In the early 1960s, Myrmy stubs her toe in the predawn hours on her way to soothe her infant son, cursing the latest nurse for not waking up, again. Dressed to the nines, it is Myrmy who is off to an executive position writing advertising copy for shampoo. Her husband, Dan, who fought in two wars, sell ties and cooks dinner. A Jewish couple living in an exclusive suburb of New York, Myrmy powers through her life in high heels and Dan silently suffers the mysterious aftereffects of a radiation experiment conducted by the military. Together they raise a family.
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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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In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. In a generous vision that is at times funny and at others sad, Desai’s characters face numerous choices which majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
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Seamlessly moving back and forth in time between the Soviet Union in the 1940s and contemporary America, The Madonnas of Leningrad is a searing portrait of war and remembrance, of the power of love, memory, and art to offer hope in the face of overwhelming despair. It is the story of Marina, an aging Russian woman caught in the grips of Alzheimer’s. While she cannot retain fresh memories, vivid images of her youth in Leningrad and the toturous German siege are preserved. To hold on to sanity when the Luftwaffe’s bombing began, she burned to memory the exquisite artworks of the Hermitage where she worked as a guide using them to furnish a “memory palace”
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