Thanks to Erika Anstead of Astor + Blue Editions, I am giving away one copy of The Car Thief.
Book Description:
Described as “one of the best coming of age novels of the Twentieth Century,” Theodore Weesner’s modern American classic is now re-launched for a new generation of readers to discover.
It’s 1959. Sixteen year-old Alex Housman has just stolen his fourteenth car and frankly doesn’t know why. His divorced, working class father grinds out the night shift at the local Chevy Plant in Detroit, looking forward to the flask in his glove compartment, and the open bottles of booze in his Flint, Michigan home.
Abandoned and alone, father and son struggle to express a deep love for each other, even as Alex fills his day juggling cheap thrills and a crushing depression. He cruises and steals, running from—and then forcing run-ins with—the police, compelled by reasons he frustratingly can’t put into words. And then there’s Irene Shaeffer, the pretty girl in school whose admiration Alex needs like a drug in order to get by.
Broke and fighting to survive, Alex and his father face the realities of estrangement, incarceration, and even violence as their lives unfold toward the climactic episode that a New York Timesreviewer called “one of the most profoundly powerful in American fiction.”
In this rich, beautifully crafted story, Weesner accomplishes a rare feat: He’s written a transcendent piece of literature in deceptively plain language, painting a powerful portrait of a father and a son, otherwise invisible among the mundane, everyday details of life in blue collar America.
A true and enduring American classic.
About Theodore Weesner:
Theodore Weesner, born in Flint, Michigan, is aptly described as a “Writers’ Writer” by the larger literary community. His short works have been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly and Best American Short Stories. His novels, including The True Detective, Winning the City and Harbor Light, have been published to great critical acclaim in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Boston Magazine and The Los Angeles Times to name a few.
Weesner is currently writing his memoir, two new novels, and an adaptation of his widely praised novel—retitled Winning the City Redux—also to be published by Astor + Blue Editions. He lives and works in Portsmouth, NH.
This book giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on August 15, 2014. Please use Rafflecopter to enter. a Rafflecopter giveaway
For those of you who missed the giveaway or didn’t win, here is another chance to win a print copy of The Last Time I Saw you. This time thanks goes to Danielle Caravella of Wunderkind PR, for making this second giveaway possible!
Book Description:
When Olivia Berrington gets the call to tell her that her best friend from college has been killed in a car crash in New York, her life is turned upside down. Her relationship with Sally was an exhilarating roller coaster, until a shocking betrayal drove them apart. But if Sally really had turned her back, why is her little girl named after Olivia?
As questions mount about the fatal accident, Olivia is forced to go back and unravel their tangled history. But as Sally’s secrets start to spill out, Olivia’s left asking herself if the past is best kept buried.
About Eleanor Moran:
Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson.
Eleanor Moran is the author of three previous novels: Stick or Twist, Mr Almost Right and Breakfast in Bed, which is currently being developed for television. Eleanor also works as a television drama executive and her TV credits includeRome, MI5,Spooks, Being Human and a biopic of Enid Blyton, Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter. Eleanor grew up in North London, where she still lives.
This giveaway is open to the U.S. only and ends on May 7, 2014. Please use Rafflecopter to enter. a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thanks to Jessica K. Bromberg of Quercus Publishing, Inc., I am giving away one copy of The Last Time I Saw You.
Book Description:
When Olivia Berrington gets the call to tell her that her best friend from college has been killed in a car crash in New York, her life is turned upside down. Her relationship with Sally was an exhilarating roller coaster, until a shocking betrayal drove them apart. But if Sally really had turned her back, why is her little girl named after Olivia?
As questions mount about the fatal accident, Olivia is forced to go back and unravel their tangled history. But as Sally’s secrets start to spill out, Olivia’s left asking herself if the past is best kept buried.
Excerpt:
“I know. I’m saving you from yourself.”
He’s towering over me, ruddy and damp from the g ym, smelling not of sweat or of aftershave, but of a smell peculiar to him. He’s ginger y-blond, with a boyish lankiness that suits the irrepressibility of his personality. He’s bendy and spring y and unstoppable, constantly in motion, and yes, before you ask, I’m more than a little bit in love with him. I always have been, ever since he walked into my high school politics class, his timing impeccable: my parents were in the middle of their gruesome separation and I was ripe for distraction.
James was an army brat, the youngest of three boys, and the family had recently been transported to Northwood, the boring north London suburb we lived in, which was dominated by the naval base. A life spent being uprooted from place after place could go two ways. For James, rather than making him shy and mistrustful, it had given him the cast iron certainty that he could walk into any situation and charm his way to the very heart of it. It wasn’t oiliness or manipulation, it was pure self-belief combined with an innate knowledge that he was attractive.
It was that age and stage where boys and girls first peek over the barricades and try out being “friends”—a funny old version of friendship in which you can snog furiously at a party one night and go back to being mates the very next day. Or at least other people could do that. James and I had one such night at school, an hour spent kissing in the boys’ cloakroom during the first- year Christmas prom— it was brief and clumsy and awkward, and yet I did nothing but daydream about it for months, staring wistfully through my clumsily applied eye makeup and playing “Wuthering Heights” on a loop, while he remained utterly oblivious.
I hoped with every fiber of my being that he’d come back to me, that I’d be able to prove myself the second time around, but he’d already moved on, climbed back aboard the romantic merry-go-round and recast me as his long-lost sister. That’s not strictly true, there was one more time but now— now is not the time to think about it. Sally whispers across my consciousness but I push her away. Perhaps it’s the ferocity with which I suppress her that makes her continue to surge up, like those schlocky horror films where the hero tries more and more elaborate methods to destroy the invincible slasher.
James leans across me, digging the wooden spoon into the pan and taking a greedy mouthful.
“Perfect,” he says, grabbing a bottle of wine from the fridge and plunking down plates on the table.
“It needs another ten minutes,” I protest.
“Yeah but you’ve got a date.”
It’s yet another soul-destroying Internet date born out of necessity— I’m thirty- five, and most of my contemporaries are coupled up, though not necessarily happily. Even so, I don’t think many of those discontented partners are looking to roll the dice again, and even if they were, I never envisioned being someone’s difficult second album. I want to be the answer to a question they’ve never been able to phrase, for me to feel the same way about them, rather than a compromise born out of a disappointment.
It’s not like I haven’t tried the compromise route. My last proper boyfriend was a perfectly nice man called Marco whom I met at a Christmas party a few months after my sister Jules had got married. I was secretly, silently panicking, and I managed to convince myself that I’d alighted on my one true love, rather than admitting that it was the romantic equivalent of a game of pin the tail on the donkey, the two of us flailing around in the ark, desperate to believe we’d somehow found the sweet spot. We moved in together far too quickly, and immediately started arguing about the kind of piffling, trifling things, like whether the pepper should live on the table or in the “condiment cupboard,” that made it clear that when we had to make decisions about things that really mattered, we wouldn’t survive. As I wept fat, salty tears of disappointment on James’s shoulder he came up with the brilliant suggestion we should live together and here we are, eighteen months on. He’s an employment lawyer—unlike me, he easily earns enough to live alone—but I think that he values having someone to come home to just as much as I do.
By now he’s shovelling the curry into his mouth like he’s rescuing a very, very small casualty who is trapped under the rice.
“Let me have a look at him then.”
“Who? ”
I know perfectly well who.
“I’ll get your laptop.”
As he goes off to find it, I try not to brood about the unfairness of the fact that he doesn’t have to submit himself to this kind of indignity. Women just seem to appear in his life, like fruit flies around a mango, and, while he’s not exactly a bastard, he’s not exactly not. Take last month’s victim (Anita? Angela . . . something beginning with an A). I met her shaking the last of my granola into a bowl. W hen I futilely rattled the empt y box she fashioned her mouth into a theatrical “oh!” and promised to replace it. She was as good as her word, leaving a replacement on my bed the very next day with a sweet, flower y postcard saying how much she was looking forward to getting to know me better. No time: before I’d got so much as half way through it James had finished with her, spooked by the seven individually wrapped presents she’d lovingly bestowed for his birthday. “How did she take it? ” I asked, knowing from even those brief fragments of contact how gutted she’d be. “It was like shooting a fawn,” he said, shoving his gym bag into a backpack, and I thanked my lucky stars for how it had played out between us.
It’s not like I’m one of those weird masochists who marries serial killers and gaily drowns out the sound of their victim’s screams with the vacuum cleaner: James as a friend is a million miles away from James as a boy friend. He truly is my best friend—the only person in the world that I’m as close to is Jules—and until I meet someone I feel a real heart connection to I’m truly grateful to have him there to shield me from the chill.
“Do you really want to go out? ” he says, coming back in, with my ancient laptop whirring into life between his hands.
Of course I don’t, what I want to do is slob out on the sofa watching The Apprentice and getting drunk with the person I like being with most in the world, but 365 more days like that equals another whole year consigned to a loveless wasteland.
“Yes,” I say, slightly unconvincingly, “sort of.” I’m fighting to stop myself from melting in the face of his obvious glee that I might nix my plans and stay in with him. “Anyway, I have to.”
“We haven’t hung out for days,” he says, turning the machine toward me so I can log on, while he gives me puppy-dog eyes from over the top of it. “And whose fault is that? ”
“I miss you,” he says. “It’s been a mad week. But here I am, your willing slave, ready to go out and buy more wine and watch Siralan kick some corporate butt.”
“You know perfectly well he’s Lord Sugar,” I say, swivelling the computer back toward him so he can check out Luke, a quantity surveyor with kind eyes, who at this very moment is probably sitting in his office mentally rehearsing a few witty opening gambits in his head. I hate Internet dating.
“Why are you meeting him so late? ”
“I told him I’d probably get stuck in the office.”
“Or is it because he looks like the spawn of Mr. Baxter? ”
“He does not!”
Mr. Baxter was our chubby, well-meaning history teacher, whose sweat y hands invariably left a damp imprint on your essay when he handed it back.
“Look at those cheeks. He’s definitely got a bulimic hamster vibe going on.”
“Don’t be mean!” I say, peering critically at his picture. He’s not madly good looking, it’s true, but there’s something honest about his gaze, and I liked the way his profile didn’t read like a psycho’s shopping list of nonnegotiable attributes— he sounded like a proper human being. Sounds.
“Just saying, Livvy, I don’t think we’ve found the one.”
It was half an hour later when I stepped out of the house, having guiltily and inevitably cancelled my date, and somehow ended up volunteering to be the person to go to the liquor store. James called me as I got to the end of the road.
“I know, I know. I won’t get any thing rank just because it’s on special.”
“Livvy, you need to come home.”
“I’ll only be five minutes.”
“Seriously. Turn around now,” he said, his voice shaking. James never sounded like that.
“What is it? ” Slivers of dread crawled dow n my back like icy raindrops dow n a w indow pane. “Tell me.”
“I’m just going to say it,” he sa id, steel ing hi msel f. “Sally’s dead.”
About Eleanor Moran:
Photo Credit: Charlie Hopkinson.
Eleanor Moran is the author of three previous novels: Stick or Twist, Mr Almost Right and Breakfast in Bed, which is currently being developed for television. Eleanor also works as a television drama executive and her TV credits includeRome, MI5,Spooks, Being Human and a biopic of Enid Blyton, Enid, starring Helena Bonham Carter. Eleanor grew up in North London, where she still lives.
This giveaway is open internationally and ends on April 16, 2014. If the winner is in the U.S. or Canada, s/he will receive print, if international, ebook. Please use Rafflecopter to enter. a Rafflecopter giveaway
Thanks to Erika Anstead of Astor + Blue Editions, I am giving away one copy of The Car Thief.
