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.

The fascination with mother-daughter relationships that captivated readers in Tan’s debut novel continues in her latest, an even more polished and provocative work. Compulsively readable and beautifully structured around three metaphorical themes—bones, ghosts, and ink—this novel explores the lives of three generations of women. It begins in a small Chinese village at the turn of the twentieth century, where a skilled bonesetter defies tradition to teach his daughter. Intelligent and willful, she rejects the marriage proposal of a vulgar coffinmaker, triggering a tragic sequence of events that reverberates a century later in San Francisco. Here, a Chinese American woman reads her mother’s memoir. Although Ruth is a ghostwriter for self-help books, her advice hasn’t fostered genuine intimacy with her boyfriend or helped her cope with her argumentative mother, Luling, who is haunted by the ghost of Precious Auntie. Widowed since Ruth was a toddler, Luling, a calligraphy artist from China, struggles with Alzheimer’s. As Ruth returns home to care for her, she confronts painful childhood memories and uncovers the truth about Precious Auntie, the bonesetter’s daughter, who is her grandmother. Through the stories of these three strong women, Tan weaves vivid Chinese history, explores familial bonds, and celebrates the preservation of family history as an act of love and a path to forgiveness.

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.

Winner of: The Pulitzer Prize The National Book Critics Circle Award The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more... Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary American experience and explores the endless human capacity to persevere—and risk it all—in the name of love.

A bestseller in Canada, this riveting family saga takes readers from Cape Breton Island to the battlefields of World War I to New York City's jazz scene--and into the lives, and guilty secrets, of four remarkable sisters.

This novel follows several members of an American family, the Berglunds, as well as their close friends and lovers, as complex and troubled relationships unfold over many years. The book follows them through the last decades of the twentieth century and concludes near the beginning of the Obama administration. The Berglunds are the middle class suburban family that the neighbors just love to talk about. Walter, the successful and doting husband, and Patty, the tall ex varsity basketball player who bakes Christmas cookies for each resident of Barrier Street, seem like the perfect couple. But life is not the pretty picture presented to the world. When their precious first born is corrupted by the wanton girl next door, the edges fray on the Berglunds' family fabric. An old friend emerges, tall, dark and only slightly disheveled and mistakes are made.

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 ofFreedom. Purity Tyler, known to all as Pip, is an outspoken, forthright young woman struggling to make a life for herself. She sleeps in an rickety commune in Oakland. She's in love with an unavailable older man and is saddled with staggering college debt. She has a crazy mother and doesn't know who her father is. A chance encounter leads her to an internship in South America with the world-famous Sunlight Project, the president of which is Andreas Wolf, a charismatic genius who grew up privileged but disaffected in the German Democratic Republic. Like numerous women before her, she becomes obsessed with Andreas, and they have an intense, unsettling relationship. Eventually, he finds her work back in the United States. What lies underneath is a wild tale of hidden identities, secret wealth, neurotic fidelity, sociopathy, and murder. The truth of Pip's parentage lies at the centre of this maelstrom, but before it is resolved Franzen takes us from the rain-drenched forests of northern California, to paranoid East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, to the paradisiacal mountain valleys of Bolivia, exposing us to the vagaries of radical politics, the problematic seductions of the internet, and the no-holds-barred war between the sexes. Featuring an unforgettable cast of inimitable Franzenian characters, Purity is deeply troubling, richly moving, and hilarious.

A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections

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.

Een jonge Duitse weduwe trekt na de Tweede Wereldoorlog met haar twee zoontjes naar haar zwager in Zuid-Amerika om er een nieuw leven op te bouwen, maar alles loopt anders dan zij verwachten.

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 ...

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 /