Azar Nafisi, author of the international best seller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in Iran, memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and complex mother, against the background of a country's political revolution.
This fantastic omnibus edition contains all six original Mary Poppins stories: Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins Comes Back, Mary Poppins Opens the Door, Mary Poppins in the Park, Mary Poppins in Cherry Tree Lane / Mary Poppins and the House Next Door When their new nanny, Mary Poppins, arrives on a gust of the East Wind, greets their mother, and slides up the banister, Jane and Michael's lives are turned magically upside down.
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art.
The Talisman - The first part of the Jack Sawyer Series Jack Sawyer, the novel's preadolescent protagonist, is a boy who has lost his father at a young age and is now in the process of losing his mother to a frightening cancer. Complicating matters is Jack's Uncle Morgan Sloat, a wretch of a man who is very good at making Jack's mother (an ex-B movie actress named Lily Cavenaugh Sawyer) a living hell. At the novel's commencement, Jack and Lily are hiding from Sloat at the Alhambra Inn in New Jersey, near a dilapitated amusement park. It is at this amusement park that Jack begins his quest.
In her third novel, Ahern (P.S., I Love You and Love, Rosie) employs an imaginary best friend to breathe distinctiveness into an otherwise stereotypical Irish tale. Living in her own house in a small, posh Irish town, 35-year-old Elizabeth Egan is an uptight interior designer and adoptive mother to her six-year-old nephew, Luke, whose mother, Elizabeth's 23-year-old sister, Saoirse, prefers boozing to parenting.
