Afternoon Bk Grp
A New York Times Best Mystery Novel of 2021 Set in 1944 Chicago, Edgar Award-winner Naomi Hirahara's eye-opening and poignant new mystery, the story of a young woman searching for the truth about her revered older sister's death, brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II. Chicago, 1944: Twenty-year-old Aki Ito and her parents have just been released from Manzanar, where they have been detained by the US government since the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, together with thousands of other Japanese Americans. The life in California the Itos were forced to leave behind is gone; instead, they are being resettled two thousand miles away in Chicago, where Aki's older sister, Rose, was sent months earlier and moved to the new Japanese American neighborhood near Clark and Division streets. But on the eve of the Ito family's reunion, Rose is killed by a subway train. Aki, who worshipped her sister, is stunned. Officials are ruling Rose's death a suicide. Aki cannot believe her perfect, polished, and optimistic sister would end her life. Her instinct tells her there is much more to the story, and she knows she is the only person who could ever learn the truth. Inspired by historical events, Clark and Division infuses an atmospheric and heartbreakingly real crime with rich period details and delicately wrought personal stories Naomi Hirahara has gleaned from thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.
The inspiration for the major motion picture Ithaca, directed by and starring Meg Ryan--with a cast that includes Sam Shepard, Hamish Linklater, Alex Neustaedter, Jack Quaid, and Tom Hanks The place is Ithaca, in California's San Joaquin Valley. The time is World War II. The family is the Macauley's--a mother, sister, and three brothers whose struggles and dreams reflect those of America's second-generation immigrants. . . . In particular, fourteen-year-old Homer, determined to become one of the fastest telegraph messengers in the West, finds himself caught between reality and illusion as delivering his messages of wartime death, love, and money brings him face-to-face with human emotion at its most naked and raw. Gentle, poignant and richly autobiographical, this delightful novel shows us the boy becoming the man in a world that even in the midst of war, appears sweeter, safer and more livable than out own.
Dr. Morayo Da Silva is one of the most memorable characters you are likely to encounter on the page - intelligent, indomitable, author and survivor of a large life. In dreamlike prose, Manyika dips in and out of her present, her past, in a story that argues always for generosity, for connection, for a vigorous and joyful endurance. --Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, shortlisted for 2014 Man Booker Prize
If aging be a lamp, then Morayo, the protagonist in Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun is a mesmerising glow. Astute, sensual, funny, and moving. --NoViolet Bulawayo, author of We Need New Names, shortlisted for 2013 Man Booker Prize
From the instant you pick it up, you know that you will privy to the most intimate secrets. A beautiful, important new novel. --Peter Orner, author of Love and Shame and Love
Morayo Da Silva, a cosmopolitan Nigerian woman, lives in San Francisco. Almost seventy-five, she has a zest for life and enjoys road trips in her vintage Porsche. But when Morayo has an accident, crushing her independence, she is prompted to reassess her relationships and recollect her past life and loves. A humorous, joyful read.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika teaches literature at San Francisco State University. Her first novel, In Dependence, has sold over 1.5 million copies in Nigeria. Sarah sits on the boards of Hedgebrook and San Francisco's Museum of the African Diaspora and was the Chair of Judges for the Etisalat Prize for Literature in 2015.
A blackly humorous story of loneliness, deception, and life in old age by one of the most accomplished novelists of the twentieth century. On a rainy Sunday afternoon in January, the recently widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont Hotel in South Kensington. "If it's not nice, I needn't stay," she promises herself, as she settles into this haven for the genteel and the decayed. "Three elderly widows and one old man . . . who seemed to dislike female company and seldom got any other kind" serve for her fellow residents, and there is the staff, too, and they are one and all lonely. What is Mrs. Palfrey to do with herself now that she has all the time in the world? Go for a walk. Go to a museum. Go to the end of the block. Well, she does have her grandson who works at the British Museum, and he is sure to visit any day. Mrs. Palfrey prides herself on having always known "the right thing to do," but in this new situation she discovers that resource is much reduced. Before she knows it, in fact, she tries something else. Elizabeth Taylor's final and most popular novel is as unsparing as it is, ultimately, heartbreaking.
First in the Old Filth trilogy. A New York Times Notable Book. "Old Filth belongs in the Dickensian pantheon of memorable characters" (The New York Times Book Review).
Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.Borrowing from biography and history, Jane Gardam has written an unforgettable novel reminiscent of Evan S. Connell's books Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, and Rudyard Kipling's Baa Baa, Black Sheep. Retracing much of the twentieth century's torrid and momentous history, Old Filth is the first installment of an immersive and atmospheric trilogy that, taken together, tells the moving story of a long, complicated marriage.
"Old Filth is an extraordinary novel--the structure, the characters, the sweep of time."--Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House "I don't know why Gardam isn't universally celebrated and beloved. Her prose is dazzling, and she writes with a kind of subdued but wicked humor that takes a moment to clamp down on you."--Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies "I think Jane Gardam is a genius and should be far more widely read. She has actually made me gasp, slap a book shut and say, 'She can't do that!, ' open it up and realize that she can, she has, and it works."--Denise Mina, author of Conviction SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZEA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
The New York Times Book Review
The Washington Post
The San Francisco Chronicle
New York Magazine
The Globe & Mail
Slate
"Will bring immense pleasure to readers who treasure fiction that is intelligent, witty, sophisticated and--a quality encountered all too rarely in contemporary culture--adult."--The Washington Post "Gardam is an exquisite storyteller, picking up threads, laying them down, returning to them and giving them new meaning . . . Old Filth is sad, funny, beautiful and haunting."--The Seattle Times "A masterpiece of storytelling."--The Dallas Morning News "[Jane Gardam is] the best contemporary British writer you probably haven't heard of."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Ernest Hemingway's most beloved and popular novel ever, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, now featuring a previously unpublished short story and additional supplementary material--plus a personal foreword by the author's only living son, Patrick Hemingway, and an introduction by the author's grandson Seán Hemingway. The last of his novels Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the most enduring works of American fiction. The story of a down-on-his-luck Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal--a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream--has been cherished by generations of readers. Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of adversity and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent 20th-century classic. First published in 1952, this hugely popular tale confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Nobel Prize winner--for the first time in a beautifully produced stand-alone edition, with an introduction by Zadie Smith "A puzzle of a story, then--a game.... When [Morrison] called Recitatif an 'experiment' she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader." --Zadie Smith, award-winning, best-selling author of White Teeth In this 1983 short story--the only short story Morrison ever wrote--we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them. Another work of genius by this masterly writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial. We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.
In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in the 1920s, a shot rings out on a farm in rural Illinois. A man named Lloyd Wilson has been killed. And the tenuous friendship between two lonely teenagers--one privileged yet neglected, the other a troubled farm boy--has been shattered. Fifty years later, one of those boys--now a grown man--tries to reconstruct the events that led up to the murder. In doing so, he is inevitably drawn back to his lost friend Cletus, who has the misfortune of being the son of Wilson's killer and who in the months before witnessed things that Maxwell's narrator can only guess at. Out of memory and imagination, the surmises of children and the destructive passions of their parents, Maxwell creates a luminous American classic of youth and loss.