FICTION · DETECTIVE AND MYSTERY
Lesley Grant-Adamson
Also known as: Grant-Adamson, Lesley., Grant-Adamson, Lesley, 1942-
Lesley Grant-Adamson is an acclaimed novelist, short-story writer and teacher of creative writing. She was a journalist who gave up her job (as a feature writer on the Guardian in London) to write fiction. Her first two novels Patterns in the Dust and The Face of Death (Faber, 1985) brought her international success with the classic English detective story and the psychological suspense novel. Patterns in the Dust was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey award for first crime novels. Like several of her early novels, it featured newspaper folk and their ailing industry. She wrote a further 14 crime novels of various types, while reviewers credited her with ‘turning the genre into an art form’. Her short stories have been read on BBC Radio 4, Radio 3 and Classic FM. They have appeared in magazines, literary journals and anthologies. Lesley has taught novel-writing at the Arvon Foundation and Ty Newydd. Her success as a teacher, and her wide experience of writing crime fiction, led to a commission for Writing Crime and Suspense Fiction (Hodder, 1996) and the updated Writing Crime Fiction (Hodder, 2003). After her RLF fellowships she taught a City University evening class in writing crime fiction. She tutors writers individually, from her home in Suffolk where she lives with her husband Andrew. They once wrote a book together. A Season in Spain (Pavilion, 1994) is a portrait of the Alpujarra region of Andalusia where they lived for two years. (Source)
They took Arlene's car because it had air-conditioning and Emily wasn't sure the Olds would make it.
— from Wish you were here
Most acclaimed
Dangerous Games
Margaret MacMillan, an acclaimed historian and "great storyteller" (The New York Review of Books), explores here the many ways in which history--its values and dangers--affects us all, including how it is used and abused. The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 and Nixon and Mao reveals how a deeper engagement with history in our private lives and, more important, in the sphere of public debate can guide us to a richer, more enlightened existence, as individuals and nations. Alive with incident and figures both great and infamous, including Robespierre, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Mao Zedong, Karl Marx, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush, Dangerous Games explores why it is important to treat history with care.History is used to justify religious movements and political campaigns alike. The manipulation of history is increasingly pervasive in today's world. Dictators may suppress history because it undermines their ideas, agendas, or claims to absolute authority. Nationalists may tell false, one-sided, or misleading stories about the past. Political leaders might mobilize their people by telling lies. Adolf Hitler, for instance, blamed the Jews for Germany's humiliation at Versailles and its defeat in World War I. It is imperative that we have an understanding of the past and avoid the all-too-common traps in thinking to which many fall prey--as MacMillan skillfully illuminates. This brilliantly reasoned work will compel us to examine history anew, including our own understanding of it, and our own closely held beliefs.From the Hardcover edition.
Wish you were here
"It's been a year since the death of her husband, Henry, and Emily Maxwell gathers her family in Lake Chautauqua in western New York for what will be their last vacation at their summer cottage before she sells the property. Joining her is her sister-in-law, Arlene, a retired teacher who silently mourns the passing of the lake house from her family's hands and still endures the wound of a love lost long ago. Emily's firebrand daughter, Meg, a recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, brings her children from Detroit, the blossoming Sarah and the timid Justin. Emily's son, Ken, a struggling photographer who has quit his job and mortgaged his future to pursue his art, comes accompanied by his wife, Lisa, who is secretly heartened to be visiting the house for the last time and not-so-secretly cool to her prickly mother-in-law - and their children, the bookish Ella and the troubled Sam.". "As O'Nan inhabits the mind and heart of each member of the house through the course of their week together, he illuminates the many lives of the Maxwell family as memories of summers past resurface, old rivalries flare up, and love is rekindled and born anew by the shores of the lake."--BOOK JACKET.