Efnisorð: bandarískar bókmenntir

Not yet thirty, Bathory has assembled a peculiar résumé: model, sex worker, linguist, Latin scholar, and assassin. The last of these has been the family trade for generations. Growing up, Bathory, her mother, and her father made an isolated, strange, and loving – if very unusual – family unit. Her lonely childhood games mimicked spycraft and wet-work, while her parents watched and shared their arcane theories about love and death.

As a student in New York, her life changes on accepting a job at a dilapidated card shop in Manhattan. This is a front for an agency that allows her to put her inherited skills to use while pursuing romance in the city.

However, steering clear of attachment is as dangerous as anything else she does and means sidestepping a certain alluring figure from her father’s past. She is equally intent on dying young, a less difficult proposition given her heritage, the company she keeps – call girls, conflicted cops, trustfund hoodlums – and the people pursuing her.

Will Bathory escape both fate and family, or does satisfaction and salvation lie only in their embrace?

In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, a fraught wedding is taking place.

Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe. Gary thinks Kismet is the answer to his problems. Kismet can’t imagine her future, but she will settle for fulfilling his. During a clumsy proposal, Kismet misses her chance to say ‘no’, and so the die is cast.

Meanwhile Crystal, Kismet’s mother, hauls sugar beets for Gary’s wealthy family. On her nightly truck drives from the farm, Crystal frets over what the future might hold – both for herself, and her daughter.

Starkly beautiful and vividly written, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendour, from one of our greatest living writers.

A thrilling, innovative novel about the interplay between nature and humankind by the author of Names on the Land.

With Storm, first published in 1941, George R. Stewart invented a new genre of fiction: the eco-novel. California has been plunged into drought throughout the summer and fall when a ship reports an unusual barometric reading from the far western Pacific. In San Francisco, a junior meteorologist in the Weather Bureau takes note of the anomaly and plots “an incipient little whorl” on the weather map, a developing storm, he suspects, that he privately dubs Maria. Stewart’s novel tracks Maria’s progress to and beyond the shores of the United States through the eyes of meteorologists, linemen, snowplow operators, a general, a couple of decamping lovebirds, and an unlucky owl, and the storm, surging and ebbing, will bring long-needed rain, flooded roads, deep snows, accidents, and death. Storm is an epic account of humanity’s relationship to and dependence on the natural world.