On (novel)

On is the second novel by Adam Roberts. According to the author's website, reviews of the novel were either extremely positive, or extremely negative.

Plot summary

The story follows the life of an adolescent named Tighe (pronounced, roughly, Tig-Hee). Tighe's village is built on the ledges and crags of an enormous cliff-face, called the Wall or the World-wall. Every morning, the sun rises from the bottom of the wall, and every evening it sets at the top. The first part of the novel introduces Tighe and the hardness of life in his village, the abuse Tighe receives from his family members, and the unusual (to us) state of his world. Partway through this part of the book, Tighe's parents mysteriously disappear, and his grandfather takes care of him. Tighe concludes that his parents must have fallen off the wall. Eventually Tighe himself falls off, falls over 10 miles, and lands in the midst of an army preparing for war. He survives.

While recovering from his injuries, he learns the local language, and that the army will soon attack the Otre, a nearby civilisation. Tighe is drafted into the army, but the campaign goes badly, and Tighe's entire platoon is lost. Tighe himself is captured by the Otre and sold as a slave. During the battle, he sees a silvery flying object that he takes as an enemy balloon, and that calls his name. However, he is forced to run from Otre troops before he can react.

*** (novel)

*** is Michael Brodsky's fifth novel. The title consists of precisely three asterisks, as mentioned on the book's copyright page as part of its Library of Congress cataloguing information.

The book centers on Stu Potts, working for Dov Grey, captain of industry, creating ***s out of raws. No underlying meanings for "***", nor for "raw", both of which occur frequently in the text, are directly suggested. Readers are left to struggle on their own. One reviewer suggested "*** seem to be (depending on the passage and on the mood of the reader) archetypal widgets, phenotypes or, occasionally, art."

*** is also metafictional. The novel begins with a "PROLOGUE" title page. No other title page appears in the novel, as if the entire novel is prologue. Early on, a short chapter consisting of instructions on the assembly of the book's "thought packets" is provided, offering contradictory advice. Towards the end, alternative plot lines are suggested and discarded, left for "the next time the story is told."

Novel

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

The genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years". This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Ian Watt, however, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century,

Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

The romance is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". However, many romances, including the historical romances of Scott,Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."

Moon of Israel (novel)

Moon of Israel is a novel by Rider Haggard, first published in 1918 by John Murray. The novel narrates the events of the Biblical Exodus from Egypt told from the perspective of a scribe named Ana.

Haggard dedicated his novel to Sir Gaston Maspero, a distinguished Egyptologist and director of Cairo Museum.

Adaptation

His novel was the basis of a script by Ladislaus Vajda, for film-director Michael Curtiz in his 1924 Austrian epic known as Die Sklavenkönigin, or "Queen of the Slaves".

References

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