"Struggling to raise her little brother Donal, eight-year-old Wavy is the only responsible adult around. Obsessed with the constellations, she finds peace in the starry night sky above the fields behind her house, until one night her star-gazing causes an accident. After witnessing his motorcycle wreck, she forms an unusual friendship with one of her father's thugs, Kellen, a tattooed ex-con with a heart of gold. By the time Wavy is a teenager, her relationship with Kellen is the only tender thing in a brutal world of addicts and debauchery"--

She's sixteen. She's alone. And the world thinks she's crazy. What could possibly happen next? Well, she's going to show them... When sixteen-year-old Connelly Pierce wakes up inside an unknown psychiatric hospital with both her wrists slashed, she begins the arduous task of piecing together the events of her life that led her there. Her own cognitive behavioral therapy (as she had learned so well from them). Beginning with the sudden death of her mother and father when she was six, and the only world she knew disappeared, literally, overnight. That's when, with no known or, at least, close relatives, she and her nine-year-old brother Eric find themselves cast into the nightmare quagmire of government child protection agencies, and Connelly begins her incredible fourteen-year journey-her dark odyssey-into her own brave new world. A world, she realizes, she must not only quickly adapt, but fight back as well, if she hopes to survive.

'so far I had known just where I stood on the Wolf-Wynant-Jorgensen troubles and what I was doing – the answers were, respectively, nowhere and nothing . . . when I opened my eyes and sat up in bed some six hours later Nora was shaking me and a man with a gun in his hand was standing in the bedroom doorway.'Ex-detective Nick Charles attracts trouble like a magnet. He thinks his sleuthing days are over, but when Julia Wolf, a former acquaintance, is found dead, her body riddled with bullets, Nick - along with his glamorous wife, Nora - can't resist making a few enquiries. Clyde Miller Wynant, Julia's lover and boss, has disappeared. Everyone is after him, but Nick is not convinced Wynant is the murderer - and when he finds a junked-up hoodlum with a careless attitude to guns in his bedroom, it's only the beginning of his troubles.Set among the speakeasies of early 1930s Manhattan, The Thin Man is hardboiled crime at its wisecracking best.

In Cameroon, a monumental "statue of liberty" is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness. Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl's photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans' Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising "morality" plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly "African" aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope. Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès

Gabe has always identified as a boy, but he was born with a girl’s body. With his new public access radio show gaining popularity, Gabe struggles with romance, friendships, and parents. His entire future is threatened when several violent guys find out that Gabe the DJ is also Elizabeth from school.

What does one get when four young women with different morals, personalities, and upbringings are thrown into a life or death situation? Jackie is a young, naive, depressed young lady. She comes from a home, and parents who never wanted or loved her. Peach is a middle aged Christian woman. Her parents were absent most of her life, so she was raised by her grandma. Jewel is a young women who was born to two very wealthy parents. Jewel has always been pampered with the finer things in life. She feels like if you have money you have everything. Giselle is a young talented women. Her mother discovers she has the voice of an angel at a very early age. All she wants is to fulfill her mother's promise of becoming a singer, but it's easier said than done. These four women board the Paradise cruise ship for what they thought would be the vacation of a lifetime. They had every intention of having a great time, when in the middle of the night tragedy strikes. They started out as strangers, but as there situation becomes tense and desperate, they find out a lot about each other. The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, And The Beautiful....."

For more than 40 years John Gollings has been the photographer of choice _ the go-to guy for scores of architects. A Gollings photograph reveals a great deal about the aspirations, aims and beliefs, and the zeitgeist of a building and its architect_s intentions. This is based on and expressed through Gollings_s own knowledge of architecture; his understanding of light and weather; and the way buildings work and how they inhabit their sites. Beautiful Ugly takes a look _ in words, pictures and recollections _ at the art of Gollings_s photography as he has made his remarkable journey around Australia_s architectural landscape. The images, personally selected by Gollings for this book, open a door into the art of architectural photography as interpreted through the lens and eye of one of Australia_s greatest architectural photographers, a true maker of pictures. It takes a special kind of photographer to evoke the true character of a building and to convey the emotional intensity that is the soul of all good architecture. John Gollings is that special kind of photographer.