Оскар Хокеа0.0 A moving and deeply engaging debut novel about a young Native American man struggling to find strength in his familial identity, from a stellar new voice in literary fiction.
Told in a series of voices, Calling for a Blanket Dance takes us into the life of Ever Geimausaddle through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they soldier through a myriad of difficulties: his father's sudden kidney failure and subsequent disability, his mother's struggle to hold on to her job and care for her husband, the constant resettlement of the family, and Ever's own bottled-up rage at the instability all around him. Meanwhile, all of Ever's relatives have ideas about who he is and who he should be. His Cherokee grandmother urges the family to move across the state to find security; his dying grandfather hopes to reunite him with his heritage through traditional gourd dances; his Kiowa cousin reminds him that he's connected to an ancestral past. And once an adult, Ever must take the strength given to him by his relatives to save not only himself, but also the next generation of family.
How will this young man visualize a place for himself when the world hasn't given him a place to start with? Honest, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting, Calling for a Blanket Dance is the story of how Ever Geimausaddle found his way to home.
Торри Питерс4.1 A whipsmart debut about three women--transgender and cisgender--whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.
Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese--and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby--and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it--Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family--and raise the baby together?
This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
Каваи Стронг Уошбёрн3.5 1995-й, Гавайи. Отправившись с родителями кататься на яхте, семилетний Ноа Флорес падает за борт. Когда поверхность воды вспенивается от акульих плавников, все замирают от ужаса — малыш обречен. Но происходит чудо — одна из акул, осторожно держа Ноа в пасти, доставляет его к борту судна. Эта история становится семейной легендой. Семья Ноа, пострадавшая, как и многие жители островов, от краха сахарно-тростниковой промышленности, сочла странное происшествие знаком благосклонности гавайских богов. А позже, когда у мальчика проявились особые способности, родные окончательно в этом уверились. Однако со временем эта божественная милость становится причиной распада семьи.
Ноа работает фельдшером в Портленде. Его старший брат Дин учится в элитарном колледже, куда его приняли из-за успехов в баскетболе. Младшая сестра Кауи поступает в университет на материке, чтобы отыскать собственный путь, не связанный с семейными легендами. Но однажды трагическое событие возвращает Флоресов на родной остров...
Ручика Томар4.0 "Sometimes characters come along that demand a new kind of novel. The young women at the center of Ruchika Tomar's A Prayer for Travelers - elusive Penny and wounded Cale - are two spirits hitchhiking through geographies of dislocation and desire. The human collisions in Tomar's novel are emotionally seismic, and they leave us haunted and unsettled."
--Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son
Cale, a bookish loner of mysterious parentage, was abandoned by her mother and raised by her grandfather in a loving, if codependent, household. One pivotal summer, her life is upended by the discovery of a devastating secret that will change her life forever.
Set adrift for the first time in her life, Cale starts waitressing at the local diner, where she reconnects with Penélope Reyes, a charismatic former classmate and all-around hustler. Penny exposes Cale to the reality that exists beyond their small town, and the girls become inseparable - until one terrifying act of violence shatters their world. When Penny vanishes without a trace, Cale must set off on a dangerous quest across the desert to find her friend, and discover herself. Told in short, deftly interweaving chapters, A Prayer for Travelers explores the complicated legacy of the American West and the trauma of female experience.
Томми Ориндж3.6 Литература и кино сформировали романтизированный образ индейцев, живущих в полной гармонии с природой. Но коренное население Америки – народ, который прошел трагический путь и был загнан в резервации. Это история двенадцати индейцев, родившихся в больших городах. Каждый из них пытается найти свое место в жизни и справиться с вызовами современного общества. У них разные судьбы, и только неугасающая связь с предками помогает сохранить свою идентичность в этом мире.
Вайке Ванг3.5 Named a “Most Anticipated Novel of 2017” by Entertainment Weekly, The Millions, and Bustle
A luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track; perfect for readers of Lab Girl and Celeste Ng's Everything I Never Told You.
Three years into her graduate studies at a demanding Boston university, the unnamed narrator of this nimbly wry, concise debut finds her one-time love for chemistry is more hypothesis than reality. She's tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence from her throughout her life. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend, a fellow scientist, whose path through academia has been relatively free of obstacles, and with whom she can't make a life before finding success on her own. Eventually, the pressure mounts so high that she must leave everything she thought she knew about her future, and herself, behind. And for the first time, she's confronted with a question she won't find the answer to in a textbook: What do I really want? Over the next two years, this winningly flawed, disarmingly insightful heroine learns the formulas and equations for a different kind of chemistry--one in which the reactions can't be quantified, measured, and analyzed; one that can be studied only in the mysterious language of the heart. Taking us deep inside her scattered, searching mind, here is a brilliant new literary voice that astutely juxtaposes the elegance of science, the anxieties of finding a place in the world, and the sacrifices made for love and family.
Yaa Gyasi4.5 A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi’s magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
Отесса Мошфег3.5 Эйлин Данлоп всегда считала себя несчастной и обиженной жизнью. Ее мать умерла после тяжелой болезни; отец, отставной полицейский в небольшом городке, стал алкоголиком, а старшая сестра бросила семью. Сама Эйлин, работая в тюрьме для подростков, в свободное время присматривала за своим полубезумным отцом. Часто она мечтала о том, как бросит все, уедет в Нью-Йорк и начнет новую жизнь. Однако мечты эти так и оставались пустыми фантазиями закомплексованной девушки. Но однажды в Рождество произошло то, что заставило Эйлин надеть мамино пальто, достать все свои сбережения, прихватить отцовский револьвер, запрыгнуть в старый семейный автомобиль - и бесследно исчезнуть...
Арна Бонтемпс Хеменуэй0.0 Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction
Barnes & Noble 2014 Discover Great New Writers Selection, Third Place
The stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier explore the profound loss and intricate effects of war on lives that have been suddenly misaligned. A diplomat navigates a hostile political climate and an arranged marriage in an Israeli settlement on a newly discovered planet; a small town in Kansas shuns the army recruiter who signed up its boys as troops are deployed to Iraq, falling in helicopters and on grenades; a family dissolves around mental illness and a child's body overtaken by cancer. The moment a soldier steps on an explosive device is painfully reproduced, nanosecond by nanosecond. Arna Bontemps Hemenway's stories feel pulled out of time and place, and the suffering of his characters seem at once otherworldly and stunningly familiar. Elegy on Kinderklavier is a disquieting exploration of what it is to lose and be lost.
NoViolet Bulawayo3.1 Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the
But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her - from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M.Coetzee - while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
