A Painted House

The gripping legal thriller from the No.1 Sunday Times bestselling author and creator of Sooley and The Judge's List. In rural Arkansas, seven-year-old farm boy Luke Chandler lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents. When the cotton is ready to be harvested, the Chandlers hire a group of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks the group pick cotton, battling the heat, rain, fatigue, and sometimes each other. During this time, Luke sees and hears things no seven-year-old should witness. Can he keep the secrets that could threaten his family's business and change their lives forever? A Painted House is a moving story of one boy's journey from innocence to experience, drawn from the personal experience of legendary legal thriller author John Grisham. _______________________________________ 'A master at the art of deft characterisation and the skilful delivery of hair-raising crescendos' - Irish Independent 'John Grisham is the master of legal fiction' - Jodi Picoult 'The best thriller writer alive!' - Ken Follett 'John Grisham has perfected the art of cooking up convincing, fast-paced thrillers' - Telegraph 'Grisham is a superb and instinctive storyteller' - The Times 'Grisham's storytelling genius reminds us that when it comes to legal drama, the master is in a league of his own' - Daily Record 'Masterful - when Grisham gets in the courtroom he lets rip, drawing scenes so real they're not just alive, they're pulsating' - Mirror 'A giant of the thriller genre!!' - TimeOut.

Racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder are seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy in a 1950s Southern cotton-farming community.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Until that September of 1952, Luke Chandler had never kept a secret or told a single lie. But in the long, hot summer of his seventh year, two groups of migrant workers — and two very dangerous men — came through the Arkansas Delta to work the Chandler cotton farm. And suddenly mysteries are flooding Luke’s world. A brutal murder leaves the town seething in gossip and suspicion. A beautiful young woman ignites forbidden passions. A fatherless baby is born ... and someone has begun furtively painting the bare clapboards of the Chandler farmhouse, slowly, painstakingly, bathing the run-down structure in gleaming white. And as young Luke watches the world around him, he unravels secrets that could shatter lives — and change his family and his town forever.....

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Not everyone who lived on an Oklahoma farm during the 1930s, the time known for the "dust bowl," abandoned their farms and headed for California. Although many suffered crop failures and financial ruin, there were just as many or more who were able to make it through. The dust bowl, coupled with the Great Depression which struck America at the same time, resulted in hardship and suffering, both for the farmers who went looking for a new life, and for those who were able to stick it out. This book is a story about a family who "stuck it out." Gene Ralston tells the story of the lives of a family of seven who lived in a two-room house, scratching out their lives on a dry-land farm, running a few cattle and several hundred White Leghorn chickens. Without running water, electricity or a telephone, the family existed on a survival level, gradually growing out of it as their fortunes improved. Having survived the dust bowl, the family was dumped into the rationing and shortages we all experienced during World War Two. This book is about people. Real live people, some with real, live problems, such as one epileptic brother, another who was an alcoholic, some real characters, such as the real live cowboy, Gene's Uncle George Ralston, larger than life and a legend in his own time. This book is filled with these people, and tells the inside story of them and of Gene and his family..

The Complete Works comprises books 1-9 from the popular Reviews by Cat Ellington series. In the making since 2018, this comprehensive reference, compiled by Quill Pen Ink Publishing, serves to wrap up the fascinating seven-year series. Featuring bonus material by author Naras Kimono and award-winning filmmaker Joseph Strickland, Reviews by Cat Ellington: The Complete Works (Books 1-9) will end the first era of Cat Ellington's prolific career in literary criticism to make way for a new span in her passion for reading and her one-of-a-kind analysis by way of the written word: for the review by Cat Ellington is the original unique critique..

Who hasn’t dreamt of writing a bestseller? Illuminating the best-known works of 50 celebrated authors, writing coach Tony Rossiter shows you exactly how they achieved their phenomenal success. With an expert eye he explains how each author began writing, and examines their style, techniques and routine for insights into their art. Imitating the methods – rather than the content – of a favourite writer is an excellent apprenticeship for anyone who wants to master the craft of writing. And it’s how many of the most successful authors began. If you want to write a bestseller, this guide will set you on the path to success..

From 1981 until 1986, the archaeologist Judith McKenzie, then a graduate student at the University of Sydney, traveled to the ancient site of Petra in Jordan, living in a cave there for extended periods, in order to survey and measure architectural moldings on the rock-cut monuments. It was a critical time in the history of Petra, where, for centuries, its local inhabitants, known as the Bdoul, had lived and worked. But that tradition was coming to a close. In 1985, the Bdoul began a move to the nearby village of Umm Sayhoun, as directed by the Jordanian government. This first-hand account of life in a cave at Petra, based on diaries Judith kept at the time she lived among the Bdoul, is therefore important as a record of a lifestyle now largely vanished. As she writes in her introduction: "I spent so much time socializing with the Bdoul, I came to observe many aspects of Bdoul life in a series of visits over three main field seasons. As women we had access to the world of young girls and women, which men from outside did not, while we were also sometimes treated as honorary men." This memoir thus stands as a reminder of life at Petra before the arrival of modern-day tourism at the site. But this book is not only a memoir. Observations are made on the ways in which the Bdoul have adapted to their new environment. Changes at the site that have taken place since 1981 because of weathering and erosion are recorded through comparisons between photographs taken forty years ago and more recent images. Ramifications of the expansion of the tourist-industry at Petra in the 21st century are also considered. Life in a Cave in Petra with the Bdoul: 1981-1986 is therefore an important and essential volume on the archaeology and history of one of the best-known ancient sites in the world..

At its deepest, philosophical skepticism questions the sense of language. Skepticism manifests itself in different forms, three of the most powerful being logical, external-world, and religious skepticism. How has philosophy of religion addressed these challenges? The attempt to answer this question leads Lance Ashdown to a consideration of three prominent contemporary philosophers of religion: Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and William Alston. The author shows that these philosophers are indeed open to the criticisms of the three types of skepticism mentioned above. According to Ashdown, they are rightly to be considered as 'anonymous skeptics'. Readers familiar with the work of the theologian Karl Rahner will recognize an echo of his famous doctrine that non-Christian religious believers are really 'anonymous Christians', i.e., Christian believers who do not recognize themselves as such. In a similar way, the philosophers of religion under consideration are skeptics who most certainly would not identify themselves as such. They are anonymous skeptics in the sense that their epistemologies create the very conditions that allow for the severe and, on their own terms, unanswerable challenges of skepticism. At the same time, none of these philosophers thinks that skeptical objections pose a devastating or unanswerable threat to their epistemologies. For example, each of them is an avowed believer in God and is fully aware of the challenge of religious skepticism, yet none believes that skepticism need cause a rational Christian to abandon his or her beliefs. Nevertheless, each of the three philosophers adheres to a philosophical theory that remains open to the devastating critique of Philo in David Hume's essay Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion - who argues at his deepest that talk of God is meaningless..

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The continuing debate over the existence or non-existence of formal verbal aspect in Gothic triggered the author to write this monograph whose aim is to provide a completely new foundation for a theory of aspect and related features. Gothic, with its limited corpus, representing a translation of the Greek, and showing interesting parallels with Slavic verbal constructions, serves and an illustrative model for the theory. In Part I the author argues that a unified theory of aspect, actional types, and verbal velocity presented there possesses an internal logic and is not at variance with observed facts in various Indo-European languages. In Part II an analysis is presented of the Gothic verb system which seeks to explain the much-disputed function of ga- and to solve the problem of Gothic aspect and actional types which does no violence either to the Gothic text or the Greek original..

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Poetic Architecture is an unusual, fascinating book written for all who are eager to identify, expland and communicate their creative energies through poetry. The author's paintings and drawings open a wide world of imagination and fantasy..

Since the late 1970s, household archaeology has become a key theoretical and methodological framework for research on the development of permanent social inequality and complexity, as well as for understanding the social, political and economic organization of chiefdoms and states. This volume is the cumulative result of more than a decade of research focusing on household archaeology as a means to gain understanding of the evolution of social complexity, regardless of underlying economy..

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