Holy Pictures

Boylan, Clare

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Concerning Virgins: A Collection of Short Stories

Contemporary

Penguin

When Charlotte Brontë died in 1855, she left behind twenty pages of a novel that signaled her most compelling work since Jane Eyre. One hundred fifty years later, Clare Boylan has finished Brontë’s novel, sparking a sensational literary event. With pitch-perfect tone that is utterly true to Brontë’s voice, Boylan delivers a brilliant tale about a mysterious young girl, Matilda, who is delivered to a girls’ school in provincial England. When everything about the girl’s wealthy background turns out to be a fiction, it falls to a local gentleman, Mr. Ellin, and a childless widow, Isabel Chalfont, to begin a quest for her past and her identity that takes them from the drawing rooms of country society to London’s seamiest alleys. With all the intelligence and pathos of the novel’s originator, Boylan develops Brontë’s sketch of a girl without a past into a stunning portrait of Victorian society with a shameful secret at its heart.

Emma Brown

United States

A year has passed since the closing of Finbar's Hotel, a down-on-its-heels hotel on the Dublin quays. Now, with a rock star as its new owner, it has once more opened its doors-and Finbar's has become an ultra-chic gathering spot. Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel describes one night in its newly illustrious surroundings-a night filled with adventure and comic romp. In one room a man surreptitiously helps his wife's friend get pregnant, while next door a businesswoman battles her father. And down the hall, a nun struggles with the most important mission of her life. A fabulous mix of pathos and high humor, this is a sardonic tour of the gamut of human experience told by Ireland's finest modern storytellers. Maeve Binchy has written numerous bestsellers, most recently Tara Road. Dermot Bolger is the author of six novels and edited The Vintage Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. Clare Boylan has written six novels and several nonfiction works, including The Literary Companion to Cats. Emma Donoghue is the author of Stirfry and Kissing the Witch, among other works. Anne Haverty's writing has been short-listed for the Whitbread Award. ƒilis N' Dhuibhne has published poetry, short fiction, children's books, and two novels. Kate O'Riordan writes for stage and screen, and has written two novels including The Bray House. Deirdre Purcell recently adapted her novel Falling for a Dancer as a four-part serial for BBC television.

Ladies' Night at Finbar's Hotel

DONOGHUE, EMMA

Bolger, Dermot

O'Riordan, Kate

PURCELL, Deirdre

BINCHY,MAEVE

Haverty, Anne

Harvest Books

For fourteen-year old Nan and her younger sister Mary, the trials of convent life blend uneasily with their innocent yet peculiar home life, where the maid regales them with tales of a lurid past. But harsh reality is looming, a reality that in 1920s Dublin, is very shocking - and very adult. By the author of ROOM FOR A SINGLE LADY.

Holy pictures: A novel

Literary

Summit Books

HOME RULE.

Hamish Hamiltin

EMMA BROWN

Clare Boylan's expansion of Bronte's scrap of plot into Emma Brown is powerfully imagined and stylish, with enough melodramatic twists to keep the momentum going until the end. She is distinctly successful in recreating faithfully an idiom both familiar yet obsolete. Charlotte Bronte left a fragment of a novel at her death, subsequently published under the title Emma, concerning the placement by a rich father of a haughty and unresponsive daughter at a school for young ladies. As with Jane Austen's Sanditon or Dickens' Edwin Drood it has offered later writers the challenge of guessing a dead author's intentions. Paradoxically, one of the opportunities that such an enterprise offers is the possibility of subverting the apparent direction of a plot-line, or undermining the perceived character of participants in the story and Clare Boylan takes extensive--perhaps too extensive--advantage of her freedom in this regard. A modern author's preoccupations are unlikely to be the same as those of a mid-Victorian and Boylan's story takes Charlotte Bronte's characters into darker milieu, and with a greater explicitness of social detail, than their creator is likely to have permitted herself. Rather like Charles Palliser did with Dickens in The Quincunx, Boylan seems to be trying to strip away the euphemism and restraint required of the great 19th-century novelists to show the reality of the world they mirrored. Students of Victorian social history will recognise elements drawn from Mayhew and WT Stead, among others: indeed Stead and the incident for which he is now best remembered--the purchase of a child--has clearly influenced a key character and plot element. There is much of Dickens, and perhaps even more of Wilkie Collins, in the plotting, which survives a tendency to the schematic or mechanical to deliver a story that ranges widely through 19th-century England and society.

BRONTЁ, CHARLOTTE

VIKING

When Charlotte Bronte died in 1855, she left behind the beginnings of a new novel - twenty pages of a work in progress called Emma. Now, almost 150 years later, Clare Boylan has returned to this most intriguing of fragments, and turned them into an astonishing story of mystery, atmosphere and page-turning suspense. When Conway Fitzgibbon arrives at Fuchsia Lodge with his daughter Matilda, the headmistress Miss Wilcox couldn't be more delighted. The ladies' school is limited in numbers and eager for new pupils, particularly ones so finely dressed, and boasting a father who is 'quite the gentleman'. But as Christmas approaches, and Miss Wilcox inquires about arrangements for the holidays, she is in for a shock. Conway Fitzgibbon, like the address he left behind, does not exist. So who is Matilda? With Miss Wilcox unable to extract any information out of the girl, it falls to a local lawyer, Mr Ellin, and a young widow, Isabel Chalfont, to unravel the truth. What they discover is a tale that travels the highs and lows of nineteenth-century England, an investigation that begins as curiosity and ends up changing all their lives forever ...

Little,Brown

Dick and Eunice have been married for 50 years. Eunice believes that they have achieved the point of real love but then Dick takes a terrifying plunge into insanity and enters a world of imaginary enemies, fantastic opportunities and sexual rivals.

Chroniclers

Genre Fiction

That bad woman: Short stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

Little,Brown & Co

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