NPR's Favorite Books of 2019 Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining opaque to the reader. Lauded for the precision of her prose and the quality of her insight, Cusk is a writer of uncommon brilliance. Now, in Coventry, she gathers a selection of her nonfiction writings that both offers new insights on the themes at the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions. Coventry encompasses memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about literature, with pieces on family life, gender, and politics, and on D. H. Lawrence, Françoise Sagan, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Named for an essay Cusk published in Granta (“Every so often, for offences actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me. There’s a funny phrase for this phenomenon in England: it’s called being sent to Coventry”), this collection is pure Cusk and essential reading for our age: fearless, unrepentantly erudite, and dazzling to behold.

On the night of the Luftwaffe's devastating bombing of Coventry, two women traverse the city and transform their hearts.

Discover the brilliant, hilarious and unlikely story of a woman's life rebuilt, from the bestselling author of the Adrian Mole series and The Woman who Went to Bed for a Year 'There are two things that you should know about me immediately: the first is that I am beautiful, the second is that yesterday I killed a man. Both things were accidents . . .' When Midlands housewife Coventry Dakin kills her next-door neighbour, in a wild attempt to stop him from strangling his wife, she goes on the run. Finding herself alone and friendless in London, she tries to lose herself in the city's maze of streets. There, she meets a bewildering cast of eccentric characters. From Professor Willoughby D'Eresby and his perpetually naked wife Letitia, to Dodo, a care-in the-community inhabitant of Cardboard City, they all contrive to change Coventry in ways she could never have foreseen . . . Praise for Sue Townsend: 'Laugh-out-loud . . . a teeming world of characters whose foibles and misunderstandings provide glorious amusement. Something deeper and darker than comedy' Sunday Times 'She fills the pages with turmoil, anger, passion, love and big helpings of wit. It's full of colour and glows with life' Independent 'Touching and hilarious. Bursting with witty social commentary as well as humour' Women's Weekly

Escaping to Coventry, Texas, for the holidays, Keelie is in for a Christmas that's as unpredictable as it is merry. When the local vet starts making house calls to check on Keelie's under-the-weather hamster, Keelie wonders if this Christmas might bring what she's always wanted: true love. Original.

A poetic, gifty offering that combines first love, friendship, and persistent courage in this lyrical immigration story told in verse. Carrying just a suitcase and an old laundry bag filled with clothes, Kasienka and her mother are immigrating to England from Poland. Kasienka isn't the happiest girl in the world. At home, her mother is suffering from a broken heart as she searches for Kasienka's father. And at school, Kasienka is having trouble being the new girl and making friends. The only time she feels comforted is when she's swimming at the pool. But she can't quite shake the feeling that she's sinking. Until a new boy swims into her life, and she learns that there might be more than one way to stay afloat. The Weight of Water is a coming-of-age story that deftly handles issues of immigration, alienation, and first love. Moving and poetically rendered, this novel-in-verse is the story of a young girl whose determination to find out who she is prevails.

In Tribes of the Moon, Otherkin author Lotuswulf re-envisions the long-standing ideas of a witches coven and provides a new shamanic view of the coven gathering. This book follows the cycle of a year through the lunar calendar with information about the name of each lunar month and the seasonal rites and rituals that correspond with it. Packed with rituals for groups or solitary work, the book goes on to include ideas for ritual pathworkings with six mystical and modern archetypes that have almost been lost or degraded by modern society.

This photographic history tells the story of Coventry, a bucolic New England town with a fascinating history. On August 21, 1741, the area west of what is now the town of West Warwick was incorporated into the Township of Coventry. The railroad would traverse Coventry in the mid-1800s, providing the gristmills, sawmills, and farmers with a quicker way to send their goods to market and to receive supplies in return. Along with the railroad came the industry of harvesting wood to supply the locomotives with fuel. In the mid-1900s, the railroads disappeared and the mills began moving south where cotton was grown. The majority of Coventry has evolved into a service town with banks, retail stores, pharmacies, convenience stores, and the like. To travel to the western portion of Coventry today is like stepping back in time, where life moves at a slower pace and the post office is still in the local general store. The eastern portion of Washington, Quidnick, and Anthony has remained a busy area where businesses have replaced the mills.

Great Britain, Women, Army, WWII 1939 - 1945.

New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2018 • Amazon Editors' Top 100 of 2018 Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power. A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation, a fissure that accrues great dramatic force as Kudos reaches a profound and beautiful climax. In this conclusion to her groundbreaking trilogy, Cusk unflinchingly explores the nature of family and art, justice and love, and the ultimate value of suffering. She is without question one of our most important living writers.

The German Luftwaffe's air raid on Coventry, England on the night of November 14, 1940 represented a new kind of air warfare. Aimed primarily at obliterating all aspects of city life, it was systematic, thorough, unconnected to any immediate military goal, and indifferent to civilian casualties. In a single night, roughly two-thirds of the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed as the bombers laid waste to legitimate industrial targets and civilian structures alike. The old St. Michael's Cathedral, a 14th century Gothic structure that burned to the ground that night, still stands in ruins today as a testament to the city's destruction during the raid. Pragmatic British government propagandists would exploit Coventry's perceived status as a "historic town," playing down the city's industrial reputation. This would prove to be a powerful tool, and, as Frederick Taylor shows, was instrumental in tipping public opinion in the then-neutral United States away from isolationism and in favor of help for Britain. But the bombing would also set a dangerous and destructive precedent as Allied air forces would study the Germans' methods in the attack and ultimately employ similar tactics in their equally ruthless and destructive attacks on German cities, eventually leading to the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945 that killed hundreds of thousands, mostly civilians. On the 75th anniversary of the Coventry bombing, acclaimed historian Frederick Taylor brilliantly narrates this momentous act and analyzes its impact on World War II and the moral quandaries it still engenders about the nature of warfare.