memoir tackles such difficult, poignant, and fascinating family memories as her paternal grandfather's shellshock, her mother's evacuation from London during the Blitz; her soft-spoken animal-loving father's torturous assignment to an explosives team during...
Publisher
Kanopy Streaming
Pub. Date
2016.
Language
English
Description
Excerpts from journals, letters, poetry and prose enrich this narrative biography of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte. The program introduces the sisters' major works and illuminates their basic, recurrent themes. Samples of their own art-work, on-location photography of northern England, as well as prints, paintings and sketches portray the land and the period.
Author
Series
Miss Buncle trilogy volume 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
Barbara Bunde is in a bind. Times are harsh, and Barbara's bank account has seen better days. Maybe she could sell a novel ... if she knew any stories. Stumped for ideas, Barbara draws inspiration from her fellow residents of Silverstream, the little English village she knows inside and out. To her surprise, the novel is a smash. It's a good thing she wrote under a pseudonym, because the folks of Silverstream are in an uproar. But what really turns...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart - so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love?"--Publisher's description.
Author
Language
English
Description
This memoir is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother by the author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit"--winner of the Whitbread First Novel award and the inspiration behind the award-winning BBC television adaptation "Oranges."
13) Levels of life
Author
Language
English
Description
An essay on grief and love for the author's late wife Pat, in which he discusses ballooning, photography, love, and bereavement; putting two things and two people together; and then tearing those things apart.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Inspired by the twenty-three "tales," Matthew Dennison takes a selection of quotations from Potter's stories and uses them to explore her multifaceted life and character: repressed Victorian daughter; thwarted lover; artistic genius; formidable country woman. This dramatic narrative charts her transformation from a young girl with a love of animals and fairy tales into a bestselling author and canny businesswoman--so deeply unusual for the Victorian...
Author
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
"A perfect match of writer and subject: one of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights--with his cooperation and access to a trove of hitherto unseen material. Tom Stoppard is a towering and beloved literary figure. Known for his dizzying narrative inventiveness and intense attention to language, he deftly deploys art, science, history, politics, and philosophy in works that span a remarkable spectrum of literary...
Author
Series
Publisher
Tundra Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada Young Readers
Pub. Date
[2018]
Language
English
Description
How does a story begin? Sometimes it begins with a dream, and a dreamer. Mary is one such dreamer, a little girl who learns to read by tracing the letters on the tombstone of her famous feminist mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and whose only escape from her strict father and overbearing stepmother is through the stories she reads and imagines. Unhappy at home, she seeks independence, and at the age of sixteen runs away with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Brontë sisters are among the most beloved writers of all time, best known for their classic nineteenth-century novels Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily), and Agnes Grey (Anne). In this sometimes heartbreaking young adult biography, Catherine Reef explores the turbulent lives of these literary siblings and the oppressive times in which they lived. Brontë fans will also revel in the insights into their
...Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in [this book], acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it. In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership....
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From the celebrated poet behind bone, a lyrical memoir--part prose, part verse--about coming-of-age, uncovering the cruelty and beauty of the wider world, and redemption through self-discovery and the bonds of family "You may not run away from the thing that you are because it comes and comes and comes as sure as you breathe." This is the story of Yrsa Daley-Ward, and all the things that happened--"even the terrible things. And God, there were terrible...
Author
Language
English
Description
Six glamorous women: Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, and Deborah. Born into privilege, the Mitford sisters were the "bright young things" of high society London in the 1920s and 1930s. Born into country-house privilege in the early years of the 20th century, they became prominent as "bright young things" in the high society of interwar London. But as the shadow of Fascism crept over Europe, the stark--and very public--differences in their outlooks...
Didn't find it?
Didn't find it in the Minuteman Library Network? Request it from other Massachusetts library systems.
Can't find what you are looking for? Recommend it to your local library as a future purchase. Suggest a Purchase