LIFE FOR SALE by Yukio Mishima

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Knopf
Publishing date April 21, 2020

About

After botching a suicide attempt, salaryman Hanio Yamada decides to put his life up for sale in the classifieds section of a Tokyo newspaper. But what begins as mere nihilism takes a turn for the unexpected as interested parties come calling with increasingly bizarre requests. What follows is a madcap comedy of errors, involving a jealous husband, a drug-addled heiress, poisoned carrots--even a vampire. For someone who just wants to die, Hanio can't seem to catch a break, as he finds himself caught up in a continent-wide conspiracy that puts him in the cross hairs of both his own government and a powerful organized-crime cartel. Wildly inventive, darkly comedic, and at times deeply surreal, Life For Sale is refreshingly unlike anything else in Yukio Mishima's oeuvre, and an essential work of international literature, finally available in English.

My view coming soon

THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY by Maisy Card

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Simon and Schuster
Publishing date March 3 2020
US/Jamaica


Description

These Ghosts Are Family revolves around the consequences of Abel’s decision and tells the story of the Paisley family from colonial Jamaica to present day Harlem. There is Vera, whose widowhood forced her into the role of single mother. There are two daughters and a granddaughter who have never known they are related. And there are others, like the house boy who loved Vera, whose lives might have taken different courses if not for Abel Paisley’s actions.

• My view coming soon

A WOMAN IS NO MAN by Etaf Rum

🌟🌟🌟🌟 1/2




Personal copy

DescriptionIn Brooklyn, eighteen-year-old Deya is starting to meet with suitors. Though she doesn’t want to get married, her grandparents give her no choice. History is repeating itself: Deya’s mother, Isra, also had no choice when she left Palestine as a teenager to marry Adam. Though Deya was raised to believe her parents died in a car accident, a secret note from a mysterious, yet familiar-looking woman makes Deya question everything she was told about her past. As the narrative alternates between the lives of Deya and Isra, she begins to understand the dark, complex secrets behind her community.

INDELICACY by Amina Cain

🌟🌟🌟 1/2

Farrar Strauss and Giroux
Publishing date February 11, 2020


Description

In "a strangely ageless world somewhere between Emily Dickinson and David Lynch" (Blake Butler), a cleaning woman at a museum of art nurtures aspirations to do more than simply dust the paintings around her. She dreams of having the liberty to explore them in writing, and so must find a way to win herself the time and security to use her mind. She escapes her lot by marrying a rich man, but having gained a husband, a house, high society, and a maid, she finds that her new life of privilege is no less constrained. Not only has she taken up different forms of time-consuming labor—social and erotic—but she is now, however passively, forcing other women to clean up after her. Perhaps another and more drastic solution is necessary?

Reminiscent of a lost Victorian classic in miniature, yet taking equal inspiration from such modern authors as Jean Rhys, Octavia Butler, Clarice Lispector, and Jean Genet, Amina Cain's Indelicacy is at once a ghost story without a ghost, a fable without a moral, and a down-to-earth investigation of the barriers faced by women in both life and literature. It is a novel about seeing, class, desire, anxiety, pleasure, friendship, and the battle to find one’s true calling.

My thoughts coming soon

MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORT LIST 2019

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)

Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)

Chigozie Obioma, An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)

Salman Rushdie, Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)

Elif Shafak, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (Viking)

---

 Winner anounced October 14, 2019

NÉ D'AUCUNE FEMME by Franck Bouysse

❤❤❤❤❤
Available now
French edition only

Description

"Mon père, on va bientôt vous demander de bénir le corps d'une femme à l'asile. — Et alors, qu'y a-t-il d'extraordinaire à cela ? demandai-je.— Sous sa robe, c'est là que je les ai cachés.— De quoi parlez-vous ? — Les cahiers... Ceux de Rose." Ainsi sortent de l'ombre les cahiers de Rose, ceux dans lesquels elle a raconté son histoire, cherchant à briser le secret dont on voulait couvrir son destin. Franck Bouysse, lauréat de plus de dix prix littéraires, nous offre avec Né d'aucune femme la plus vibrante de ses oeuvres. Ce roman sensible et poignant confirme son immense talent à conter les failles et les grandeurs de l'âme humaine.

THE MOUNTAIN IN MY SHOE by Louise Beech

❤❤❤❤❤

Available now

Description
On the night Bernadette finally has the courage to tell her domineering husband that she’s leaving, he doesn’t come home. Neither does Conor, the little boy she’s befriended for the past five years. Also missing is his lifebook, the only thing that holds the answers. With the help of Conor’s foster mother, Bernadette must face her own past, her husband’s secrets and a future she never dared imagine in order to find them all.

My view
Louise is a gifted story teller, she shines in The Mountain In My Shoe.
Her novels were brought to my attention by a dear friend at WORD AFTER WORD 
Claire wrote a beautiful review

A must read

THE THERAPIST by Nial Giacomelli

Fairlight Modern
Available now

Description

A strange epidemic is sweeping the globe. Little by little, each victim becomes transparent, their heart beating behind a visible rib cage, an intricate network of nerves left hanging in mid-air. Finally, the victims disappear entirely, never to be seen again. In this bittersweet and hauntingly surreal tale, a couple struggle to connect while the epidemic creeps nearer. ‘I dreamt we were at sea,’ she says.

My thoughts soon

10 MINUTES 38 SECONDS in this strange world by Elif Shafak

Bloomsbury Publishing
Publishing date December 3, 2019
Turkish Literature

Description

In the pulsating moments after she has been murdered and left in a dumpster outside Istanbul, Tequila Leila enters a state of heightened awareness. While the Turkish sun rises above her and her friends asleep soundly nearby, she contemplates her mortal existence before eternal rest.

Tequila Leila's memories bring us back to her childhood in the provinces, a highly oppressive milieu where a loving mother is no match for a strict, unforgiving father. Escaping to Istanbul, Leila makes her way into the sordid industry of sex trafficking, finding a home in the city's historic Street of Brothels. This is a dark, violent world, but Leila is tough and open to beauty, light, and the essential bonds of friendship.

In Tequila Leila's death, the secrets and wonders of modern Istanbul come to life, painted vividly by the captivating tales of how Leila came to know and be loved by her friends. As her epic journey to the afterlife comes to an end, it is they who bring her story to a buoyant and breathtaking conclusion.

My view 

Elif Shafak's latest novel takes the reader to Istambul. 
The protagonists Leila and her friends face the consequences of living under a male dominated society. 
Five.women struggling to free themselves from a patriarchal society. 

I found the premise of the story interesting. 10 minutes 38 seconds refers to the time the brain continues to function after death. I believe we all heard of "life flashing by at the moment of death"

The novel begins with Leila, her body in a rubbish bin, Leila has been murdered, With her memories intact she remembers her very birth in a town far from Istambul, Van a small muslim town where patriarchy is the norm, as in many small towns surrounding Turkey. As the story progresses, each chapter is a minute less from 10 minutes 38 seconds.

Leila shares this novel in equal parts with Humeyra, Zaynap, Jameelah and Nalan, four women we will meet along with Leila. I liked how every woman was an equal with her story throughout the novel, five women friends.

Istambul can be unforgiving to girls lost in it's immensity, it's diversity of religion, extraordinary wealth and poverty. Lila will find her new home in Istambul's red district. A business licenced by the city. 

Girls arriving from small towns surrounding Turkey are most vulnerable to sex traffickers, some survive through prostitution some die at the hands of such men.

This novel takes place in Turkey, sex trafficking takes place around the world.

The author Elif Shafak's novels have been banned in Turkey, for exposing the true face of this country who thrives to modernize itself yet still remains for the most part a patriarchal society in many ways. The author now lives in London where she is active in women's rights.

A must read. A well written story.


Thank you to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for this arc

THE INDUSTRY OF SOULS by Martin Booth

Personal Copy

Description

The Industry of Souls is the story of Alexander Bayliss, a British citizen who was wrongfully arrested for espionage by the KGB in the 1950s and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor in the work camps of Siberia. Eventually freed in the 1970s, he decides not to return to the West--a world he barely remembers and to which he no longer belongs--and instead finds his way to a small Russian village where he becomes a much beloved schoolmaster.

Now, on the day of his eightieth birthday, communism has evaporated and Russia is changed. This moving story alternates between this momentous day to his harrowing past in the camp and his life in the village. And in the end, he is presented with a choice, perhaps for the first time in his life

My thought to come

WOMEN IN TRANSLATION MONTH 2019

Author, Tatiana Tolstaya
Translator, Anya Migdal
Book 1

5.5

Tolstaya's characters--seekers all--are daydreaming children, lonely adults, dislocated foreigners in unfamiliar lands. Whether contemplating the strategic complexities of delivering telegrams in Leningrad or the meditative melancholy of holiday aspic, vibrant inner lives and the grim elements of existence are registered in equally sharp detail in a starkly bleak but sympathetic vision of life on earth. 

A unique collection from one of the first women in years to rank among Russia's most important writers.

My view

Tatyana Tolstaya who counts among her heritage Tolstoy, is a rambunctious, acerbic and erudite author.

I encourage readers to become acquainted with this author.

Her stories will have you laugh and think. She delivers an interesting look into the new Russia of today in prose which would have certainly send her to the gulag under the USSR.

Read

Author Alina Bronsky

Translator Tim Mohr

Book 2

5.5

My view

Alina Bronsky one of my favorite Russian author, among a few others.

we all have heard of Chernobyl's catastrophe.

A dozen individuals with diverse afflictions decide to return to their homes, regardless of radiation present in their home town, after all who wants to end the last days of their lives in some strange place? Life resumes rapidly as in any small town, to the delight of the reader.

Reade

Author Linda Stift

Transator Jamie Bulloch

Book 3

Madness lurks behind the pretty façade of everyday life.


An elderly lady offers a young woman a piece of cake. She accepts. The lady resembles the Austrian Empress Elisabeth and lives with her servant in an apartment full of bizarre souvenirs. More invitations follow. A seemingly harmless visit to the museum turns into a meticulously planned raid to steal a royal cocaine syringe. Without realizing, the young woman has become the lady’s accomplice. Does she realize she is losing control?


My view

Oh, I loved this tale so exquisitely executed (  pun intended ) without a single drop of blood being spilled...
I absolutely loved this mystery novel.
Read

AKIN by Emma Donoghue

Little, Brown and Company
Publishing date September 10, 2019

Description

Noah Selvaggio is a retired chemistry professor and widower living on the Upper West Side, but born in the South of France. He is days away from his first visit back to Nice since he was a child, bringing with him a handful of puzzling photos he's discovered from his mother's wartime years. But he receives a call from social services: Noah is the closest available relative of an eleven-year-old great-nephew he's never met, who urgently needs someone to look after him. Out of a feeling of obligation, Noah agrees to take Michael along on his trip. 
Much has changed in this famously charming seaside mecca, still haunted by memories of the Nazi occupation. The unlikely duo, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, bicker about everything from steak frites to screen time. But Noah gradually comes to appreciate the boy's truculent wit, and Michael's ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family's past. Both come to grasp the risks people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.

Review coming

THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING by Deborah Levy

5.5
❤❤❤❤❤

Bloomsbury
Publishing date October 15, 2019

Description

It is 1988 and Saul Adler, a narcissistic young historian, has been invited to Communist East Berlin to do research; in exchange, he must publish a favorable essay about the German Democratic Republic. As a gift for his translator's sister, a Beatles fanatic who will be his host, Saul's girlfriend will shoot a photograph of him standing in the crosswalk on Abbey Road, an homage to the famous album cover. As he waits for her to arrive, he is grazed by an oncoming car, which changes the trajectory of his life.

The Man Who Saw Everything is about the difficulty of seeing ourselves and others clearly. It greets the specters that come back to haunt old and new love, previous and current incarnations of Europe, conscious and unconscious transgressions, and real and imagined betrayals, while investigating the cyclic nature of history and its reinvention by people in power. Here, Levy traverses the vast reaches of the human imagination while artfully blurring sexual and political binaries-feminine and masculine.

My thoughts

"It's like this, Saul Adler: when I was twenty-three I loved the way you touched me, but when the afternoon slipped in and you slipped out of me, you were already looking for someone else. No, it's like this, Jennifer Moreau I loved you every night and every day, but you were scared of my love and I was scared of my love too. No, she said, I was scared of your envy which was bigger than your love.
Attention Saul Adler. Attention! Look to the left and to the right, cross the road and get to the other side."

Saul Adler proposed to Jennifer before leaving London for East Germany, Jennifer rebuffed Saul.

Saul Adler is the man who saw everyting.
Saul a professor teaching history at university in London, is on his way to East Germany in order to learn first hand how it's citizens faired since the Wall went up. The year is 1988, the wall separates East Germany from West Germany. Saul is 28.
When he arrives he noticed the stark difference between East and West...something he was well aware of, after all he is a professor, a historian.

This is a difficult book to review without giving away to much.
As others mentioned, readers used to stories with clear beginings and ends might find this novel confusing. I would disagree, yes it does read like a puzzle, however in Deborah Levy's hands it is beautifully executed.

The writing is beautiful, filled with love, heartache, hope. 

Deborah Levy, deserves the Booker Prize for this novel, having been nominated a few days ago on the long list. 

Yes read it

Thank you Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley

ISLAND OF SEA WOMEN by Lisa See

Scribner
My copy

Description

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger.

Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore. The Island of Sea Women is an epoch set over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War and its aftermath, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother’s position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that after surviving hundreds of dives and developing the closest of bonds, forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point.

This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. A classic Lisa See story—one of women’s friendships and the larger forces that shape them—The Island of Sea Womenintroduces readers to the fierce and unforgettable female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives.

ZULEIKHA by Guzel Yakhina

One World Publication
Available now

5.5 +
Daescription

The year is 1930. In a small Tartar village, a woman named Zuleikha watches as her husband is murdered by communists. Zuleikha herself is sent into exile, enduring a horrendous train journey to a remote spot on the Angara River in Siberia. Conditions in the camp are tough, and many of her group do not survive the first difficult winter.

As she gradually settles into a routine, Zuleikha starts to get to know her companions. The eclectic group includes a rather dotty doctor, an artist who paints on the sly, and Ignatov, Zuleikha’s husband’s killer. Together, the group starts to build a new life, one that is far removed from those they left behind.
Guzel Yakhina’s smooth prose describes Zuleikha’s adjustment to a new reality and her discovery of a new form of happiness, and covers a range of cultural, ethnic, religious and socio-political issues. This outstanding debut novel from an exciting new talent has been showered with prizes and is capturing the hearts of readers all over the world.

THE SCENT OF BUENOS AIRES by Hebe Uhart

Archipelago
Publishing date October 15, 2019

Description

The Scent of Buenos Aires offers the first book-length English translation of Uhart's work, drawing together her best vignettes of quotidian life: moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a cacophonous homeowners association meeting. She writes in unconventional, understated syntax, constructing a delightfully specific perspective on life in South America. These stories are marked by sharp humor and wit: discreet and subtle, yet filled with eccentric and insightful characters. Uhart's narrators pose endearing questions about their lives and environments - one asks "Bees - do you know how industrious they are?" while another inquires, "Are we perhaps going to hell in a hand basket?"

THE GRAMMARIANS, by Cathleen Schine

3.5/5
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publishing date September 16, 2019P

Description

The Grammarians are Laurel and Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret “twin” tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor and grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity and elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written and spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

Cathleen Schine has written a playful and joyful celebration of the interplay of language and life. A dazzling comedy of sisterly and linguistic manners, a revelation of the delights and stresses of intimacy, The Grammarians is the work of one of our great comic novelists at her very best.

WILD GAME by Adrienne Brodeur

5.5

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing date October 16, 2019

On a hot August night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their lives for years to come: Ben Souther just kissed me. 
 
Adrienne instantly became her mother’s confidante and helpmate, blossoming in the sudden light of her attention, and from then on, Malabar came to rely on her daughter to help orchestrate what would become an epic affair with her husband’s closest friend. The affair would have calamitous consequences for everyone involved, impacting Adrienne’s life in profound ways, driving her into a precarious marriage of her own, and then into a deep depression. Only years later will she find the strength to embrace her life—and her mother—on her own terms.  

My thoughts

First I would like to mention, there is no anymosity between Malabar, the mother, and Rennie, the daughter in this memoir. The writing is one of healing on Rennie's part, of understanding her mother.
Entering into this memoir I feel it matters to understand the family's dynamics.
A family descendant of the Mayflower, people of privileged and wealth.
Malabar, a mother without boundaries will incapacitated Rennie through her teen years and beyond, she will never understand her indecent misstep.
The healing will consume Rennie for many years, the search for herself.
Distancing herself from Malabar will be her first step. Finding hope and guidance through books suggested by her stepmother Margo will lead her toards fundamental understandings.
I was taken aback by Rennie's lack of literary education, yet not surprised considering the hedonistic lifestyle she grew up around.
Literature will become Rennie's vocation, which can be noticed by the beautiful writing in this memoir.

Thank you NetGalley & Houghton Mifflain and Harcourt

THE WATER DANCE by Ta - Nehisi Coates

5.5

One World
Publishing Date September 24, 2019

About

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her—but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the deep South to dangerously utopic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

This is the dramatic story of an atrocity inflicted on generations of women, men, and children—the violent and capricious separation of families—and the war they waged to simply make lives with the people they loved. Written by one of today’s most exciting thinkers and writers, The Water Dancer is a propulsive, transcendent work that restores the humanity of those from whom everything was stolen.

My thoughts

Virginia, tobacco fields who once enriched the masters and brought on the slave trade, see their land striped to sand, their mansions crumbling.
Slaves are sold, families separated, children sold from their mothers, all send Natchez - way, Tennessee, Missouri, where masters with lucrative land are in need of Taskers...slaves.

[...I heard stories of white men who bought colored men to enact their wildest pleasures - white men who kept them locked away for the sheer thrill of being able to...]

Hiram, a child without a mother he can remember, a child, a slave who's father is the master. We will travel many ways with Hiram, on his road to find his mother, on his road to find freedom for many. I spend 4 days with Hi as he calls himself and found myself missing him.

You will have to wait till the end to find out what separated Hiram from his mother, well worth the wait.

I loved this novel based on facts, so well written...so many truth.
A must read

THE BEEKEEPER OF ALEPPO by Christy Lefteri

Ballentine Books
Publishing date August 27, 2019

This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. 

As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again. Moving, powerful, and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo brings home the idea that the most ordinary of lives can be completely upended in unimaginable ways.

Review on its way

THE TENTH MUSE by Catherine Chung

Harper Collins Publishing
Publishing Date June 18, 2019

The first thing I remember being said of me with any consistency was that I was intelligent—and I recognized even then that it was a comment leveled at me with as much disapproval as admiration. Still, I never tried to hide or suppress my mind as some girls do, and thank God, because that would have been the beginning of the end.

From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems—who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition? 

On her quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her—their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.

In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.

THE GIRL RETURNED by Donatella Di Pietrantonio

🌺🌺🌺🌺
Europa Editions
Publishing 
date July 2019

Winner of the Campiello Prize.

A pitch-perfect rendering in English by Ann Goldstein, Elena Ferrante’s translator.

“I was the Arminuta, the girl returned. I spoke another language, I no longer knew who I belonged to. The word ‘mama’ stuck in my throat like a toad. And, nowadays, I really have no idea what kind of place mother is. It is not mine in the way one might have good health, a safe place, certainty.”

Told with an immediacy and a rare expressive intensity that has earned it countless adoring readers and one of Italy’s most prestigious literary prizes, A Girl Returned marks the English-language debut of an extraordinary literary talent. Set against the stark, beautiful landscape of Abruzzo in central Italy, this is a compelling story about mothers and daughters, about responsibility, siblings, and caregiving.

Without warning or explanation, an unnamed 13-year-old girl is sent away from the family she has always thought of as hers to live with her birth family: a large, chaotic assortment of individuals whom she has never met and who seem anything but welcoming. Thus begins a new life, one of struggle, tension, and conflict, especially between the young girl and her mother. But in her relationship with Adriana and Vincenzo, two of her newly acquired siblings, she will find the strength to start again and to build a new and enduring sense of self.

My view

The girl returned is a very appt title for this novel.

The novel opens with a thirteen year old girl carrying her belongings up some steps towards an open door held by her younger sister, although the two sisters have never met.

This is a story of abandonment, of good intentions and, how a child fulfils two women's dreams and needs

At thirteen she is send by her mother to live in a poverty ridden home run by a family with three sons and a nine year old daughter.

With a distance of twenty years, now a grown woman, she shares her recollections of those years with her new family, the discovery of her real mother, the abandonment by the only mother she knew for thirteen years.

The writing is beautiful, characters well developed, the subject of the story, perhaps a cautionary tale....

Thank you NetGalley and Europa for allowing me this arc

THE LIGHT YEARS by Chris Rush

🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺
Farrar Straus and Giroux
Publishing date April 2, 2019

Description

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic, New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade.

His older sister Donna introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on twelve-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”

After an unceremonious ejection from an experimental art school, Rush heads to Tuscon to make a major drug purchase and, still barely a teenager, disappears into the nascent American counterculture. Stitching together a ragged assemblage of lowlifes, prophets, and fellow wanderers, he seeks kinship in the communes of the west. His adolescence is spent looking for knowledge, for the divine, for home. Given what Rush confronts on his travels—from ordinary heartbreak to unimaginable violence—it is a miracle he is still alive.

The Light Years is a prayer for vanished friends, an odyssey signposted with broken and extraordinary people. It transcends one boy’s story to perfectly illustrate the slow slide from the optimism of the 1960s into the darker and more sinister 1970s. This is a riveting, heart-stopping journey of discovery and reconciliation, as Rush faces his lost childhood and, finally, himself.

PRAISE SONG FOR THE BUTTERFLIES by Bernice L. McFaddenn

🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺

Akashic press
Available now

Description

Abeo Kata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine-year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Katas’ idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abeo’s father, following his mother’s advice, places her in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as religious atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abeo for the fifteen years she is enslaved within the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again.

"Praise Song For The Butterflies is a contemporary, eye-opening and heart-breaking account of ritual servitude in West Africa."

FRESHWATER by Akwaeke Emezi

🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺++
Grove Atlantic
Available now

Description

A National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Honoree
Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel
Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

An extraordinary debut novel,Freshwater explores the surreal experience of having a fractured self. It centers around a young Nigerian woman, Ada, who develops separate selves within her as a result of being born “with one foot on the other side.” Unsettling, heartwrenching, dark, and powerful,Freshwater is a sharp evocation of a rare way of experiencing the world, one that illuminates how we all construct our identities.

Ada begins her life in the south of Nigeria as a troubled baby and a source of deep concern to her family. Her parents, Saul and Saachi, successfully prayed her into existence, but as she grows into a volatile and splintered child, it becomes clear that something went terribly awry. When Ada comes of age and moves to America for college, the group of selves within her grows in power and agency. As Ada fades into the background of her own mind and these alters—now protective, now hedonistic—move into control, Ada’s life spirals in a dark and dangerous direction.

Narrated by the selves within Ada, and based in the author’s realities,Freshwaterexplores the metaphysics of identity and mental health, plunging the reader into the mystery of being and self.Freshwater dazzles with ferocious energy and serpentine grace, heralding the arrival of a fierce new literary voice.

A unique read
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