Bøger af Tim Farrington

"All the gravestone shops in all the towns in all the world, and she walks into mine." Jeremiah Mason learned the stone-working craft from his grandfather, a cathedral mason of the old school," at an early age. But it is not until an old love shows up in his own shop one day, bearing a raw new grief, that Jeremiah begins to understand his grandfather's extraordinary gift with the mourners of those for whom he carved his gravestones with such care, and to fathom the real depths of love and loss, and the human heart. Tim Farrington of the author of the trilogy The Monk Downstairs--- a New York Times Notable Book--- The Monk Upstairs, and The Lazarus Kid; as well as the novels Lizzie's War, The California Book of the Dead, and Blues for Hannah, and the nonfiction book A Hell of Mercy: Some Meditations on Depression and the Dark Night of the Soul. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, Image, Zyzzyva, and San Francisco Magazine.

In a tour de force of romantic comedy, brilliant newcomer Tim Farrington brings San Francisco into delightful focus in this wonderfully witty novel of life, love and awakenings.

Rebecca Martin is a single mother with an apartment to rent and a sense that she has used up her illusions. I had the romantic thing with my first husband, thank you very much, she tells a hapless suitor. I'm thirty-eight years old, and I've got a daughter learning to read and a job I don't quite like. I don't need the violin music. But when the new tenant in her in-law apartment turns out to be Michael Christopher, on the lam after twenty years in a monastery and smack dab in the middle of a dark night of the soul, Rebecca begins to suspect that she is not as thoroughly disillusioned as she had thought.Her daughter, Mary Martha, is delighted with the new arrival, as is Rebecca's mother, Phoebe, a rollicking widow making a new life for herself among the spiritual eccentrics of the coastal town of Bolinas. Even Rebecca's best friend, Bonnie, once a confirmed cynic in matters of the heart, urges Rebecca on. But none of them, Rebecca feels, understands how complicated and dangerous love actually is.As her unlikely friendship with the ex-monk grows toward something deeper, and Michael wrestles with his despair while adjusting to a second career flipping hamburgers at McDonald's, Rebecca struggles with her own temptation to hope. But it is not until she is brought up short by the realities of life and death that she begins to glimpse the real mystery of love, and the unfathomable depths of faith.Beautifully written and playfully engaging, this novel. is about one man wrestling with his yearning for a life of contemplation and the need for a life of action in the world. But it's Rebecca's spirit, as well as her relationships with Mary Martha, Phoebe, her irresponsible surfer ex-husband Rory -- and, of course, the monk downstairs -- that makes this story shine.

It's the summer of 1967, and Mike O'Reilly's has just shipped out to Vietnam. Liz O'Reilly is trying to keep it all together for their four kids. While set during the conflict in Vietnam, this novel captures the other side of any war - that of the war at home and the careening emotions of the spouses and families left behind.