Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to “Mister,” a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister’s letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.
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Anchee Min’s new novel, Becoming Madame Mao (Mariner Books), is a triumph of historical fiction. In Min’s skillful hands, the “white-boned demon,” as Madame Mao is known, is given flesh and blood. The myths surrounding her are systematically unraveled to reveal a woman motivated by ambition, fueled by revenge, and tortured by her unrequited love for Mao Zedong.
To millions, Madame Mao Jiang Ching is evil personified; she has been erased from China’s history books. In Becoming Madame Mao, Anchee Min resurrects her in a sweeping story that moves gracefully from the intimately personal to the great stage of world history.
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Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters. She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called patient capital can help make people self-sufficient and can change millions of lives. More than just an autobiography or a how-to guide to addressing poverty,
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Fascinating, insightful, and wholly engrossing, The Peabody Sisters is a landmark biography of three women who made American intellectual history. Though theirs may not be household names, Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia Peabody had an extraordinary influence on the thought of their day, the movement of intense creative ferment known as American Romanticism. Megan Marshall adeptly brings to life the sisters and the men they loved and inspired, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Mann, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. In a work filled with startling revelations, Marshall presents a vivid and nuanced psychological portrait of a sisterhood rife with shifting loyalties yet founded on enduring affection.
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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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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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