David Park

Set in a frozen winter landscape, the new novel from the prize-winning, acclaimed author David Park is a psychologically astute, expertly crafted portrait of a father's inner life and a family in crisisAn Irish Times Book of 2018I am entering the frozen land, although to which country it belongs I cannot say. The world is shrouded in snow. Transport has ground to a halt. Tom must venture out into a transformed and treacherous landscape to collect his son, sick and stranded in student lodgings. But on this solitary drive from Belfast to Sunderland, Tom will be drawn into another journey, one without map or guide, and is forced to chart pathways of family history haunted by memory and clouded in regret. Written in spare, crystalline prose by one of the most important voices in contemporary Irish writing, Travelling in a Strange Land is a work of exquisite loss and transformative grace. It is a novel about fathers and sons, grief, memory, family and love; about the gulfs that lie between us and those we love, and the wrong turns that we take on our way to find them.

Travelling in a Strange Land

Roman

Reise durch ein fremdes Land

By the author of The Big Snow, this is David Park's first collection of short stories, published by Bloomsbury for the first time to tie-in with the publication of his wonderful new novel, Swallowing the Sun

Oranges from Spain

Philip J. Davis

The Nature of the Impossible

No Way

The extraordinary new novel from David Park.

The Light of Amsterdam

In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men's lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. In a community where truth is often tribal and partial, the secret they share threatens to destroy what they have each built in the present.

The Truth Commissioner

Neil T. Anderson

Suggests ways to resist sexual temptation, peer pressure, bad habits, discouragement, and fears, and discusses ways teenagers can discover who God created them to be.

The Bondage Breaker Youth Edition

This is a story of tragedy and a past catching up with a father in modern-day Northern Ireland.

Swallowing the Sun

Helen Park Bigelow

--First full-length book in two decades devoted to the art and life of this important American artist. Includes more than 90 plates illustrating Park's development and career --Park's paintings have seen a resurgence of interest among collectors and institutions, with 2009 exhibitions at Washington's Phillips Collection and Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center; pieces recently auctioned for $2.7 million at Christie's and $1.4 million at Sotheby's David Park, Painter: Nothing Held Back chronicles the brief but remarkably prolific career of this American artist, who died in 1960 at age 49. He was an integral part of the San Francisco Bay art community from the early 1930s on, and is counted as one of the group of immensely gifted artists who made up the Bay Area Figurative Painting movement in its nascent years of the 1950s. A painter deeply committed to humanity as a subject in an era that exalted abstraction, Park's work can be startling for its depth of feeling even today. Writing about him recently, San Francisco critic Kenneth Baker noted: Park's freedom from irony will strike anyone sated by postmodernist flippancy as enviable and almost beyond achievement today.

Nothing Held Back

David Park, Painter

Adapted as a TV drama for BBC 2 Northern Ireland, starring Roger Allam and airing in March 2016 Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, is troubled by his estrangement from his daughter, and struggling with the consequences of his infidelities. Francis Gilroy, veteran Republican and recently appointed government minister, risks losing what feels tantalisingly close to his grasp. In America, Danny and his partner plan for the arrival of their first child, happily oblivious to what is about to pull him back to Belfast and rupture the life they have started together. Retired detective James Fenton, on his way to an orphanage in Romania with a van full of supplies, will soon be forced to confront what he has come to think of as his betrayal, years before, of a teenage boy. In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, these four men's lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined.

"Strangers come together to run. Angela and Brendan are racing towards a wedding day that is increasingly tainted by doubts. Yana runs to free herself from the darkness of the past and to remember her missing brother. Cathy thinks about the secret she has been unable to share. Running takes Maurice past his daughter's house, the place he is not allowed to enter. Over the nine weeks unexpected friendships are forged, challenges faced and by the time of their final run together all will grasp a new commitment to life itself."--Publisher

A Run in the Park

David Park's sixth book is a dark and powerful exploration of the legacy of childhood abuse and its effect on an adult survivor's ability to deal with conflict and loss.

Rejacketed

Three women, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin's terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband's death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Set across continents and centuries, and in very different circumstances, these three women confront the contradictions between art and life, contemplate their emotional and physical sacrifices for another's creativity, and struggle with infidelities that involve not only the flesh, but ultimately poetry itself. They find themselves custodians of their husbands' work, work that has been woven with love's intimacies and which has shaped their own lives in the most unexpected of ways. Deeply insightful and beautifully wrought, The Poets' Wives is David Park at his best – a novelist whose work has the power to bring the hidden from the shadows, into a delicate and shimmering light.

The Poets' Wives

Geared toward upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, this self-contained first course in quantum mechanics covers basic theory and selected applications and includes numerous problems of varying difficulty. 1992 edition.

Third Edition

Introduction to the Quantum Theory

It is December in Belfast, Christmas is approaching and three sets of people are about to make their way to Amsterdam. Alan, a university art teacher, goes on a pilgrimage to the city of his youth with troubled teenage son Jack; middle-aged couple Marion and Richard take a break from running their garden centre to celebrate Marion's birthday; and Karen, a single mother struggling to make ends meet, joins her daughter's hen party. As these people brush against each other in the squares, museums and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured as they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before.

The Grand Contraption tells the story of humanity's attempts through 4,000 years of written history to make sense of the world in its cosmic totality, to understand its physical nature, and to know its real and imagined inhabitants. No other book has provided as coherent, compelling, and learned a narrative on this subject of subjects. David Park takes us on an incredible journey that illuminates the multitude of elaborate "contraptions" by which humans in the Western world have imagined the earth they inhabit--and what lies beyond. Intertwining history, religion, philosophy, literature, and the physical sciences, this eminently readable book is, ultimately, about the "grand contraption" we've constructed through the ages in an effort to understand and identify with the universe. According to Park, people long ago conceived of our world as a great rock slab inhabited by gods, devils, and people and crowned by stars. Thinkers imagined ether to fill the empty space, and in the comforting certainty of celestial movement they discerned numbers, and in numbers, order. Separate sections of the book tell the fascinating stories of measuring and mapping the Earth and Heavens, and later, the scientific exploration of the universe. The journey reveals many common threads stretching from ancient Mesopotamians and Greeks to peoples of today. For example, humans have tended to imagine Earth and Sky as living creatures. Not true, say science-savvy moderns. But truth isn't always the point. The point, says Park, is that Earth is indeed the fragile bubble we surmise, and we must treat it with the reverence it deserves.

The World as Myth, Number, and Chance

The Grand Contraption

It is December; Christmas is approaching and the magic of one of Europe's most beautiful cities beckons. A father looks for himself in the past, struggling to deal with a recent divorce, his teenage son in tow. A single, selfless mother accompanies her only daughter and friends for a weekend-long bachelorette party. And a husband treats his wife to a birthday weekend away, somehow heightening her anxieties and insecurities about age, desire, and motherhood. As these people brush against one another in the squares, museums, and parks of Amsterdam, their lives are transfigured in the winter light, and they encounter the complexities of love in a city that challenges what has gone before. Tender and humane, elevating the ordinary to something timeless and important, The Light of Amsterdam is a novel of compassion and rare dignity.

A Novel

Northern Ireland, 1963. In a house with windows flung defiantly wide, a wife dies before her husband can make his confession. Elsewhere, an old woman searches desperately for a wedding dress in her dream of love. And in the very heart of the city, the purity of snow is tainted by the murder of a young woman, leaving one man in race against time - to find the murderer before the snow melts. This is the story of a time muffled and made claustrophobic by unprecedented snow falls. Suddenly shaken free from the normal patterns of their lives by the extremity of the weather, people find their intimate desires thrown into sharp relief and David Park shows this flawed slice of humanity to be somehow glorious. 'Ingenious' SUNDAY TIMES 'A magnificent writer' BELFAST TELEGRAPH 'Park writes prose like a poet; and the invisible lines of national borders and tribal territory are etched into a text which rolls thorugh time and space.' THE TIMES 'Some of the more exhibitionist fictional voices currently clamouring for our attention seem mute in comparison' INDEPENDENT 'Considerable dexterity, freshness, and insight ... (A) well-crafted, closely observed tale.' WASHINGTON POST

The Big Snow

Robin Griffith-Jones

First full-length survey of the Temple Church, from its foundation in the twelfth century to the Second World War.

David Park

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