NNELS Upgrade

Henry Hayward is a drowning man. With a soured long-term romance finally at an end, no family, and no refuge to be had in work, he progressively spends his days in the solace of alcohol and his nights with a series of interchangeable partners. In a quest to simultaneously recover from unrequited love and to find meaning in what is becoming an increasingly emotionally arid life, Henry travels to Afghanistan as an army-affiliated contractor.

Spring 2010. Harriet works in local radio in London, England. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York, travels to Toronto to stay with an old flame. Their teenage son Jack takes an unexpected risk and finds himself in trouble. Meanwhile, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a labour camp in Dubai, and Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her father to a sudden heart attack. Two years later, their lives intersect dramatically.

On the small fictional island of Sweetland, just south of Newfoundland, a former lighthouse keeper becomes the last man standing when he refuses to accept a government resettlement package, much to everyone's exasperation.

Resigned to living out the Second World War in a German POW camp, James Hunter, an English officer, begins studying a pair of redstarts near the camp. His interest in the birds captures the attention of the Kommandant and gives James cause to fear for his life. Meanwhile, back in England, James's young wife, Rose, falls headlong into a passionate affair with another man. When James's sister, Enid, is bombed out of her London flat, she comes to stay with Rose, and the two women form a surprising friendship that alters the course of both of their lives.

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings.

As the week opens, 50-something Hugh Argylle, owner of the Argylle Art Gallery, has a jarring fall from a ladder - a fall that leaves him with a fractured off-kilter vision of his own life and the lives of his friends, who are going through crises that leave them despairing, afraid, one half-step from going under emotionally or financially. Someone's going to have to fix all that, thinks Hugh - and it will probably be him.

This is the story of a middle-aged copywriter in New York City. He's worked at the same ad agency for fifteen years, but one morning this copywriter finds himself fired from his job, and after he catches his live-in girlfriend moving out of their apartment a couple hours later, he's also single. Believe it or not, these aren't the biggest problems in this copywriter's life. There's something bigger, something that has been haunting him his whole life. Meet Earnest Hemmingway. What's in a name?

There's a killer on the loose who knows that beauty is only skin deep, and a trainee investigator who's trying to save her own hide. The only man that can help is locked in an asylum. But he's willing to put a brave face on — if it will help him escape.