Plot summary
Bobby had grown up in a home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio during the 1960s and 1970s where partying and drugs were a recurring theme. He has already witnessed the death of his mother and beloved older brother by the time he befriends Jonathan, who comes from a sheltered family. After Bobby finds his father is dead, Jonathan's family takes him in.
Bobby and Jonathan become best friends, and also experiment sexually. The two eventually lose touch, but meet up again in their 20s in 1980s New York, where Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his eccentric roommate Clare. Clare had planned to have a baby with Jonathan (who is openly gay), but Bobby and Clare become lovers, while Jonathan still has feelings for Bobby. Clare and Bobby have a baby and move to a country home together with Jonathan.
The trio form their own family, questioning traditional definitions of family and love, while dealing with the complications of their polyamourous relationship.
Isaac Liev Schreiber is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and narrator. He became known during the late 1990s and early 2000s after appearing in several independent films, and later mainstream Hollywood films, including the first three Scream horror films (1996-2000), Ransom (1996), Phantoms (1998), The Hurricane (1999), The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), The Omen (2006), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), Taking Woodstock (2009), Salt (2010), Goon (2011), Pawn Sacrifice (2014), and Spotlight (2015). He has also lent his voice to animated films such as My Little Pony: The Movie (2017), Isle of Dogs, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.
Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
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Interpreter of Maladies is a book collection of nine short stories by American author of Indian origin Jhumpa Lahiri published in 1999. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in the year 2000 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide. It was also chosen as The New Yorker's Best Debut of the Year and is on Oprah Winfrey's Top Ten Book List.
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In a Free State is a novel by V.S. Naipaul published in 1971 by Andre Deutsch. It won that year's Booker Prize. The plot consists of a framing narrative and three short stories - “One out of Many,” “Tell Me Who to Kill,” and the title story, “In a Free State.” The work is symphonic, with different movements converging towards a common theme; although the theme is not spelled out, it evidently concerns the price of freedom, with analogies implicitly drawn between the three scenarios.
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The First Part Last is a young adult novel by Angela Johnson that deals with the subject of teen pregnancy. It's the second book in the Heaven Trilogy. Johnson writes the story in first person narration from the perspective of Bobby, the 16-year-old father, setting it apart from most books on the subject. The book is divided into four parts and its chapters alternate between "then" and "now."
Tracks is a novel by Louise Erdrich, published in 1988. It is the third in a tetralogy of novels beginning with Love Medicine that explores the interrelated lives of four Anishinaabe families living on an Indian reservation near the fictional town of Argus, North Dakota. Within the saga, Tracks is earliest chronologically, providing the back-story of several characters such as Lulu Lamartine and Marie Kashpaw who become prominent in the other novels. As in many of her other novels, Erdrich employs the use of multiple first-person narratives to relate the events of the plot, alternating between Nanapush, a tribal patriarch, and Pauline, a young girl of mixed heritage.
Garrison "Gary" Arthur Ewing is a fictional character from the CBS soap opera, Knots Landing, a spin-off of Dallas. The character of Gary Ewing was first played by actor David Ackroyd in a 2-part Dallas season two episode "Reunion" in 1978. Gary Ewing was the middle son of oil baron Jock and Miss Ellie Ewing, the father of Lucy Ewing and the ex-husband of Valene Ewing. Over a year later, the part of Gary Ewing was recast for the spin-off Knots Landing with actor Ted Shackelford in the role, and Gary became one of the main stars of the series in 1979. Shackelford played Gary Ewing in Knots Landing for its entire fourteen seasons (1979–1993), while continuing to make occasional appearances in Dallas during that time. The character of Gary made his last Knots Landing appearance in 1997, in the reunion series Knots Landing: Back to the Cul-de-Sac. Shackelford reprised his character for the new, updated version of Dallas in 2013.
Tom Cunningham is a fictional character from the British Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, played by Ellis Hollins. With Tom being a young child for most of his tenure, his early years featured minimal storylines, including the numerous death of his family, being abused by Clare Devine and having various guardians including Steph Cunningham and Jack and Frankie Osborne. However, a turning point came for Tom when it was announced that he would impregnate his girlfriend, Peri Lomax and deal with Peri's subsequent decision to give the baby away for adoption. Minor storylines have also included his friendships with Nico Blake and Dylan Jenkins and his relationships with Peri and his foster sister Jade Albright.
No Telephone to Heaven, the sequel to Abeng (novel), is the second novel published by Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff. The novel continues the story of Clare Savage, Cliff's semi-autobiographical character from Abeng, through a set of flashbacks that recount Clare's adolescence and young adulthood as she moves from Jamaica to the United States, then to England, and finally back to Jamaica. First published in 1987, the book has received attention for its articulation of the paradoxes of history and identity after, and counter to, the experience of colonization.
A Home at the End of the World is a 2004 American drama film directed by Michael Mayer from a screenplay by Michael Cunningham, based on Cunningham's 1990 novel of the same name. It stars Colin Farrell, Robin Wright Penn, Dallas Roberts, and Sissy Spacek.
The Cunningham family are a fictional family in the long-running Channel 4 soap opera, Hollyoaks. The family were one of the original families introduced in 1995, debuting on the first ever episode of Hollyoaks. Subsequently, the family has seen more tragedy than happiness. Their storylines include Gordon and Angela divorcing, Dawn's affair with Jack Osborne, her leukemia, which leads to her death, Cindy's teenage pregnancy, Jude being in trouble with the police, the death of Gordon and his second wife in a car accident and the death of Max on his wedding day to Steph. In 2015 Tom became a father of his girlfriend Peri's child, and Cindy's bigamous marriage, when she was still married to Mac Nightingale, and had their son Alfie. Cindy claimed that the father was Mac but when Alfie Nightingale and his uncle Tom Cunningham do a DNA test a confusion with the samples makes Tony Hutchinson believe he is the father.
A Smuggler's Bible is Joseph McElroy's first novel. David Brooke—who talks of himself in a split-personality manner—narrates a framing tale that consists of him "smuggling" his essence into eight autobiographical manuscripts, although their connection with Brooke is not always clear. Brooke seems to deteriorate, while his fictions become more real.
The Baby-Sitters Club is a series of novels written by Ann M. Martin and published by Scholastic between 1986 and 2000, that sold 176 million copies. Martin wrote the first 35 novels in the series, but the subsequent novels were written by ghostwriters, such as Peter Lerangis. The Baby-Sitters Club is about a group of friends who live in the fictional, suburban town of Stoneybrook, Connecticut. These friends run a local babysitting service called "The Baby-Sitters Club". The original four members were Kristy Thomas, Mary Anne Spier (secretary), Claudia Kishi (vice-president), and Stacey McGill (treasurer), but the number of members varies throughout the series. The novels are told in first-person narrative and deal with issues such as illness, moving, and divorce.
Sing, Unburied, Sing is the third novel by the American author Jesmyn Ward and published by Scribner in 2017. It focuses on a family in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The novel received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was named by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2017.
