Twenty years ago Kathleen Norris, with her husband, fellow poet David Dwyer, moved from New York City to her late grandmother’s home in Lemmon, South Dakota (population 1,614). Their stay was to be temporary. They are still there. It is clear why, in Norris’s loving descriptions of this vast and starkly beautiful landscape, of its extremes of weather and topography, and of its townspeople and farmers.
She also touts the rewards of monastic life, which leads her to a deeper understanding of herself. This self-knowledge heightens her appreciation of the concept of community, both social and spiritual,
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Alex Voormann, an intense, cerebral thirty-year-old archaeologist, is married to the woman of his dreams—an intelligent, ambitious botanist named Isabel. When Isabel is killed by a reckless driver, Alex reluctantly agrees to donate her heart.
Janet Corcoran, a young mother of two and an art teacher at an inner-city school in Chicago, is sick with heart disease. She is on the waiting list for a transplant, but her chances are slim. She watches the Weather Channel, secretly praying for foul weather and car crashes. The day Isabel dies, Janet gets her wish.
So begins this extraordinary story about two families whose lives intersect forever in the aftermath of a tragic accident.
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In her first novel in fifteen years, Helen Garner writes about the joys and limits of female friendship under the transforming pressure of illness. “The clear-eyed grace of her prose” in this darkly funny and unsparing novel has been hailed by Peter Carey as “the work of a great writer.” Compulsively readable and exhilarating, “Garner’s luminous, adamantine narrative,” wrote Claire Messud in Newsweek, is a “triumph of art over artifice…a reminder that literature not only can, but must, address the most important subject, because it does so in ways no other form can.”
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Sid is going crazy . . .
A telemarketer at a travel agency, Sid is becoming unhinged and superneurotic. Lately he’s been obsessed with car washes and mud baths. His hypochondria is driving his doctor sister mad. And it’s all because of his ex-girlfriend, Zoe, who’s sending him postcards from her European adventure, one that they were supposed to take together. It’s all quite upsetting.
A fact-finding tour of local post offices—and a new friendship with postman Gerald—followed by a solo European jaunt will do little to ease his anxiety. A long talk with his mother’s spirit in a wine bottle doesn’t help either.
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When Frank and Ellie Benton lose their only child, seven-year-old Benny, to a sudden illness, the perfect life they had built is shattered. Filled with wrenching memories, their Ann Arbor home becomes unbearable, and their marriage founders. Then an unexpected job half a world away in Girbaug, India, offers them an opportunity to start again. But Frank’s befriending of Ramesh—a bright, curious boy who quickly becomes the focus of his attentions—will lead the grieving man down an ever-darkening path with stark repercussions.
A devastating look at cultural clashes and divides, Thrity Umrigar’s The Weight of Heaven is a rare glimpse of a family and a country struggling under pressures beyond their control.
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It all started when fourteen-year-old Hannah Salwen had a eureka moment. Seeing a homeless man in her neighborhood at the same instant she spotted a man driving a glistening Mercedes, she said, “Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal.”
Until that day, the Salwens had been caught up like so many of us in the classic American dream–providing a good life for their children, accumulating more and more stuff, doing their part to help others but not really feeling it. So when Hannah was stopped in her tracks by this glaring disparity,
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