Korn begins by describing her life as a feisty Somali nomad, freely roaming her country’s steppes. She undergoes FGM (female genital mutilation) at the age of seven, and everything changes. She is sent to Mogadishu for treatment of complications, and as civil war looms, finds herself living amid luxury in the capital with an uncle related to the president. Korn escapes the violence that envelops Somalia when she is sent to Europe for advanced medical care. There she finds physical and emotional release from trauma, marries a German, bears a child, and becomes an international anti-FGM activist.
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Strikingly different since childhood and leading dissimilar lives now, sisters Frances and Cynthia have managed to remain “devoted”—as long as they stay on opposite coasts. When Frances arranges to host Thanksgiving at her New England farmhouse, she envisions a happy family reunion, one that will include the sisters’ long-estranged father. Cynthia, however, doesn’t understand how Frances can ignore the past their father’s presence revives, a past that includes suspicions about their mother’s death twenty-five years earlier. As Thanksgiving arrives, with a houseful of guests, the sisters continue to struggle with different versions of a shared past, their conflict escalating to a dramatic,
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Slavery as it existed in Africa has seldom been portrayed—and never with such texture, detail, and authentic emotion. Inspired by actual 19th-century court records, Unconfessed is a breathtaking literary tour de force.
They called her Sila van den Kaap, slave of Jacobus Stephanus Van der Wat of Plettenberg Bay, in the colony of South Africa. They called her murderer, and demanded that she explain her terrible violence. A woman fit for hanging . . . condemned to death on April 30, 1823, only to have her sentence commuted to a lengthy term on the notorious Robben Island.
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An international bestseller, Bliss embodies the sweep and contradictions of modern Turkish society and the place of women in it.
Bliss is the story of Meryem, a young village girl who is raped by her uncle. An outcast for shaming her family, she is locked in the cellar and expected to kill herself. Whe she refuses to do her duty, her cousin and childhood playmate Cemal is charged with carrying out the honor killing, to “take her to Istanbul” as the village euphemism goes. By chance, their paths cross with Irfan, an older and sophisticated professor from Istanbul who has abandoned his elite existence.
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In this lovely, unconventional, and often funny memoir, Catherine Goldhammer wakes in middle age to find herself stunned, newly separated, and several tax brackets poorer, forced by circumstance to move from the affluent New England suburb of her daughter’s childhood into a new, more rustic life by the sea. Against all logic, partly to please her daughter and partly for reasons not clear to her at the time, she begins this yars of transition by purchasing six baby chickens—whose job, she comes to suspect, is to pull her and her daughter forward, out of one life and into another.
As she gradually transforms her new home—with its tawdry exterior but radiant soul—tile by tile,
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Sofie and her husband have decided to trade their Manhattan apartment for a house in Greenwich, Connecticut. But the oak-shaded streets are not the tranquil retreat that Sofie expected. When Julia, a member of Sofie’s new neighborhood book club, turns up dead, things get messy. Sofie discovers that everybody has something to hide, including her own husband.
As Sofie wades through a swamp of suburban secrets, it becomes clear that no one’s life is exactly what it seems to be. Priscilla has been married to Gordon for fifteen years, but the love left their marriage a long time ago.
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