NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A riotous, bitingly funny, and supremely clever novel of a twenty-year-old literature student in 1970 who’s about to discover the liberating possibilities and haunting consequences of social change. "A nearly perfect comic novel.” —New York Magazine The year is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old literature student, is spending his summer vacation in a castle on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full-swing—a historical moment of unprecedented opportunity—and Keith and his friends are immediately caught up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes. Yet they soon discover a disturbing truth: between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of liminal purgatory, once described by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen as “a pregnant widow.” As Amis deftly explores the repercussions and consequences of that one summer, he presents us with a precise and poignant portrait of change. Expertly written and full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is Amis at his fearless best.

Summer 1970. A long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside thehistory of the sexual revolution.

Long presumed dead, antiquities dealer Brand Noble has finally clawed his way back to New York City. Only to find his wife, Clea, pregnant...and engaged to another man? She hadn't wasted any time in moving on. It will not do. Brand will have her back--no matter what. Clea had held out to the bitter end before tearfully having Brand declared dead. Now he's jumped to conclusions about her condition, and his unwillingness to believe her explanation is unbearable. She will not be reclaimed--or so she tells herself. Even as her resistance melts under his scorching caresses.

Recounting past events is intrinsic to the storytelling function, as most fiction assumes the past tense as the natural means of narrating a story. Few narratives draw attention to this process, yet others make the act of remembering a primary part of the narrative situation. Ranging in its focus from poetry to novels, autobiographical memoirs and biopics – from the ostensibly fictional to the implicitly real – this volume discusses the extent to which such fictional acts of remembering are also acts of rewriting the past to suit the needs of the present. How seamlessly does experience yield to the ordering strictures of narrative and what is at stake in the process? What must be omitted or stylised, and to what (ideological) end? In making an artefact of the past, what role does artifice play, and what does this process also tell us about history-making?

A Widow’s Awakening tells the story of how Krista triumphed through a fairy-tale love that quickly became a toxic, turned fatal marriage at an early age, and how losing a husband at 23 years old transformed her outlook and attitude on life. With the many highs and lows of any marriage, she had to learn to live with the physical and emotional abuse that came with being married to an addict. As she coped in a marriage based around alcohol and drug addiction, she had to overcome her own battles of misuse to regain her life. Struggling through battles of addiction and mental health issues, with not only herself but loved ones, her journey through the years taught her a great deal on healing, self-awareness, and self-love. After shutting out many emotions for years throughout her childhood, she had to relearn to be vulnerable and open with herself and others. Krista spent her childhood lacking the emotional guidance most children learn which left her fighting to understand her emotions for many adolescent years. Feeling empty for so long, she searched for any relationship that would make her feel whole but found it in all the wrong places. Learning to rely on her own individual capabilities was something that took years to adapt to as she went through many obstacles to find her inner strength. Krista wrote this book in hopes that other people struggling with similar situations would be able to relate to the hardships that can happen in life and to gain a spiritual perspective to become resilient.

This collection of essays focuses on addressing the imaginative wake of the rebellious late 1960s, with a particular, but not exclusive, focus on word-and-image relations. The volume showcases and discusses the impact of such processes on literature and the arts of that mythologized historical period. It explores the impact of its defining causes, hopes and regrets on the creative imagination. The awakening moment for that extraordinary momentous period in the global socio-political memory was May 1968, which came to be seen as the culmination and epitome of a series of processes involving protest, and the affirmation of previously silent or subaltern causes. Such processes and causes were predicated on challenges to established powers and mindsets, and hence on demands for change, which have had rich consequences in literature and the arts.

Islamic law never achieved unity but developed into five surviving schools, which, when first established, were in competition with one another. This scholarly book is the first to examine critically the differing Islamic theories of abrogation (or Naskh) upon which each school based its claim to be the correct interpretation.