|
Showing 1 - 12 of
12 matches in All Departments
"[An] ingeniously plotted novel . . . Norman knows how to weave an
enticing and satisfying mystery, one tantalizing thread at a time."
-- New York Times Book Review A witty, engrossing homage to noir,
from National Book Award finalist Howard Norman Jacob Rigolet,
soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector, looks up
from his seat at an auction--his mother, former head librarian at
the Halifax Free Library, is walking almost casually up the aisle.
Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of ink at master
photographer Robert Capa's Death on a Leipzig Balcony. Jacob's
police detective fiancee is assigned to the ensuing interrogation.
My Darling Detective delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as
Jacob's understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his
father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a police
officer suspected of murdering two Jewish residents during an
upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945. The denouement, involving a dire
shootout and an emergency delivery--it's the second Rigolet to be
born in the Halifax library in a three decades--is Howard Norman at
his uncannily moving best. "Norman works with an offhand ease and
grace . . . Whimsy is balanced by moments of powerfully evoked
realism." -- Washington Post "An unconventional, lively literary
mystery." -- Kirkus Reviews
Howard Norman's The Bird Artist, the first book of his Canadian trilogy, begins in 1911. Its narrator, Fabian Vas is a bird artist: He draws and paints the birds of Witless Bay, his remote Newfoundland coastal village home. In the first paragraph of his tale Fabian reveals that he has murdered the village lighthouse keeper, Botho August. Later, he confesses who and what drove him to his crime—a measured, profoundly engrossing story of passion, betrayal, guilt, and redemption between men and women.
|
Koren. in the Wild (Hardcover)
Edward Koren; Preface by Howard Norman, Ben Cohen
|
R876
R725
Discovery Miles 7 250
Save R151 (17%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
Koren. In the Wild (Paperback)
Edward Koren; Preface by Howard Norman, Ben Cohen
|
R594
R494
Discovery Miles 4 940
Save R100 (17%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
"The events of a single episode of Howard Norman's superb memoir
are both on the edge of chaos and gathered superbly into coherent
meaning . . . A wise, riskily written, beautiful book." -- Michael
Ondaatje
Howard Norman's spellbinding memoir begins with a portrait, both
harrowing and hilarious, of a Midwest boyhood summer working in a
bookmobile, in the shadow of a grifter father and under the erotic
tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. His life story continues in
places as far-flung as the Arctic, where he spends part of a decade
as a translator of Inuit tales--including the story of a soapstone
carver turned into a goose whose migration-time lament is "I hate
to leave this beautiful place"--and in his beloved Point Reyes,
California, as a student of birds. Years later, in Washington,
D.C., an act of deeply felt violence occurs in the form of a
murder-suicide when Norman and his wife loan their home to a poet
and her young son. In Norman's hands, life's arresting strangeness
is made into a profound, creative, and redemptive story.
"Uses the tight focus of geography to describe five unsettling
periods of his life, each separated by time and subtle shifts in
his narrative voice . . . The originality of his telling here is as
surprising as ever." -- "Washington Post"
"These stories almost seem like tall tales themselves, but Norman
renders them with a journalistic attention to detail. Amidst these
bizarre experiences, he finds solace through the places he's lived
and their quirky inhabitants, human and avian." -- "The New Yorker"
Howard Norman, widely regarded as one of this country's finest
novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his
major books--"The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard," and "The
Haunting of L"--in this erotically charged and morally complex
story.
Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his
parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different
bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same
compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring
actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle
Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and ravishing cousin
Tilda.
Setting in motion the novel's chain of life-altering passions
and the wartime perfidy at its core is the arrival of the German
student Hans Mohring, carrying only a satchel. Actual historical
incidents--including a German U-boat's sinking of the Nova
Scotia-Newfoundland ferry "Caribou," on which Aunt Constance
Hillyer might or might not be traveling--lend intense narrative
power to Norman's uncannily layered story.
Wyatt's account of the astonishing--not least to him-- events
leading up to his fathering of a beloved daughter spills out
twenty-one years later. It's a confession that speaks profoundly of
the mysteries of human character in wartime and is directed, with
both despair and hope, to an audience of one.
An utterly stirring novel. This is Howard Norman at his
celebrated best.
With tales from the tribal peoples of Greenland, Canada, Siberia,
Alaska, Japan, and the polar region, told and retold during
months-long winter nights, "Northern Tales" gathers together a rich
diversity of traditions and cultures, spanning the Way-Back Time
through the coming of the first white explorers. By turns tragic
and comic, fantastic and earthy, frivolous and profound, this
collection transports the reader to the haunting, little-known
world of the far North, with all its fragile majesty and power.
|
Devotion (Paperback)
Howard Norman
|
R396
R346
Discovery Miles 3 460
Save R50 (13%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
Like many of Howard Norman's celebrated novels, this intense and
intriguingly unconventional love story begins with a crime. David
Kozol has assaulted his father-in-law on a London street. What
could possibly enrage David enough that he would strike the father
of his new bride? Why would William, the gentle caretaker of an
estate in Nova Scotia -- along with its flock of swans -- be so
angry at the man who has just married his beloved daughter Maggie?
And what would lead Maggie to believe that David has been
unfaithful to her?
At its core, Devotion is an elegantly constructed, unsparing
examination of love in its various forms -- romantic, filial -- and
of course, love for the vast open spaces of the natural world.
In the fall of 1977, Howard Norman went to Churchill, Manitoba, to
translate Inuit folktales, and there he met Helen Tanizaki, an
extraordinary linguist translating the same tales into Japanese.
"In Fond Remembrance of Me" recaptures their intimacy, and the
remarkable influence that she, and the tales themselves, would have
on the future novelist. Through a series of overlapping panels of
reality and memory, Norman evokes with vivid immediacy their brief
but life-shifting encounter, and the earthy, robust Inuit folklore
that occasioned it.
|
|