Artificial Intentions

Jonathan Whitelaw (Author)

The Village Hall Vendetta

There's a fine art to murder... Hal Mulberry has long dreamt of owning the iconic painting, Buttermere at Dawn. And now the entrepreneur has got his hands on it, he's determined to bring it back to the Lakes where it belongs and put it on show, turning Penrith Village Hall into a cultural hotspot - with the painting at its heart. Journalist Jason Brazel is delighted to get the exclusive. Even if his mother in law, Amita, thinks he's making a fuss about an ugly piece of modern art. But when Amita uncovers a theory that the painting is cursed, she wonders just what Hal is bringing to their door: hex, hoax or dirty-deal? While the great and the good gather for the unveiling, someone's got murder on their mind. And it's up to Jason and Amita to find who is trying to put people out of the picture ... permanently.

Thomas Rasche (Author)

They Huffed and They Puffed: Why The Three Little Pigs Chose Their Buildings

The fable of the three little pigs is retold here. Understand why they made their building choices!

Patrick Modiano (Author)

Ballerina

2,A critically acclaimed #1 bestseller in France--a novel of art, desire, and time lost and regained, from Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano "[Modiano's] words conjure up the promise of hidden worlds."--Tobias Grey, Financial Times "Pithy and introspective. . . . Modiano delivers wondrous images of the tricks memory plays, sharply translated by Polizzotti."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) Paris, 1960s. A young dancer and single mother, who might or might not be the narrator's love interest, is revisited by menacing figures from her past, even as she tries to escape that past through her art. Set in the shimmering world of the Paris ballet, a world populated by giants such as Balanchine and Nureyev, Ballerina revisits the themes of memory, desire, and ineffable danger that have become hallmarks of Patrick Modiano's fiction. Focusing on the dancer's troubled relations with her young son, her enigmatic involvement with the narrator, her mysterious past entanglements, and the tension between the narrator's past and present selves, Modiano's new novel is both a nostalgic evocation of the world gone by and a haunting exploration of time lost and regained. In deceptively ...