Best Selling Books by Robert Clark

My Victorians is a hybrid in both form and content, part memoir/extended lyric essay but also a work of biography, photography, and cultural, literary, and art history. This is a travelogue of writer Robert Clark’s attempt to work through a sudden and inexplicable five-year-long obsession focused on Victorian novelists, artists, architecture, and critics. He wends his way through England and Scotland, meticulously tracking down the haunts of Charles Dickens, George Gissing, John Millais, the Bloomsbury Group, and others, and documenting everything in ghostly photographs as he goes. As Clark delves deeper into the Victorian world, he wonders: What can its artists offer a twenty-first century writer by way of insight into his own life and work? His obsession with Victoriana bleeds into all aspects of his life, even the seemingly incongruous world of online dating. My Victorians is in the spirit of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage and Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. This book considers what happens when heartbreak, eros, faith, and doubt drive us to take refuge in the past.

England, 1926. Lady Isobel Farrar, an ageing widow with a colorful past, has returned home after years of living abroad. As she moves back into Halcyon Hill, her beloved country house, she finds herself dwelling on a long-buried secret. In the wake of a terrible tragedy when she was young, Isobel gave up a child for adoption, and now she can''t help but wonder what became of him. Life has not been kind to Frank Brodie. Cruelly mistreated by his adoptive parents, he spent his young adulthood struggling to survive on the harsh streets of London, before the Great War took him away to the trenches. Now he has found safety with Arthur, an older man who loves and protects him. But something is still missing from Frank''s life. When mother and son are finally reunited, will they be able to lay the past to rest?

The third in a series of three, this training manual takes students to achieve the coveted Black Belt -- the highest level in Jiu Jitsu.

When William Lowry writes to Emily Byrne–I don’t know if you know that you know me–the seventeen-year-old hardly suspects that his life, along with the rest of America, is about to change forever. But the day Emily receives the letter and composes a response–I know who you are. In fact, I remember you from a bunch of times–is also the day that Robert Kennedy is shot. In Minnesota, even as the tumultuous summer of 1968 has begun, first love cares little for matters of time and place. William and Emily fall hard, despite the fact that he and his family are determined to wrestle with the system while she and hers are conservative, God-fearing Catholics. Together, the young lovers grow into each other and decide to escape to the wilderness to start anew. Left behind to grapple with the shifting mores of the nation and the sundering of their families, the Lowrys and the Byrnes must search for both their children and their own lost innocence. Masterfully rendering both young love and the unrest of the 1960s Robert Clark has crafted a work that is at once intimate and grand.

Birthplace of Michelangelo and home to untold masterpieces, Florence is a city for art lovers. But on November 4, 1966, the rising waters of the Arno threatened to erase over seven centuries of history and human achievement. Now Robert Clark explores the Italian city’s greatest flood and its aftermath through the voices of its witnesses. Two American artists wade through the devastated beauty; a photographer stows away on an army helicopter to witness the tragedy first-hand; a British “mud angel” spends a month scraping mold from the world’s masterpieces; and, through it all, an author asks why art matters so very much to us, even in the face of overwhelming disaster.