The Centaur is a 1963 novel by John Updike. It won the National Book Award in 1964. The story concerns George Caldwell, a school teacher, and his son Peter, outside of Alton (i.e., Reading), Pennsylvania. The novel explores the relationship between the depressive Caldwell and his anxious son. Like James Joyce in Ulysses, Updike drew on the myths of antiquity in an attempt to turn a modern and common scene into something more profound, a meditation on life and man's relationship to nature and eternity. George is both the Centaur Chiron and Prometheus (some readers might see George's son Peter as Prometheus), Mr. Hummel, the automobile mechanic, is Hephaestus (AKA Vulcan); and so forth.
Steel's usual formula is at play here in a new love story about the difficulties of a relationship between two wildly different persons. Sasha is a high-powered gallery owner, and Liam is a feckless artist. Recently widowed, Sasha, who is nine years older than Liam, is staid, conservative, and bound by tradition. Liam is married (unhappily), manic, and a pronounced nonconformist. While Sasha has been busy building her father's Parisian art gallery into an international success, Liam has become the darling of the art world. The two meet and gradually begin an affair, but soon their strong personalities get in the way of their blossoming relationship.
Last seen in Split Second (2003), former Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have reached a crisis in their relationship in this less than compelling Washington political thriller from bestseller Baldacci.
Scottish Soldiers in France in the Reign of the Sun King - Nursery for Men of Honour
This volume examines the role and significance of Scottish soldiers in France in the age of the Sun King, Louis XIV. The study examines the complex relationship of expatriate Scottish soldiers to their homeland and native sovereign, within the context of a changing environment for military employment. The amity of the so-called 'auld' alliance meant little in an age of rapid development in the relationship between armies and the states they served. Caught in the middle were a number of Scots, attempting to perpetuate traditional modes of employment abroad. They found themselves the target of increasing pressures to commit wholeheartedly to one employer or another.
Liss recycles familiar conventions—drug dealers, missing money, an innocent hero mixed up with bad guys—but salvages his novel from banality with a few quirky touches. In sticky south Florida of August 1985, Lem Altick, a 17-year-old door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, witnesses the murder of two potential customers in a mobile home. Fearing he'll be fingered for the crime—or worse, that he's next—Lem establishes a wary relationship with the likable killer, Melford Kean, who is either a violent psychopath or an animal rights vigilante fighting agribusiness.
