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Avalon: A Novel (Coronet Bks.)
Par Anya Seton. 2013
A novel of England during the Viking era, from an author who &“has vividly and colorfully portrayed life during the…
tumultuous Dark Ages&” (Historical Novels Review). The last quarter of the tenth century was a time of conflict and exploration—while the Anglo-Saxons fought against the Vikings, Norsemen voyaged into the unknown looking for new lands to pillage, and so discovered America. Prince Rumon of France, descendant of Charlemagne and King Alfred, was a searcher. He had visions of the Islands of the Blessed, perhaps King Arthur&’s Avalon, &“where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow.&” Merewyn grew up in savage Cornwall—a lonely girl, sustained by stubborn courage and belief in her descent from great King Arthur. Chance—or fate—in the form of a shipwreck off the Cornish coast brought Rumon and Merewyn together, and from that hour their lives were intertwined. Bound by his vow to her dying mother, Rumon brings Merewyn safely to England, keeping hidden the shameful secret of her birth. He considers his responsibility ended. At court, he is dazzled by the beautiful Queen Alfrida—but when a murderous truth is revealed, he turns to Merewyn, only to discover that he may have lost her. And he will journey across the Atlantic to find her again . . . From the beloved bestselling author of Katherine and Dragonwyck, this is a romantic tale of history and adventure &“characterized by an authentic sense of time&” (The New York Times Book Review).The Welsh Girl: A Novel
Par Peter Davies. 2008
A WWII-era Welsh barmaid begins a secret relationship with a German POW in this &“beautiful&” novel by the author of A…
Lie Someone Told You About Yourself (Ann Patchett). Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Set in the stunning landscape of North Wales just after D-Day, this critically acclaimed debut novel traces the intersection of disparate lives in wartime. When a prisoner-of-war camp is established near her village, seventeen-year-old barmaid Esther Evans finds herself strangely drawn to the camp and its forlorn captives. She is exploring the camp boundary when an astonishing thing occurs: A young German corporal calls out to her from behind the fence. From that moment on, the two begin an unlikely—and perilous—romance. Meanwhile, a German-Jewish interrogator travels to Wales to investigate Britain&’s most notorious Nazi prisoner, Rudolf Hess. In this richly drawn and thought-provoking &“tour de force,&” all will come to question the meaning of love, family, loyalty, and national identity (The New Yorker). &“If you loved The English Patient, there&’s probably a place in your heart for The Welsh Girl.&” —USA Today &“Davies&’s characters are marvelously nuanced.&” —Los Angeles Times &“Beautifully conjures a place and its people, in an extraordinary time . . . A rare gem.&” —Claire Messud, author of The Woman Upstairs &“This first novel by Davies, author of two highly praised short story collections, has been anticipated—and, with its wonderfully drawn characters, it has been worth the wait.&” —Booklist, starred reviewThe classic tale of marriage, infidelity, and homosexual yearning on a Southern army base by the acclaimed author of The…
Ballad of the Sad Café. Georgia, 1930s. Army bases are notoriously boring places during peacetime, but the quiet life of Captain Penderton is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of dashing ladies&’ man Major Langdon. Penderton&’s marriage has always been tempestuous, but when his wife Leonora begins an affair with Langdon, Penderton finds himself increasingly unable to mask his attraction to the handsome young private he has assigned to do his yard work. And tensions rise to explosive levels as that private develops a dangerous infatuation with Leonora. A scandal when it was first published in 1941, Reflections in a Golden Eye was later adapted into a film starring Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, and Robert Forester.Scenes from Village Life
Par Amos Oz. 2011
Linked short stories set in a town in the midst of change: &“One of the most powerful books you will…
read about present-day Israel.&” —The Jewish Chronicle &“&‘Scenes from Village Life&’ is like a symphony, its movements more impressive together than in isolation. There is, in each story, a particular chord or strain; but taken together, these chords rise and reverberate, evoking an unease so strong it&’s almost a taste in the mouth . . . &‘Scenes from Village Life&’ is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it.&” —The New York Times Book Review Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sounds of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. And where has the mayor&’s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying &“Don&’t worry about me&”? Around the village, the veneer of new wealth—gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery—barely conceals the scars of war and of past generations: disused air-raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Scenes From Village Life is a memorable novel in stories by the inimitable Amos Oz: a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Translated from Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange &“Finely wrought . . . Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.&” —Publishers Weekly, starred review &“Informed by everything, weighed down by nothing, this is an exquisite work of art.&” —The ScotsmanThis cult classic from the author of Trout Fishing in America &“reads like a spaghetti Western crossed with Frankenstein, viewed…
through an opium haze&” (The Sunday Times). The celebrated poet, novelist, and guru of the 1960s San Francisco literary scene, Richard Brautigan brings his highly original Gonzo style to this surreal parody Western. The time is 1902, the setting eastern Oregon. In the ice caves underneath Professor Hawkline&’s house, a deadly monster lurks. It&’s already turned the professor into an elephant foot umbrella stand, and now his two beautiful daughters have hired a pair of gunslingers to put a stop to the mayhem. But Hawkline Manor is full of curiosities and secrets, like the professor&’s underground laboratory where his work on The Chemicals remains unfinished. And as the gunslingers pursue their peculiar quarry, they encounter monstrous mischief, amorous advances, and evil that is all too human. &“Bursting with colour, humour and imagery, Brautigan&’s virtuoso prose is rooted in his rural past.&” —The GuardianOur Tragic Universe
Par Scarlett Thomas. 2010
This &“delightfully whimsical novel riffs on the premise that ordinary lives stubbornly resist the tidy order that a fiction narrative…
might impose on them&” (Publishers Weekly). Can a story save your life? Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend&’s only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting. But who wants to live forever? Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what&’s the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever? Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas&’s trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.Like Normal People: A Novel (G. K. Hall Core Ser.)
Par Karen Bender. 2015
"Bender has crafted a luminous, meditative novel on the boundaries between childhood, adulthood, and old age." -Entertainment WeeklyA tour de…
force of literary craft and emotional resonance, Like Normal People charts a family constellation that revolves around an off-kilter center: Lena, who is forty-eight but mentally locked in childhood. Moving deftly between present and past, the novel follows Lena's day-long escape from her residential home with her troubled twelve-year-old niece. While this odd couple takes refuge on a honky-tonk southern California beach, Lena’s widowed mother, Ella, goes in search of them. In the process, Ella relives her own life's dreams and disappointments: her marriage to a sweet, loving shoe salesman; her discovery of Lena's handicap and her aching attempts to give her daughter a "normal" childhood. For so long, Lena has been the focus of Ella's world. When Lena at last finds approximate normalcy -- by marrying a man much like herself -- Ella must contend with letting her daughter go.Covering three entire lifetimes in the course of one day, Like Normal People is tender, often hilarious, and deeply moving. Bender brilliantly enters into the consciousness of three women at very different stages of life, each on a private search for love and acceptance. Like Normal People is a novel about desire, about what constitutes normality, and, most poignantly, about the ways in which a family finds its strength in the face of adversity.Karen Bender's powerfully affecting first novel has garnered remarkable early attention. Portions of the novel have been published in The New Yorker, Granta and Story magazine. An excerpt chosen for The Best American Short Stories by Annie Proulx was recorded by Joanne Woodward and aired on NPR's Selected Shorts.Mary Reilly (Vintage Contemporaries)
Par Valerie Martin. 1990
From the acclaimed author of the bestselling Italian Fever and award-winning Property, comes a fresh twist on the classic Jekyll…
and Hyde story, a novel told from the perspective of Dr. Jekyll's dutiful and intelligent housemaid. "Part psychological novel, part social history, part eerie horror tale ... dark and moving and powerful." —The Washington Post Faithfully weaving in details from Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, Martin introduces an original and captivating character: Mary is a survivor—scarred but still strong—familiar with evil, yet brimming with devotion and love. As a bond grows between Mary and her tortured employer, she is sent on errands to unsavory districts of London and entrusted with secrets she would rather not know. Unable to confront her hideous suspicions about Dr. Jekyll, Mary ultimately proves the lengths to which she'll go to protect him. Through her astute reflections, we hear the rest of the classic Jekyll and Hyde story, and this familiar tale is made more terrifying than we remember it, more complex than we imagined possible.Lásko
Par Catherine Cooper. 2023
"Extraordinary -- and totally engrossing. Lásko is at once an intimate tale of personal awakening, a love story, and a…
provocative parable about the lures and dangers of influence." JOHANNA SKIBSRUD, author of IslandWhen Mája was seven, her mother disappeared. Now Mája has an urge to do the same. She leaves her fiancé in Canada and follows signs that she believes are leading her to the Czech Republic, her mother's home country.In Prague, she falls in love with Kuba, a charismatic musician who is a rising star in Czech New Age circles. As she navigates this irresistible and overwhelming relationship, Mája is guided by dreams, visions, and synchronicities, but she also suffers from a mysterious illness and the unshakeable sense that something is terribly wrong.Revealing both the falseness and truth of the stories we tell ourselves, Catherine Cooper's novel is sharply observed, darkly funny, and ultimately moving -- a profound meditation on the pain and potency of love.Miracle Creek: A Novel
Par Angie Kim. 2019
Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First NovelA Time Best Mystery and Thriller Book of All Time The “gripping……
page-turner” (Time) hitting all the best of summer reading lists, Miracle Creek is perfect for book clubs and fans of Liane Moriarty and Celeste NgHow far will you go to protect your family? Will you keep their secrets? Ignore their lies? In a small town in Virginia, a group of people know each other because they’re part of a special treatment center, a hyperbaric chamber that may cure a range of conditions from infertility to autism. But then the chamber explodes, two people die, and it’s clear the explosion wasn’t an accident. A powerful showdown unfolds as the story moves across characters who are all maybe keeping secrets, hiding betrayals. Chapter by chapter, we shift alliances and gather evidence: Was it the careless mother of a patient? Was it the owners, hoping to cash in on a big insurance payment and send their daughter to college? Could it have been a protester, trying to prove the treatment isn’t safe?“A stunning debut about parents, children and the unwavering hope of a better life, even when all hope seems lost" (Washington Post), Miracle Creek uncovers the worst prejudice and best intentions, tense rivalries and the challenges of parenting a child with special needs. It’s “a quick-paced murder mystery that plumbs the power and perils of community” (O Magazine) as it carefully pieces together the tense atmosphere of a courtroom drama and the complexities of life as an immigrant family. Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a Korean-American, former trial lawyer, and mother of a “miracle submarine” patient, this is a novel steeped in suspense and igniting discussion. Recommended by Erin Morgenstern, Jean Kwok, Jennifer Weiner, Scott Turow, Laura Lippman, and more--Miracle Creek is a brave, moving debut from an unforgettable new voice.Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable
Par Ronald Fair. 2023
Rediscover this gripping 1965 novel about race in America—set in a rural corner of Mississippi where slavery never endedFrom the…
Civil Rights Era comes an urgent allegory about the terror and tragedy of Jim Crow, with a new introduction by W. Ralph EubanksThe premise of Ronald Fair&’s short, parable-like novel, Many Thousand Gone: An American Fable (1965), is that in a rural corner of Mississippi—the fictional Jacobs County—slavery did not end in 1865 but continued uninterrupted into the 1960s through the brutal tactics of the local sheriff's office and the willing complicity of surrounding counties. Black outsiders are not allowed into Jacobs County while Black inhabitants attempting to escape are hunted down and killed. All the Black women in the county have been made sexually available to any white man for generations, resulting in the mixed blood of nearly all the enslaved population. When the last all-Black child, &“the Black Prince,&” is born, he is secreted out of the county by his great-grandmother and a family friend, and eventually makes his way north to join his father. Years later, when the Black Prince becomes a celebrated writer in Chicago, his growing fame puts an unwanted spotlight on Jacobs County, emboldening the enslaved population, exposing the white supremacists&’ false sense of superiority, and setting in motion a series of events that will change everything. Will the white population change with the times? Or will they willingly see the destruction of Jacobsville—the county&’s principal town—before sharing power with the Black population? An introduction by W. Ralph Eubanks explores Fair&’s extended metaphor for Black life under Jim Crow and reflects on the power of literature to illuminate the past.The Man Who Cried I Am: A Novel
Par John Williams. 2023
Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artistsWith a foreword by…
Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault linesMax Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright.In Amsterdam, among Harry&’s papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining &“King Alfred,&” a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming &“to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society.&” Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help.Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider&’s view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery.Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed.&“It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb . . . . This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book.&” —Chester Himes&“Magnificent . . . obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class.&” —John Fowles&“If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate.&” —Walter MoselyLET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO
Par Cleo Qian. 2003
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence A TIME Best Book of 2023 “Qian has a gift for sensory details,…
and for the speculative and grotesque. . . . a pleasure to read.”—Raven Leilani, author of Luster The electric, unsettling, and often surreal stories in LET'S GO LET'S GO LET'S GO explore the alienated, technology-mediated lives of restless Asian and Asian American women today. A woman escapes into dating simulations to forget her best friend’s abandonment; a teenager begins to see menacing omens on others’ bodies after her double eyelid surgery; reunited schoolmates are drawn into the Japanese mountains to participate in an uncanny social experiment; a supernatural karaoke machine becomes a K-pop star’s channel for redemption. In every story, characters refuse dutiful, docile stereotypes. They are ready to explode, to question conventions. Their compulsions tangle with unrequited longing and queer desire in their search for something ineffable across cities, countries, and virtual worlds. With precision and provocation, Cleo Qian’s immersive debut jolts us into the reality of lives fragmented by screens, relentless consumer culture, and the flattening pressures of modern society—and asks how we might hold on to tenderness against the impulses within us.The Competent Authority
Par Iegor Gran. 2020
'Great is the Soviet Union, vast its territories, warm its entrails...' 1959. Whispers of dissidence are spreading in the U.S.S.R.…
Texts published in the West are circulating in samizdat, tormenting the secret police. Lieutenant Ivanov of the K.G.B, under pressure from his enraged superiors, is handed the case.Leads emerge, flare up, vanish. Years pass. 'Abram Tertz' publishes another short story, a new novel, mocking the competent authority. Shielded by his fierce wife Maria Vasilyevna Rozanova, Andrei Sinyavsky, one of the Soviet Union's most renowned and brilliant figures of resistance, waits in his wired apartment, drinking, sure his days as a free man are numbered.But as Rozanova continues to taunt Ivanov with her cheerful intransigence, a crisis of confidence opens up within the regime's resolve, causing the young lieutenant to wonder, 'are we actually as competent as we claim to be?''With the unique insight afforded by his mother, Rozanova, Gran pays remarkable homage to Andrei Sinyavsky, his father, reimagining the six long years leading up to his infamous arrest, trial and conviction. Framed within a riveting cat-and-mouse dynamic; irreverent and darkly comic, Gran balances a satirical lightness with deeper meditations on dogma and freedom of expression, state control and creative resistance, the ghosts of which, at a time when political criticism is being crushed once again, are as present today as ever before.Oxygen: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Par Andrew Miller. 2001
'ANDREW MILLER'S WRITING IS A SOURCE OF WONDER AND DELIGHT' Hilary Mantel 'ONE OF OUR MOST SKILFUL CHRONICLERS OF THE…
HUMAN HEART AND MIND' Sunday TimesShortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award 'Beautiful'The Times 'Superbly realised'Sunday Telegraph 'Breathtaking'Irish Times The third novel from the critically acclaimed author of Pure - a deeply moving exploration of courage, love and liberation in the modern age In the summer of 1997, four people reach a turning point: Alice Valentine, who lies gravely ill in her West Country home; her two sons, one still searching for a sense of direction, the other fighting to keep his acting career and marriage afloat; and László Lázár, who leads a comfortable life in Paris yet is plagued by his memories of the 1956 Hungarian uprising.For each, the time has come to assess what matters in life, and all will be forced to take part in an act of liberation - though not necessarily the one foreseen. PRAISE FOR ANDREW MILLER 'Unique, visionary, a master at unmasking humanity' Sarah Hall 'A writer of very rare and outstanding gifts' Independent on Sunday 'A highly intelligent writer, both exciting and contemplative' The Times 'A wonderful storyteller' SpectatorBanyan Moon: A Read with Jenna Pick
Par Thao Thai. 2023
A TODAY Show #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick"A riveting mother-daughter tale." — Elle"Radiant. … An intimate account of one family’s planting of…
roots in American soil and the sacrifices great and small that each member makes along the way.” — Washington PostA sweeping, evocative debut novel following three generations of Vietnamese American women reeling from the death of their matriarch, revealing the family’s inherited burdens, buried secrets, and unlikely love stories. When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng.Back in Florida, Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home, in all its strange, Gothic glory. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.Running parallel to this is Minh’s story, as she goes from a lovestruck teenager living in the shadow of the Vietnam War to a determined young mother immigrating to America in search of a better life for her children. And when Ann makes a shocking discovery in the Banyan House’s attic, long-buried secrets come to light as it becomes clear how decisions Minh made in her youth affected the rest of her life—and beyond.Spanning decades and continents, from 1960s Vietnam to the wild swamplands of the Florida coast, Banyan Moon is a stunning and deeply moving story of mothers and daughters, the things we inherit, and the lives we choose to make out of that inheritance.Let Us Descend
Par Jesmyn Ward. 2023
From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and…
MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. “‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” —Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation. From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages. New York Times BestsellerSycamore: A Novel
Par Bryn Chancellor. 2018
A Southwest Book of the Year"In this masterful performance, Bryn Chancellor explores the loss around which an entire community has…
calcified with humanity and wisdom. Chancellor digs deep in these pages, unearthing broken hearts, secrets, betrayals, passion and—most impressively—grace. What a joy to find a book that is both propulsive and perfectly composed."—Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of The NestAn award-winning writer makes her debut with this mesmerizing page-turner in the spirit of Everything I Never Told You and Olive Kitteridge.Out for a hike one scorching afternoon in Sycamore, Arizona, a newcomer to town stumbles across what appear to be human remains embedded in the wall of a dry desert ravine. As news of the discovery makes its way around town, Sycamore’s longtime residents fear the bones may belong to Jess Winters, the teenage girl who disappeared suddenly some eighteen years earlier, an unsolved mystery that has soaked into the porous rock of the town and haunted it ever since. In the days it takes the authorities to make an identification, the residents rekindle stories, rumors, and recollections both painful and poignant as they revisit Jess’s troubled history. In resurrecting the past, the people of Sycamore will find clarity, unexpected possibility, and a way forward for their lives.Skillfully interweaving multiple points of view, Bryn Chancellor knowingly maps the bloodlines of a community and the indelible characters at its heart. Evocative and atmospheric, Sycamore is a coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a moving exploration of the elemental forces that drive human nature—desire, loneliness, grief, love, forgiveness, and hope—as witnessed through the inhabitants of one small Arizona town.Imani All Mine: A Novel
Par Connie Porter. 1999
"With authority and grace" (Essence), Imani All Mine tells the story of Tasha, a fourteen-year-old unwed mother of a baby…
girl. In her ghettoized world where poverty, racism, and danger are daily struggles, Tasha uses her savvy and humor to uncover the good hidden around her. The name she gives her daughter, Imani, is a sign of her determination and fundamental trust despite the odds against her: Imani means faith. Surrounding Tasha and Imani is a cast of memorable characters: Peanut, the boy Tasha likes, Eboni, her best friend, Miss Odetta, the neighborhood gossip, and Tasha's mother, Earlene, who's dating a new boyfriend. Tasha's voice speaks directly to both the special pain of poverty and the universal, unconquerable spirit of youth. Authentic in every detail, this is an unforgettable story. As Seventeen declared, "Porter's candid narrative will have you hooked from the opening sentence."Bottled Goods: A Novel
Par Sophie Van Llewyn. 2018
Longlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize, this poignant, lyrical novel is set in 1970s Romania during Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s…
regime—and depicts childhood, marriage, family, and identity in the face of extreme obstacles.Alina yearns for freedom. She and her husband Liviu are teachers in their twenties, living under the repressive regime of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the Socialist Republic of Romania in the 1970s. But after her brother-in-law defects, Alina and Liviu fall under suspicion and surveillance, and their lives are suddenly turned upside down—just like the glasses in her superstitious Aunt Theresa's house that are used to ward off evil spirits. But Alina's evil spirits are more corporeal: a suffocating, manipulative mother; a student who accuses her; and a menacing Secret Services agent who makes one-too-many visits. As the couple continues to be harassed, their marriage soon deteriorates. With the government watching—and most likely listening— escape seems impossible . . . until Alina’s mystical aunt proposes a surprising solution to reduce her problems to a manageable size. Weaving elements of magic realism, Romanian folklore, and Kafkaesque paranoia into a gritty and moving depiction of one woman's struggle for personal and political freedom, Bottled Goods is written in short bursts of “flash fiction” and explores universal themes of empowerment, liberty, family, and loyalty.