With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and two teenage girls caught in the middle.
Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s two families—the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich yet flawed characters—the father,
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Anna and Louise could be sisters, but they don’t know each other. They are both married with children, and for the most part, they are happy. On almost the same day, Anna, a psychiatrist, crosses paths with Yves, a writer, while Louise, a lawyer, meets Anna’s analyst, Thomas. Love at first sight is still possible for those into their forties and long-married. But when you have already mapped out a life path, a passionate affair can come at a high price. For our four characters, their lives are unexpectedly turned upside down by the deliciously inconvenient arrival of love. For Anna,
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In Chicago’s Ukrainian Village, Nadya Lysenko has built her life on a
foundation of secrets. When she was sixteen, Nadya snuck out of her
house in Western Ukraine to meet a fortuneteller in the woods. She never
expected it to be the last time she would see her family.
Decades later, Nadya continues to be haunted by the death of her parents
and sisters. The myths and magic of her childhood are still a part of
her reality: dreams unite friends across time and space, house spirits
misplace keys and glasses,
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Short-listed three times for the Booker Prize, Anita Desai explores time and transformation in these artful novellas
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Anita Desai ruminates on art and memory, illusion and disillusion, and the sharp divide between life’s expectations and its realities in three perfectly etched novellas. Set in India in the not-too-distant past, the stories’ dramas illuminate the ways in which Indian culture can nourish or suffocate. All are served up with Desai’s characteristic perspicuity, subtle humor, and sensitive writing.
Overwhelmed by their own lack of purpose, the men and women who populate these tales set out on unexpected journeys that present them with a fresh sense hope and opportunity.
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Some people need to run away to find themselves. Some need to come home
Kyran Pittman did both, landing in the last place she ever expected: inside the white picket fence at the center of an all-American family. A self-described wild child, Pittman grew up in a loving yet chaotic household on the “near-mythical island” of Newfoundland, off Canada’s rugged east coast.
Unmoored by “the catastrophe of falling in love with an American,” she embarked on a new life as an unlikely pilgrim to the suburban heartland–a journey that began in exile and ends in homecoming.
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With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.
In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father’s fortune evaporates,
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