Bøger udgivet af Delphinium Books

Iris Flynn is an acerbic, self-sufficient seventy-three-year-old widow with a minor Hollywood career in her past and some streamlined kitchen cabinets inspired by Marie Kondo. Her composed and simplified existence is disrupted when her son Frank lands on her doorstep after his rental home is destroyed in a wildfire, the latest in a string of personal setbacks for Frank. He arrives with Logan, his young and handsome boyfriend, a featured extra on a teen soap opera with a loyal Instagram following. Soon, news from her estranged family in Maine forces everyone out of their comfort zone. Iris convinces Frank and Logan to travel with her to the potato farm from where she made a quick getaway fifty years earlier, unleashing a funny and poignant family saga about secrets, forgiveness, and the fluctuating map of the human heart.An extraordinary story about family resilience, missed connections and second chances that assures us it's sometimes okay to create our own Hollywood endings.

Can coming home be a redemption? Or at least a place to hide out? Released from prison, Blake returns to the only place she ever felt safe, the now derelict Maine town she harbored in as a teen. Determined to keep her secrets and the losses to herself, Blake can't help being dragged into others' lives when she walks on as an apprentice lobsterman to Leland, who has problems of his own. Nearly broke and trying to support himself and 9-year-old Quinnie, Leland's questionable reputation and inability to pay the going wage make it impossible find lobstermen for his crew. Blake is distant and silent, but competent, more than competent. Soon Leland and those around Blake are surprised and jarred by how much they have come to rely on her. As more eyes turn her way, Blake feels forced to run again, only to discover her old life is seldom more than a couple steps behind her. Blake finds herself on a collision path with her own past in her quest to find home.

Living with her Babby after her parents' death, 10-year-old Dinah Ash is invited to train at Leningrad's legendary Vaganova Ballet School. From a young age, her life is immersed in the world of elite dance. She works hard, falls in love, and weathers the Soviet Union's ubiquitous antisemitism, but despite an impressive talent, she quickly learns that dancers of her "profile" don't become prima ballerinas.Love of Leningrad, ballet, friends, family, and books sustain Dinah until history intervenes. The Soviet war in Afghanistan, the rise of perestroika, and a re-emergence of Nazism leave her vulnerable and exposed. Realizing escape is her only option, she applies for refugee status in America.Dinah's adjustment to life in the US is a test as much of her identity as of her perseverance. Is who she is something Dinah can forge on her own? Or is identity imposed by upbringing, public opinion, and the myths of our cultures? As Dinah struggles with the questions of religion, race, and worth, her choices and the people she encounters will determine whether the dream of a better life can survive the weight of the past.

A sequel to the author’s critically acclaimed Delphinium title, One of These Things First, The Greta Garbo Home for Wayward Boys and Girls is a poison-pen, love letter to the end of an era—Manhattan during the decadent, late 1970s. Picking up where he left off at the end of his widely praised debut memoir, One of These Things First, Gaines recounts his hilarious, sometimes poignant attempt to forge a writing career and a successful love life in the gay world of the 1970s. He has limited success until he falls in love with an older woman dying of cancer. Meanwhile, he serendipitously begins a career as a writer when he meets a former child evangelist, and with naïve chutzpah, manages to land a book deal that leads to a whirlwind career as a biographer, rock and roll columnist, and roman à clef novelist who writes a book with a Studio 54 bartender that brings the world down around them. From inside the entertainment business in New York and L.A. to inside the publishing world, Gaines narrates a life of escapades and adventures and searching for love in all the wrong places. After hitting rock bottom, he writes a book about the Beatles that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list, leading to popular esteem and a feeling of momentary redemption.

From a remote village between Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire unrolls the intimate story of Teresa and Carlo, two young people whose paths cross and recross as they are first impelled by parents, then forced by sweeping world events to leave their childhood homes for lives they never imagined.Having left her mother and cherished dog Allucio, in Ulfano, Teresa works as a domestic servant in a large villa in Trento. She survives the Great War in the occupied city by banding together in a makeshift family with the other servants of the owners who have fled to escape the occupation. Carlo, an American still new to Italy and who speaks barely passable Italian, is just finding his footing in Trento when he’s dragged from bed at his boarding school, along with his classmates, and conscripted by the invading Austrian army. In a comical twist of fate, Carlo’s childhood near the Colorado gold mines motivates his captors to place him with a company of miners tasked with digging entrenchments and bunkers and building a massive fortress out of stone and ice, even as blizzards rage and artillery shells fall from the sky. Out of sheer loneliness, Carlo writes letters to Teresa, the girl he met only once in Trento. After the war, Carlo returns to Trento and reconnects with Teresa. Times are unsettled, as soldiers and those who fled the war flood back to the city and signs of the impending Influenza epidemic appear. With so much chaos, tradition gives way to new ideas, so neither worries about the consequences of their growing attachment. However, the same independence that has them dreaming of a future that didn’t exist when they were children, may pull them apart forever.

Chas. Johnson & Sons has been a family operation for three generations--grandfather, father and son. But when it comes time for Gabe Johnson to take the reins of the business, the world of books has changed, and the combination of the internet and inner city rents forces the store to close. But instead of folding his hand, Gabe decides to risk everything he has and reopen the shop--and, in a sense restart his life--in a small town on the shores of Lake Michigan. Haunted his entire life by an obsession with a former lover, he finds her again only to be faced with yet another even more difficult challenge that threatens the well-being of the revival of the bookstore as well as the fate of his rekindled relationship.

Fabrizio Garrone is an impoverished but aristocratic translator who has been living a life of quiet desperation in Milan. He feels underappreciated and tormented by a persistent sense of having been cheated by life. But when he reads about a lost Viennese novel--The House on Moon Lake--in the journals of a late esteemed literary critic, he dreams that this project will put him on the cultural and literary map, and finally bring him the accolades that have eluded him.Fabrizio journeys to Vienna, tracks down the book, and translates it, and in so doing embarks on a nightmarish search for the truth behind the events depicted in it, as well as for clues about the tragic life of its forgotten author. When asked to write a short biography of the novelist, Fabrizio must invent details missing from the last three years of his subject's life. The resulting biography is a publishing phenomenon. But the repercussions for Fabrizio are profound: he becomes the willing victim of a person he had thought to be fictional.

This engaging new collection of essays from the New York Times?bestselling novelist gathers together her reflections on the writing life; fond recollections of inspiring friends; and perceptive, playful commentary on preoccupations ranging from children's literature to fashion and feminism.Citing her husband's comment to her that ?Nobody asked you to write a novel,? Lurie goes on to eloquently explain why there was never another choice for her. She looks back on attending Radcliffe in the 1940s?an era of wartime rations and a wall of sexism where it was understood that Harvard was only for the men.From offering a gleeful glimpse into Jonathan Miller's production of Hamlet to memorializing mentors and intimate friends such as poet James Merrill, illustrator Edward Gorey, and New York Review of Books coeditor Barbara Epstein, Lurie celebrates the creative artists who encouraged and inspired her.A lifelong devotee of children's literature, she suggests saying no to Narnia, revisits the phenomenon of Harry Potter, and tells the truth about the ultimate good bad boy, Pinocchio.Returning to a favorite subject, fashion, Lurie explores the symbolic meaning of aprons, enthuses on how the zipper made dressing and undressing faster?and sexier?and tells how, feeling abandoned by Vogue at age sixty, she finally found herself freed from fashion's restrictions on women.Always spirited no matter the subject, Lurie ultimately conveys a joie de vivre that comes from a lifetime of never abandoning her ?childish impulse to play with words, to reimagine the world.?

""It had been a Second Coming sky all day, which meant they might be in heaven by this evening.""--BOOK JACKET. "So begins the uproarious and tender tale of Roxanne Fish, daughter of Sister Zelda Fish and Pastor Winston Fish of the First Assembly of God Church of Ames, Iowa, who believe fervently in the imminent return of Jesus to take the Christians up to heaven. The Fishes' older daughter, Colleen, wants no part of their exuberant faith ("Where are you going, young lady?" "To find my real family!"), but Roxy longs to be saved even as she fears her sinful desires, such as marrying Elvis Presley when she grows up. If she grows up."--BOOK JACKET. "Roxy lives in a world populated by angels with blue noses and demons who follow her around whispering "God doesn't like you." And sinners, sinners everywhere, easily identifiable by their makeup and capri pants and knowledge of television programs. Her soul's journey through this wicked world to her own particular salvation - with an assist from the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin - is unforgettable."--BOOK JACKET.