Arcadia Public Library

"It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants"--ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples": the...

"In 1969, sisters Trang and Quynh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village to work at a bar in Sai Gon. Once in the big city, the young girls are thrown headfirst into a world they were not expecting. They learn how to speak English, how to dress seductively, and how to drink and flirt (and more) with American GIs in return for money. As the war moves closer to the city, the once-innocent Trang gets swept up in an...

An award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, drawing on new sources available for the first time, shows how the way we look at a writer and his canon has changed over the course of the last two decades, presenting a fresh and relevant biography seen through a post-millennial prism. George Orwell was a prolific author, and his two masterpieces, Animal Farm, and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are regularly invoked to explain the political complexities...