Розина Липпи0.0 The most moving debut novel of the year, shortlisted for the 2001 Orange Prize for Fiction.
Homestead is simply one of the most beautifully written and moving books it’s been our privilege to publish in years. It is also perfectly constituted to be a word-of-mouth bestseller (and its fate in the US bears this out; from very small beginnings at an obscure press in 1998, that is what is has gone to become, picking up the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Prize on its way to regional bestsellerdom in paperback).
Its focus is on the women of a remote Alpine village, where life revolves around farming – and more particularly, around milk and cheese – in a way it has done for generations. Though the sense of place is acute in the book, equally the experiences and emotions of the women at the heart of it are timeless. This community of a few hundred souls, where everyone not only knows but is related to everyone else, is, of course, the kind of environment that is fast disappearing in Europe – reminiscent of remote sheep-farming communities in mid-Wales or the Cumbrian hills or the Scottish highlands. This self-contained, traditional world is evoked with tenderness but without sentimentality or blinkers. The real world creeps up the mountain to the village all too often – for example, carrying off its menfolk to war, and blighting the women with more work still, and less aid. The book spans more or less the entire twentieth century, and puts at the heart of each chapter a different woman. The casual brilliance of Lippi’s storytelling can be devastating; the reader passes by a seemingly innocuous sentence, only to turn back and see blood and fire everywhere in it.
Николь Монс0.0 A novel of searing intelligence and startling originality, Lost in Translation heralds the debut of a unique new voice on the literary landscape. Nicole Mones creates an unforgettable story of love and desire, of family ties and human conflict, and of one woman's struggle to lose herself in a foreign land--only to discover her home, her heart, herself.
At dawn in Beijing, Alice Mannegan pedals a bicycle through the deserted streets. An American by birth, a translator by profession, she spends her nights in Beijing's smoke-filled bars, and the Chinese men she so desires never misunderstand her intentions. All around her rushes the air of China, the scent of history and change, of a world where she has come to escape her father's love and her own pain. It is a world in which, each night as she slips from her hotel, she hopes to lose herself forever.
For Alice, it began with a phone call from an American archaeologist seeking a translator. And it ended in an intoxicating journey of the heart--one that would plunge her into a nation's past, and into some of the most rarely glimpsed regions of China. Hired by an archaeologist searching for the bones of Peking Man, Alice joins an expedition that penetrates a vast, uncharted land and brings Professor Lin Shiyang into her life. As they draw closer to unearthing the secret of Peking Man, as the group's every move is followed, their every whisper recorded, Alice and Lin find shelter in each other, slowly putting to rest the ghosts of their pasts. What happens between them becomes one of the most breathtakingly erotic love stories in recent fiction. Indeed, Lost in Translation is a novel about love--between a nation and its past, between a man and a memory, between a father and a daughter. Its powerful impact confirms the extraordinary gifts of a master storyteller, Nicole Mones.
Ричард Мэннинг0.0 So much of the tortured ecological history of the American West has been played out in microcosm along the banks of the Blackfoot River in western Montana. Generations of abuse - from logging, grazing, mining, and now overdevelopment - have left this once vibrant waterway choked and gasping. And today a new threat looms: a massive gold mine hard by the river's edge. Here is the biography of a river, and like the best of that genre, it resonates far beyond the life of its particular central character. In telling the river's story, Richard Manning takes us as far back as the Salish tribe, who first settled its valley, on through the years of nation building and the influx of new Americans migrating west, to the new settlers of the nineties - the well-monied urban refugees who bring with them their own brand of waste and destruction. He carefully and eloquently chronicles the successive waves of cattle, of axes and chain saws, of bulldozers and dynamite that have bled the life from the river. This is also the story of gold, the lust for which is now the driving force toward what may be the river's ultimate demise. Finally, Manning offers a ground-level view of the battle currently raging in Montana to stop the mine and save the Blackfoot.
Роберт Кларк0.0 St. Paul, Minnesota, 1939. Lieutenant Wesley Horner is heading a police investigation into the brutal murder of a beautiful showgirl. His chief suspect is Herbert White an eccentric recluse and hobby photographer who spends his days writing gushing fan letters to Hollywood starlets and, recording his life in detailed journal entries and scrapbooks.
Then another dancer is found murdered, and the clues point once again to Herbert White. In his extraordinary second novel, Robert Clark examines the inner worlds of two very different men and the women in their lives. He illuminates the complex relationships between truth and fiction, past and present, while exploring the nature of faith and memory.
Фрэнк Сус0.0 This collection of stories captures people in the middle of their lives and on the verge of change when things are almost willing themselves to fall apart. Jobs, mariages and hopes disintegrate while peopleseek answers and strategies.
Сандра Алкоссер0.0 "Whether immersed in the exotic claustrophobia and sexual edginess of a Louisiana bayou or smelling again the sweat of workers in her father's garage, or remembering an aunt's passion for extravagant hats . . . Sandra Alcosser always gives us poems vivid with what she calls 'the tangible feel / of being alive.' EXCEPT BY NATURE is an exceptional collection: feisty, accomplished, and mature, its poems brim with serious delights".--Eamon Grennan.
