What part of our selves do we hide away in order to have a stable, prosperous life?
Pippa Lee has just such a life in place at age fifty, when her older husband, a retired publisher, decides that they should move to a retirement community outside New York City. Pippa is suddenly deprived of the stimulation and distraction that had held everything in place. She begins losing track of her own mind; her foundations start to shudder, and gradually we learn the truth of the young life that led her finally to settle down in marriage–years of neglect and rebellion,
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Spiritual and sensuous, divine and carnal, decay and regeneration. Sarika discovers this blend through her journey in the world of music. Life is not a simple black and white but a mix of the dichotomous. Music offers a unique lens through which to look at relationships: the guru-pupil, husband-wife, parent-child, artist-world. Each relationship brings its own complexities to an already complex world that goes on through each death into rebirth.
Divine Music is a sensitive look at the world of music, a microcosm of Indian society. The novel reaffirms our faith in life and in the ability of humans to go on living after a catastrophe.
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The boy wants nothing more than his maman’s lap and a view of the birds that soar over his Kurdish village. Nameless, impressionable, and watchful, the boy soon becomes a man in a mountaintop ritual with his baba, uncles, and cousins. And as a man, he must join the male villagers when they march to war against the shah’s army. But the Kurds, fierce protectors of their homeland against centuries of invasion, fall to the shah; the boy’s father is massacred before his eyes. As the only survivor, adopted by the very soldiers that murdered his father, the boy begins a new life as Reza Pejman Khourdi—conscripted soldier for the new Iran.
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“I need you to understand how ordinary it all was. . . .”
In the turbulent southern summer of 1963, Millwood’s white population steers clear of “Shake Rag,” the black section of town. Young Florence Forrest is one of the few who crosses the line. The daughter of a burial insurance salesman with dark secrets and the town’s “cake lady,” whose backcountry bootleg runs lead further and further away from a brutal marriage, Florence attaches herself to her grandparents’ longtime maid, Zenie Johnson. Named for Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, Zenie treats the unwanted girl as just another chore,
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Already fast becoming a classic among coming-of-age tales, John the Revelator has garnered praise from Nick Laird, Colm Tóibín, Roddy Doyle, and John Boyne, and is a critical darling in the U.K.
This is the story of John Devine–stuck in a small town in the otherworldly landscape of southeastern Ireland, worried over by his single, chain-smoking, Bible-quoting mother, Lily, and spied on by the “neighborly” Mrs. Nagle. When Jamey Corboy, a self-styled Rimbaudian boy wonder, arrives in town, John’s life suddenly seems full of possibility. His loneliness dissipates. He is taken up by mischief and discovery,
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“D’Erasmo moves to the top of her craft with The Sky Below,” said Town and Country, and many others have joined the chorus of critical acclaim for her newest novel, in part inspired by Ovid, which illuminates the myths that underlie our everyday lives.
At thirty-seven, Gabriel Collins works halfheartedly as an obituary writer at a fading newspaper in lower Manhattan, which, since 9/11, feels like a city of the dead. This once dreamy and appealing boy has turned from a rebellious adolescent to an adult who trades in petty crimes.
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