Jo

Bryan Costales

Summary

Jo Bailey was a mystic and religious figure who, shortly before his death, founded the Church of Jo. Jo is a late 20th Century historical novel by award winning author Bryan Costales. The life and times of Jo Bailey is presented in the form of a sequence of letters, articles, news accounts, diaries, and so on, each told by someone who cared about, or hated, Jo. It is the combined nature of these narratives that provide a rich overview of the last part of the 20th Century and and of Jo Bailey's ability to foresee death, but never prevent it.
 
This book is a fiction in the guise of reality, a story about the last half of the 20th century, and about three solved mysteries.

Available since: 10/22/2014.

Other books that might interest you

The Original Manuscript The...

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz Age on Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.A youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King, and the riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922 inspired the novel. Following a move to the French Riviera, he completed a rough draft in 1924. He submitted the draft to editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter. After his revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about the book's title and considered several alternatives.After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable reviews, although some literary critics believed it did not hold up to Fitzgerald's previous efforts and signaled the end of the author's literary achievements. Despite the warm critical reception, Gatsby was a commercial failure. The book sold fewer than 20,000 copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. After his death, the novel faced a critical and scholarly re-examination amid World War II, and it soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a focus of American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent decades.Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. The novel was most recently adapted to film in 2013 by director Baz Luhrmann, while contemporary scholars emphasize the novel's treatment of social class, inherited wealth compared to those who are self-made, race, environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream.

Show book

Echoes

Marc Everitt

Chester Bryers knows a secret. He has kept it for decades but now, as he nears his final days, he is finally telling his tale. A tale of what really happened to the lost Franklin Expedition,A tale of cold vengeance, long planned and of the adventurer George Greener who discovered a terrible truth. It is a truth that must not be known and by breaking his long silence Bryers’ life may be coming to a swifter and more violent end than he imagined; because some secrets must be kept, and The Thin man is watching.

Show book

Madame Tussaud - A Novel of the...

Michelle Moran

The year is 1788, and a revolution is about to begin…

Marie Tussaud has learned the secrets of wax sculpting by working alongside her uncle in their celebrated wax museum, the Salon de Cire. From her popular model of the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson to her tableau of the royal family at dinner, Marie's museum provides Parisians with the very latest news on fashion, gossip, even politics. Her customers hail from every walk of life, and when word arrives that the royals themselves are coming to see their likenesses, Marie never dreams that the king's sister will request her presence at Versailles as a royal tutor in wax sculpting. Yet when a letter with a gold seal is delivered to her home, Marie knows she cannot refuse—even if it means time away from her beloved Salon and her increasingly dear friend Henri Charles.

As Marie becomes acquainted with her pupil, Princess Élisabeth, she is taken to meet both Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, who introduce her to the glamorous life at court. From lavish parties with more delicacies than she's ever seen to rooms filled with candles lit only once before being discarded, Marie steps into to a world entirely different from her home on the Boulevard du Temple, where people are selling their teeth in order to put food on the table.

Meanwhile, many resent the vast separation between rich and poor. In salons and cafés across Paris, people like Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre are lashing out against the monarchy. Soon, there's whispered talk of revolution. Will Marie be able to hold on to both the love of her life and her friendship with the royal family as France approaches civil war? More important, will she be able to fulfill the demands of powerful revolutionaries who ask that she make the death masks of beheaded aristocrats, some of whom she knows?

Spanning five years from the budding revolution to the Reign of Terror, Madame Tussaud brings us into the world of an incredible heroine whose talent for wax modeling saved her life and preserved the faces of a vanished kingdom.

Show book

The Africa Hand

Andrew Wareham

Bloody Nick Turnhouse is in fine fettle, a frigate captain and respected by those who know him. He has taken a ship twice to the Bight of Benin and survived both occasions, falling to none of the fevers. Unfortunately, this has made him one of the few naval captains with a close knowledge of the fatal shores and Their Lordships are inclined to see him as their sole expert in sailing waters that have previously only been familiar to slavers and the few Guineamen. 
 
 
 
Returning from the Bight, Nick is currently in Spanish waters, seeking glory and prizes and uncertain which might be more important to a farm boy made good.

Show book

The Chasing of Eleanor Vane

Sierra Simone

Ajax Dartham, the Duke of Jarrell, has a problem. 
And that problem is his future niece-in-law. 
When the clever and capable Lady Eleanor Vane—understandably—runs off into the night rather than marry his horrible nephew, the Duke has a choice. 
Should he catch Eleanor and return her to her fate—or make Eleanor his own instead?

Show book

Moving the Palace

Charif Majdalani

“A Middle Eastern heart-of-darkness tale that flows like a dream . . . Crackling with razor-sharp humor” (The New York Times).   At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young Lebanese explorer leaves the Levant for the wilds of Africa, encountering an eccentric English colonel in Sudan and enlisting in his service. In this lush chronicle of far-flung adventure, the military recruit crosses paths with a compatriot who has dismantled a sumptuous palace in Tripoli and is transporting it across the continent on a camel caravan. The protagonist soon takes charge of this hoard of architectural fragments, ferrying the dismantled landmark through Sudan, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, attempting to return to his native Beirut with this moveable real estate. Along the way, he will encounter skeptic sheikhs, suspicious tribal leaders, bountiful feasts, pilgrims bound for Mecca, and T. E. Lawrence in a tent—in this “utterly charming” novel that was a recipient of the Académie Française’s François Mauriac Prize (Library Journal).   “Renders the complex social landscape of the Middle East and North Africa with subtlety and finesse . . . Yet one doesn’t need to care about the region’s history, or its present-day contexts, to enjoy Moving the Palace.” —The Wall Street Journal

Show book