Set in Viking Greenland in AD 985, this dramatic novel focuses on the intertwined lives of three women—Katla, who was born into slavery when Vikings seized her Irish mother; Thorbjorg, a seeress steeped in the pagan Norse religion; and Bibrau, the strange silent child Katla bears after she is brutally raped by her master’s son, Torvard. Together these women recount the hardship and wonder of the first years of the Norse colony and the great change that comes to the settlers after Leif, son of Eirik the Red, brings Christianity to Greenland. For Katla, who has long whispered her mother’s Christian blessings in secret,
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A nonfiction She’s Come Undone, Fat Girl is a powerfully honest and darkly riveting memoir of obsession with food and body image, penned by a Guggenheim and NEA award-winning writer. For anyone who’s ever had a love/hate relationship with food and with how they look, for anyone who’s ever knowingly or unconsciously used food to fill a hole in their heart, Fat Girl is a brilliantly rendered, angst-filled coming-of-age story of gain and loss.
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Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of war as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. Finell depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed;
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In Dreaming the Mississippi, Fischer offers a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation by sharing experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope–swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets.
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Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York. One is a young model stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged office temp. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality. Moving seamlessly from present and past, casting a fierce yet compassionate eye on two eras and their fixations, the result is a work of timeless depth and moral power.
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In this riveting novel, bestselling author John Darnton transports us to Victorian England and around the world to reveal the secrets of a legendary nineteenth-century figure. What led Darwin to the theory of evolution? Why did he wait twenty-two years to write On the Origin of Species? The story shifts among Darwin’s adventures as he sails around the world on the Beagle, his daughter Lizzie’s journals recording his subsequent ailments and strange behavior, and the research of present-day anthropologist Hugh Kellem and Darwin scholar Beth Dulicmer, whose obsession with Darwin (and with each other) drives them beyond the accepted boundaries of scholarly research.
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