The narrative explores the journey of self-discovery and renewal, emphasizing that true transformation often follows a period of hardship. Characters confront their pasts and the challenges that led them to a crossroads, ultimately finding hope and new beginnings. The story highlights the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of embracing change after hitting rock bottom.
Exploring the heart-wrenching theme of lost love, this story delves into the emotional turmoil faced by a protagonist whose partner has moved on after losing all memories of their relationship. As they grapple with feelings of betrayal and longing, the narrative unfolds through poignant moments and reflections on love, identity, and the power of memory. The journey highlights the struggle to reclaim a past that seems irretrievably lost while navigating the complexities of moving forward.
In the early twentieth century China?s most famous commercial artists promoted new cultural and civic values through sketches of idealized modern women in journals, newspapers, and compendia called One Hundred Illustrated Beauties. This genre drew upon a centuries-old tradition of books featuring illustrations of women who embodied virtue, desirability, and Chinese cultural values, and changes in it reveal the foundational value shifts that would bring forth a democratic citizenry in the post-imperial era. The illustrations presented ordinary readers with tantalizing visions of the modern lifestyles that were imagined to accompany Republican China?s new civic consciousness. Citizens of Beauty is the first book to explore the One Hundred Illustrated Beauties in order to compare social ideals during China?s shift from imperial to Republican times. The book contextualizes the social and political significance of the aestheticized female body in a rapidly changing genre, showing how progressive commercial artists used images of women to promote a vision of Chinese modernity that was democratic, mobile, autonomous, and free from the crippling hierarchies and cultural norms of old China.
A tense, Hitchcockian psychological thriller in which nothing is as it seems,
every truth might be a lie, and the past looms ever larger over the present,
The Old You is a nail-bitingly modern slice of domestic noir.
Doesn't love always feel this way? Alex Parkinson is in love with his writing tutor, Siobhan. He has never loved anyone like this, but how can he convince Siobhan that they are meant to be together? So Alex stalks her on Facebook and finds out where she lives, buys her presents using her own credit card and sends her messages telling her exactly what he wants to do to her. He breaks into her house, reads her diary and secretly listens to her while she takes a bath. Isn't that what all lovers do? But when a love rival appears on the scene, Alex has to take drastic action, and soon a young woman lies dead after tumbling from the roof of her house. Now there is no-one standing in the way of Alex and his true love. But someone is watching Alex too and he is about to discover that there is a thin line between love -- and hate...
Despite being adopted, Emma Victor didn't feel all that different as a child; at least not for the first nine years of her life. Then her adoptive parents had a baby - Stella - of their own. Ten years later they were killed in a car crash - and Emma, aged 19, was left to bring Stella up alone, at an age when she should have been partying, not parenting. Ten years on, Stella has grown up. Now 19 herself, she is beautiful, confident and happy. Emma, however, is in a rut. Her career and love-life are going nowhere fast. Nearly 30, she feels she's not just on the shelf, but in danger of falling off it. But an extraordinary confrontation with a tramp on a tube shakes her from her lethargy, and she starts on a search for her birth mother; a search which, fearful both of what she might find and how it might affect Stella, she has been putting off for years. Are You My Mother? was a book that Emma used to read to Stella, when Stella was a toddler. Now the story of the little lost baby bird and the emotion and pathos of its quest for its mother haunts her as, with the help of her friend Mack, she tracks down five women with the same name; one of whom must be her mother. Emma soon finds however that her search is not so much for her mother but for her own identity. She has spent so long fulfilling roles for other people - daughter, girlfriend, sister, surrogate mother - that she has little idea of who or what she really is. Tentative at first but soon gaining in momentum, her search begins to change her life in more ways than she could possibly have imagined.
