A Country Road A Tree

Samuel Beckett is a young writer living in Paris--intoxicated by new friendships with James Joyce and the other writers and artists making the vibrant city their creative home--when war breaks out in 1939. He determines to stay and is swiftly drawn into the maelstrom, joining the Resistance. With him we experience the terrifying excitement yet stubborn vibrancy and camaraderie as the Parisians flee the Nazis and the Resistance goes underground; his friendships with the astonishing group of men and women who find themselves caught up in the Occupation; his quiet, committed love for Suzanne, the Frenchwoman who will become his lifelong companion; and his dangerous work encoding critical messages in translations and narrow escapes from the Gestapo. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of a uniquely brilliant mind.

On today's farm, B is for barn cat...E is for erosion...G is for grinding feed, and I is for...inoculate? In 26 beautifully detailed spreads, acclaimed illustrator Arthur Geisert takes readers on a literal journey following a real road in Iowa (County Road Y31) through the ins and outs of America's farmland. This isn't your grandfather's farm book. It still features pigs, hay, and other familiar farm residents, but you'll see a very different kind of quicksand and traffic jam here...Along the bottom of each page is a continuous panorama that totals nearly forty feet of art. Country Road ABC is a unique and funny look at America's present-day farmland.

A young woman is assaulted by a jogger on a busy road in South London. Three years later her a job at a university in the remote English countryside is meant to be a fresh start. When one of her students starts turning in chapters that blur the lines between fiction and reality, the professor recognizes herself as the main character in his book-- and he has written her a horrific fate. Will she be able to stop life imitating art before it's too late? -- Adapted from jacket and perusal of book.

From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences, Waiting for Godot has become of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius … Waiting for Godot is one of the masterpieces of the century.” The story revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree, inhabiting a drama spun of their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett’s language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existential post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

Take Me Home, Country Roads, a book following the lyrics of John Denver's first hit song, is a great teaching tool for young readers about family and appreciation for the natural world around us. This brilliant picture book adaptation of John Denver's first hit song is all about roots, family, and country. Set in Appalachia, a humorously diverse bunch of relatives and their in-laws go up, down and around the hills of West Virginia to converge by car, pickup, and motorcycle to a family reunion at Grandma and Grandpa's country home. True to Appalachian style, Canyon portrays it all as if on a quilt, complete with little stitches between the "fabric." The lyrics demand to be sung! A book for: fans of John Denver wanting to share his music with their kids! anyone who wants to inspire children to appreciate the country! Parents and children looking for feelings of security and comfort!

A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK Winner of the 2022 BookTube Silver Medal in Fiction * Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction "A wise novel of love and grief, roots and branches, displacement and home, faith and belief. Balm for our bruised times." -David Mitchell, author of Utopia Avenue A rich, magical new novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal, from the Booker-shortlisted author of 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World. Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island they both call home. In the taverna, hidden beneath garlands of garlic, chili peppers and creeping honeysuckle, Kostas and Defne grow in their forbidden love for each other. A fig tree stretches through a cavity in the roof, and this tree bears witness to their hushed, happy meetings and eventually, to their silent, surreptitious departures. The tree is there when war breaks out, when the capital is reduced to ashes and rubble, and when the teenagers vanish. Decades later, Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really, he's searching for lost love. Years later a Ficus carica grows in the back garden of a house in London where Ada Kazantzakis lives. This tree is her only connection to an island she has never visited--- her only connection to her family's troubled history and her complex identity as she seeks to untangle years of secrets to find her place in the world. A moving, beautifully written, and delicately constructed story of love, division, transcendence, history, and eco-consciousness, The Island of Missing Trees is Elif Shafak's best work yet.

Now including the full text of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice! A brilliantly imagined, irresistible below-stairs answer to Pride and Prejudice: a story of the romance, intrigue and drama among the servants of the Bennet household, a triumphant tale of defying society's expectations, and an illuminating glimpse of working-class lives in Regency England. The servants at Longbourn estate--only glancingly mentioned in Jane Austen's classic--take centre stage in Jo Baker's lively, cunning new novel. Here are the Bennets as we have never known them: seen through the eyes of those scrubbing the floors, cooking the meals, emptying the chamber pots. Our heroine is Sarah, an orphaned housemaid beginning to chafe against the boundaries of her class. When the militia marches into town, a new footman arrives under mysterious circumstances, and Sarah finds herself the object of the attentions of an ambitious young former slave working at neighboring Netherfield Hall, the carefully choreographed world downstairs at Longbourn threatens to be completely, perhaps irrevocably, up-ended. From the stern but soft-hearted housekeeper to the starry-eyed kitchen maid, these new characters come vividly to life in this already beloved world. Jo Baker shows us what Jane Austen wouldn't in a captivating, wonderfully evocative, moving work of fiction.

A ghost story of the most unusual kind, The Telling is a thrilling—and sometimes chilling—tale about two women, separated by almost two centuries, grappling with change and loss. After her mother dies, Rachel sets off alone to pack up and sell off the remnants of her family’s isolated country house. But from the moment she steps through the front door, she feels that the house contains more than she had expected. Generations earlier, a young housemaid, Lizzy, called the same dwelling home. On course for a life of service no different from her mother and her mother’s mother before her, Lizzy’s world is upended by the arrival of a mysterious lodger. Interweaving the two narratives, Jo Baker—best-selling author of Longbourn—brings these women, both struggling against their stations and their duties, vividly to life.