In Alice Greenway’s exquisite gem of a novel, two girls tumble into their teenage years against the extraordinary backdrop of a Hong Kong dealing with the threat of communist China bubbling at its borders and the carnage in Vietnam that calls their father back time and again, like a moth to a flame. This astonishing literary debut is a tale of sacrifice and solidarity that gleams with the kind of intense, complicated love that only exists between sisters. In this novel based on historical fact, Jim Fergus takes readers on a journey of magnificent sweep and heartbreaking consequence peopled with unforgettable characters.
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Disgrace—set in post–apartheid Cape Town and on a remote farm in the Eastern Cape—is deft, lean, quiet, and brutal. A heartbreaking novel about a man and his daughter, Disgrace is a portrait of the new South Africa that is ultimately about grace and love.
At fifty—two Professor David Lurie is divorced, filled with desire but lacking passion. An affair with one of his students leaves him jobless and friendless, except for his daughter, Lucy, who works her smallholding with her neighbor, Petrus, an African farmer now on the way to a modest prosperity. David’s attempts to relate to Lucy,
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When Melanie Marsh learns that her son Daniel is autistic, she becomes determined to fight to teach Daniel to speak, play, and become as normal as possible. Melanie’s enchanting disposition has helped her weather some of life’s storms, but Daniel’s autism may just push her over the brink, destroying her resolute optimism and bringing her unsteady marriage to its end. Surprisingly funny yet deeply moving, Daniel Isn’t Talking is the story of a mother and a family in crisis. What sets it apart from most novels about difficult subjects is Marti Leimbach’s ability to write about a sad and frightening situation with a seamless blend of warmth,
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It is the Great Depression. Abandoned by his beautiful wife, Henry and his two young children, Thomas and Margaret, spend that summer in a tent on the edge of Black Pond. Henry, an itinerant butcher, struggles to provide for his children but often must leave them alone as he travels the county in search of work. And while Henry loves his children deeply, he is devastated by their mother’s desertion, refusing to tell them why she left or if she’ll return. When Mrs. Phyllis Farley, a prosperous neighbor, begins to woo the children as companions for her strange, housebound son,
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Max Wolinsky comes from a family of mostly upstanding salesmen. On the eve of his son’s bar mitzvah, he returns home to Philadelphia, where he plans to put the finishing touches on a not-so-honorable business transaction and then disappear quietly back to Florida. Nothing, however, goes as planned. Coming home, it seems, means coming to terms with his family. It means facing the expectations of his father, the needs of his stroke-addled uncle, and the adolescent tribulations of his son. Honest, funny, and moving, Responsible Men is a portrait of three generations of men struggling to be good sons and good fathers in a world of big dreams and bigger temptations.
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When an elderly and newly widowed Ukrainian immigrant declares his intention to remarry, his intended turns out to be a voluptuous gold digger from the old country with a proclivity for green satin underwear and an insatiable appetite for the good life of the West. And so his children Vera and Nadezhda must set aside years of bitter rivalry to rescue their annoyingly frisky father who (when he is not pursuing Valentina) is busily writing a grand history of the tractor and its role in human progress. As the intrigues multiply and secrets spill out, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian takes in love and suffering,
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