Visiting The Visitors

Some of the most wondrous gifts cost nothing. This is a story of such gifts. On a silent and magical Christmas Eve night, three children and their grandparents bear gifts down the starlit path to a stable. They take this peaceful, wintry journey to thank the visitors of centuries ago for their historic and holy visit. The children deliver simple gifts and sincere gratitude to the visitors in tribute for that long-ago night honoring a newborn babe.

In this small but perfectly formed collection of supernatural short stories, Sophie Hannah takes the comforting scenes of everyday life and imbues them with a frisson of fear, then a gust of terror. Why is a young woman so unnerved by the presence of a visitors book in her boyfriend's inner-city home? And whose spidery handwriting is it that fills the pages? Who is the strangely courteous boy still lingering at a child's tenth birthday party when all the parents have gathered their children and left? And why does the presence of a perfectly ordinary woman in a post office queue leave another customer pallid and sweating with fear? Beware what you open this Christmas!

With the smart suspense of Emma Donoghue’s Room and the atmospheric claustrophobia of Grey Gardens, this “bizarrely unsettling, yet compulsively readable” (Iain Reid, internationally bestselling author of I’m Thinking of Ending Things) thriller explores the twisted realities that can lurk beneath even the most serene of surfaces. What becomes of a child who grows up without love? Marion Zetland lives with her domineering older brother John in a crumbling mansion on the edge of a northern seaside resort. A timid spinster in her fifties who still sleeps with teddy bears, Marion does her best to live by John’s rules, even if it means turning a blind eye to the noises she hears coming from behind the cellar door...and to the women’s laundry in the hamper that isn’t hers. For years, she’s buried the signs of John’s devastating secret into the deep recesses of her mind—until the day John is crippled by a heart attack, and Marion becomes the only one whose shoulders are fit to bear his secret. Forced to go down to the cellar and face what her brother has kept hidden, Marion discovers more about herself than she ever thought possible. As the truth is slowly unraveled, we finally begin to understand: maybe John isn’t the only one with a dark side....

Visitor guest book: Hardback gloss finish cover. Page size: 8.5" x 8.5" (216mm x 216 mm). Pages headed: Date, Name, Email Address, Address, Telephone Sufficient for 17 entries per double page width 98 lined white pages (enough for 833 entries)

Committee Serial No. 89-33. Considers H.R. 14604 and related H.R. 11429, H.R. 11780, and H.R. 14700 to authorize the Architect of the Capitol to convert the Botanic Garden to a National Visitor Center or construct a Visitor Center on the Capitol grounds.

Understanding the visitor experience provides essential insights into how museums can affect people’s lives. Personal drives, group identity, decision-making and meaning-making strategies, memory, and leisure preferences, all enter into the visitor experience, which extends far beyond the walls of the institution both in time and space. Drawing upon a career in studying museum visitors, renowned researcher John Falk attempts to create a predictive model of visitor experience, one that can help museum professionals better meet those visitors’ needs. He identifies five key types of visitors who attend museums and then defines the internal processes that drive them there over and over again. Through an understanding of how museums shape and reflect their personal and group identity, Falk is able to show not only how museums can increase their attendance and revenue, but also their meaningfulness to their constituents.