Peter Abelsen Books

When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits - the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth - a second-rate travelling circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. Jacob, a veterinary student who almost earned his degree, is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there that he meets Marlena, the beautiful young star of the equestrian act, who is married to August, the charismatic but twisted animal trainer. He also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems untrainable until he discovers a way to reach her. Water for Elephants is illuminated by a wonderful sense of time and place. It tells a story of a love between two people that overcomes incredible odds in a world in which even love is a luxury that few can afford. Water for Elephants was a major movie starring Robert Pattinson and Reese Witherspoon.

Stunning reissue of an international bestseller, from the author of The Joy Luck Club' and The Bonesetter's Daughter'.

Tells the story of three generations of Chinese women, beginning at the turn of the century.

Life of Pi meets Lord of the Flies in The Dolphin People , a darkly comic “postmodern novel par excellence” ( Sydney Morning Herald ) from Torsten Krol, the author of the critically acclaimed Callisto . While fleeing Germany after World War II, a family arrives in Venezuela and encounters a Stone Age Amazon tribe that mistakes them for dolphins in human form. But the ruse can only protect them for so long in this madcap, imaginative tale.

A young man arrives in the Ukraine with a tattered photograph, a bad translator, a man haunted by memories and an undersexed guide dog - he is looking for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. What they find turns all their worlds upside down.

Oscar, an overweight Dominican from a New Jersey ghetto, dreams of becoming a writer and finding love, but Fuku, the curse has haunted his family for generations, may well prevent him from attaining his desires.

Following the curves of history in the first half of the twentieth century, Fall on Your Knees takes us from haunted Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, through the battlefields of World War I, to the emerging jazz scene in New York City, and into the lives of four unforgettable sisters. The mythically charged family - James, a father of intelligence and immense ambition ; Materia, his Lebanese child-bride ; and their daughters: Kathleen, the eldest, a beautiful talent preparing for a career as an opera diva ; Frances, incorrigible liar and hell-bent bad girl ; Mercedes, obsessive Catholic and protector of the flock ; and Lily, the adored invalid who takes us on a quest for truth and redemption - is supported by a richly textured cast of characters. Fall on Your Knees is a story of inescapable family bonds, of terrible secrets, of miracles, racial strife, attempted murder, birth and death, and forbidden love

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. *NOMINATED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2019* At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing - especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since. There's very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. Told with Jacobson's trademark wit and style, Live a Littleis in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender - a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.

The idyllic lives of civic-minded environmentalists Patty and Walter Berglund come into question when their son moves in with aggressive Republican neighbors, green lawyer Walter takes a job in the coal industry, and go-getter Patty becomes increasingly unstable and enraged.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic. "The war tried to kill us in the spring," begins this breathtaking account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. Bound together since basic training when their tough-as-nails Sergeant ordered Bartle to watch over Murphy, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes impossible actions. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds a groundbreaking novel about the costs of war that is destined to become a classic.

Zoals alle tieners uit heden en verleden hunkert Liza Normal naar roem. Helaas voor haar is ze echter geen meisje dat voor het succes. In de wieg is gelegd. Eerder voor het tegendeel. Gehinderd door de vulkanische ambities van haar moeder en haar eigen gebrek aan smaak beleeft Liza de ene afgang na de andere; zeperds, dompers en rampzalige liefdes. Het enige wat in haar voordeel werkt is het feit dat ze een veel beter mens is dan het sterretje dat ze zou willen zijn. Liza is onverwoestbaar. En als ze zich ten slotte verzoent met haar bestaan in de marge, breekt het uur aan van haar zoete wraak op de Hollywoodmythen die haar al die tijd tot wanhoop hebben gedreven.

Dave travels to India with Liz hoping to get her into bed. Liz travels with Dave wanting a companion for her voyage of self-discovery. This novel is a satire about backpackers.

A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of FREEDOM and THE CORRECTIONS

This is one of the most anticipated novels of this or any other year, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes--both human and literary--that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we've come to expect from Franzen. Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.

No one knows us quite the same way as the men and women who sit beside us in department meetings and crowd the office refrigerator with their labeled yogurts. Every office is a family of sorts, and the ad agency Joshua Ferris brilliantly depicts in his debut novel is family at its strangest and best, coping with a business downturn in the time-honored way: through gossip, pranks, and increasingly frequent coffee breaks. With a demon's eye for the details that make life worth noticing, Joshua Ferris tells a true and funny story about survival in life's strangest environment--the one we pretend is normal five days a week.

This sheet map, covering the whole of Lancashire, uses a large scale of 1 inch to 1.6 miles. It contains detailed coverage of the region's road network, including country lanes and rural lanes and tracks. Major footpaths, junctions, roundabouts and slip roads are also shown. Additional detail includes thousands of individually marked farms, houses and hamlets. Airports, airports, stations, ferries, houses, marinas and other places of interest are featured. Also included are town plans of Blackpool, Lancaster and Preston. Designed for both professional and leisure users, it is printed on one side to allow hanging as a wall map.

In this spellbinding new exploration of the varieties of love, the author of Call Me by Your Name revisits his characters' complex lives in the years after their first meeting.

A twelfth-century Sicilian cat burglar snatches a sack of artefacts from the king's geographer's library, and the tools and talismans of transmutation - and eternal life - are soon scattered all over the world. The bizarre and dangerous circumstances under which these alchemical objects change hands are testament to their extraordinary value, but it is not until nine hundred years later that a young reporter on a local paper, Paul Tomm, stumbles upon evidence that someone is collecting them again. Investigating the suspicious death of a local professor, Tomm finds the dead man's heavily fortified office stuffed with books on alchemy and clues that the man's life was as suspicious as his death ...

In Whitehall, het regeringscentrum in Londen, leveren de verschillende politieke partijen rond de verkiezingen in het midden van de jaren vijftig een harde, niet altijd eerlijke strijd.

Only R.W.B. Lewis-the renowned biographer and author of The City of Florence-could write so insightfully about Dante Alighieri, Florence's famous son. In Dante he traces the life and complex development-emotional, artistic, philosophical-of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, and to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a century later.Lewis reveals the boy who first encounters the mythic Beatrice, the lyric poet obsessed with love and death, the grand master of dramatic narrative and allegory, and his monumental search for ultimate truth in The Divine Comedy. It is in this masterpiece of self-discovery and redemption that Lewis finds Dante's own autobiography-and the sum of all his shifting passions and epiphanies.

Een jonge joods-Amerikaanse schrijver gaat op zoek naar sporen van zijn familie op het Oekraïense platteland.

Reisgids met de nadruk op culturele en historische zaken.

/ 9041406026 / Literature translated into Dutch / Nederlands / Dutch / Néerlandais / Niederländisch / paperback / 22 x 14 cm / 227 .pp /