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The Cabala and The Woman of Andros: Two Novels (Library Of America Thornton Wilder Edition Ser. #2)
By Thornton Wilder. 2009
“For much of the twentieth century, these remarkable early novels were hidden in the great shadow of The Bridge of…
San Luis Rey. Now we can examine them in the spotlight for the gifts that they are—memorable monuments to style and keys to understanding Wilder’s genius.” – Penelope Niven, Thornton Wilder BiographerFeaturing a foreword by Penelope Niven and a revealing afterword by Wilder’s nephew, Tappan, this reissue reintroduces the reader to the Thornton Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala, and to The Woman of Andros, one of the inspirations for his Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town. A young American student spends a year in the exotic world of post-World War I Rome. While there, he experiences firsthand the waning days of a secret community (a "cabala") of decaying royalty, a great cardinal of the Roman Church, and an assortment of memorable American ex-pats. The Cabala, a semiautobiographical novel of unforgettable characters and human passions, launched Wilder's career as a celebrated storyteller and dramatist.The Woman of Andros, set on the obscure Greek island of Brynos before the birth of Christ, explores universal questions of what is precious about life and how we live, love, and die. Eight years later, Wilder would pose the same questions on the stage in a play titled Our Town, also set in an obscure location, this time a village in New Hampshire. The Woman of Andros is celebrated for some of the most beautiful writing in American literature.After the Hurricane: A Novel
By Leah Franqui. 1996
Named by Etaf Rum as one of the Best Beach Reads of All Time for "Read with Jenna!"Reminiscent of Gabriela…
Garcia’s Of Women and Salt, Leah Franqui brings us an engrossing, deeply personal novel with a mystery at its heart as a daughter returns to Puerto Rico to search for her troubled father, who has gone missing after Hurricane Maria. From the outside, Elena Vega’s life appears to be an easy one: the only child of two professional parents, private school, NYU. But her twenties are aimless and lacking in connection. Something has always been amiss in her life: her father, the brilliant but deeply troubled Santiago Vega. Born in rural Puerto Rico, Santiago arrived in New York as a small child. His harsh, mercurial father returned to the island, leaving Santiago to be raised by his mentally ill mother and his formidable grandmother. An outstanding student, he followed scholarships to Stanford, then Yale Law, marrying Elena’s mother along the way. Santiago is the shining star of his migrant family—the one who made it out and struck it rich. But he is a haunted man, plagued by trauma, bipolar disorder, and alcoholism. He’s lost contact with Elena over the years and returned to San Juan to wrestle his demons alone.Then Hurricane Maria strikes, and Santiago vanishes. Desperate to know what happened to the father she once adored, Elena returns to Puerto Rico, a place she loved as a child but hasn’t seen in years. There she must unravel the truth about who her father is, crisscrossing the storm-swept island and reaching deep into his family tree to find relatives she’s never met, each of whom seems to possess a clue about Santiago’s fate.A compelling mystery unfolds, as Elena is reunited with family, and with a place she loved and lost—the island of Puerto Rico, which is itself a character in this book. It’s a story of connection, migration, striving, love, and loss, illuminated by humor and affection, written by a novelist at the height of her gifts.Moth: A Novel
By Melody Razak. 2022
“Both a heartbreaking and heart-warming story, Melody Razak’s debut transports the reader into the home of a Brahmin family in…
1940s Delhi. . . . The character portrayal is so intricate that as the plot twists and turns, you'll truly care what happens to them.”—The Independent (UK)A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2022 • An Oprah Daily Most Anticipated Historical Fiction Novel of 2022 • A Betches Summer PickMelody Razak makes her literary debut with this internationally-acclaimed saga of one Indian family’s trials through the tumultuous partition—the 1947 split of Pakistan from India—exploring its impact on women, what it means to be “othered” in one’s own society, and the redemptive power of family.Delhi, 1946. Fourteen-year-old Alma is soon to be married despite her parents’ fear that she is far too young. But times are perilous in India, where the country’s long-awaited independence from the British empire heralds a new era of hope—and danger. In its wake, political unrest ripples across the subcontinent, marked by violent confrontations between Hindus and Muslims. The conflict threatens to unravel the rich tapestry of Delhi—a city where different cultures, religions, and traditions have co-existed for centuries. The solution is partition, which will create a new, wholly Muslim, sovereign nation—Pakistan—carved from India’s northwestern shoulder. Given the uncertain times, Alma’s parents, intellectuals who teach at the local university, pray that marriage will provide Alma with stability and safety.Alma is precocious and headstrong, and her excitement over the wedding rivals only her joy in spinning wild stories about evil spirits for her younger sister Roop. But when Alma’s grandmother—a woman determined to protect the family’s honor no matter the cost—interferes with the engagement, her meddling sets off a chain of events that will wrench the family apart, forcing its members to find new and increasingly desperate ways to survive in the wake of partition.Set during the most tumultuous years in modern Indian history, Melody Razak recreates the painful turmoil of a rupturing nation and its reverberations across the fates of a single family. Powerfully evocative and atmospheric, Moth is a testament to survival and a celebration of the beauty and resilience of the human spirit.The Forgotten Cottage
By Courtney Ellis. 2022
Connected through time to her great-grandmother by a shared English countryside home, an American nurse tries to piece together her family's tangled history in this…
new historical novel from the acclaimed author of At Summer&’s End. England, 2014: Audrey Collins knows only two things about her beloved grandmother's past: She was born into nobility and she immigrated to America at seventeen years old. So when Audrey inherits her gran's home in North Yorkshire, she arrives expecting a sprawling country estate fit for lords and ladies. Instead, she finds an abandoned stone cottage perfectly preserved as Gran left it when she fled in 1941—ration book and all—and begins to uncover what secrets her family has been keeping. France, 1915: Lady Emilie Dawes is working as a nurse on the Western Front, grateful to have escaped the restraints of her restrictive, privileged home life. But the independence she fought hard to earn is suddenly jeopardized when a familiar man shows up in one of her hospital beds. Facing him means facing her past, and the decisions she had made in fear. As the war rages around her, Emilie realizes she cannot continue running from who she is until she decides who she truly wants to be. Over a hundred years apart, Audrey and Emilie each struggle to find purpose, love, and a place to call home in this enchanting family saga celebrating the courage of underestimated women—and the power a secret can hold across generations.The Making of Her
By Bernadette Jiwa. 2022
An unforgettable debut novel about family secrets, falling apart, and coming together. Dublin 1996. Joan Egan lives an enviable life.…
She and her husband, Martin, and daughter, Carmel, are thriving in Dublin at the dawn of an economic boom. But everything changes when Joan receives a letter from Emma, the daughter who she and Martin gave up for adoption thirty years before, asking for a life-or-death favor. While Joan grapples with the guilt over giving up her baby long ago, she must confront her present as the cracks in her marriage become impossible to ignore and simmering tension with Carmel boils over. Meanwhile, Carmel and Emma must come to terms with the perceived sins of their mother, to imagine a future for their family before it is too late. Spanning the nineties and the sixties, with Dublin as its backdrop, The Making of Her is the tender and page-turning story of marriage, motherhood, a culture that would not allow a woman to find true happiness—and her journey to finally claim it.The Maid: A Novel
By Nita Prose. 2022
&“An endearing debut. . . . The reader comes to understand Molly&’s worldview, and to sympathize with her longing to…
be accepted—a quest that gives The Maid real emotional heft.&” —The New York Times &“The Maid is a masterful, charming mystery that will touch your heart in ways you could never expect. . . . This is the smart, quirky, uplifting read we need.&” —Ashley Audrain, #1 bestselling author of The Push A dead body is one mess she can&’t clean up on her own.Molly Gray is not like everyone else. She struggles with social skills and misreads the intentions of others. Her gran used to interpret the world for her, codifying it into simple rules that Molly could live by. Since Gran died a few months ago, twenty-five-year-old Molly has been navigating life&’s complexities all by herself. No matter—she throws herself with gusto into her work as a hotel maid. Her unique character, along with her obsessive love of cleaning and proper etiquette, make her an ideal fit for the job. She delights in donning her crisp uniform each morning, stocking her cart with miniature soaps and bottles, and returning guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel to a state of perfection. But Molly&’s orderly life is upended the day she enters the suite of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black, only to find it in a state of disarray and Mr. Black himself dead in his bed. Before she knows what&’s happening, Molly&’s unusual demeanour has the police targeting her as their lead suspect. She quickly finds herself caught in a web of deception, one she has no idea how to untangle. Fortunately for Molly, friends she never knew she had unite with her in a search for clues to what really happened to Mr. Black. But will they be able to find the real killer before it&’s too late? Both a Clue-like, locked-room mystery and a heartwarming journey of the spirit, The Maid explores what it means to be the same as everyone else and yet entirely different—and reveals that all mysteries can be solved through connection to the human heart.My Uncle Dudley
By Wright Morris. 1942
Goth Girls of Banff
By John O'Neill. 2020
John O’Neill’s gothic short stories, set in the Canadian Rockies, are haunted by the violence inherent in nature and humans.…
The mountains are majestic and impassive. The characters are surprising, bent, but also empathetic. Their survival is tenuous. A two-sister team of goth tour guides offers guided excursions up switchback mountain trails; a paroled convict thumbs his way into the life of a family driving west; and an animal pathologist, while performing a necropsy on a grizzly bear, has an unusual encounter with both technology and humanity.Goth Girls of Banff is a superb collection, sharply written, with plot turns as consequence-laden as those on an iced-over mountain road.Hunger Moon: Stories (Nunatak First Fiction Series #52)
By Traci Skuce. 2020
Traci Skuce’s Hunger Moon is a collection of stories that echo with the yearning to be replenished, to be made…
full. Here are characters at cusp-points in their lives, attempting to shift their trajectories: to cease wrapping up the heart's desire in a pink bubble by launching it into the universe. Some turn to ESP, some to a belief in ghosts, some to the future caught inside a glass bottle, each character taking the hackneyed adage “Follow Your Bliss” too literally to blissfully follow their own storyline.Emotionally charged, evocative, and lush, Hunger Moon’s thirteen short stories each set out on profound quests to satisfy an emotional hunger.In Veritas (Nunatak First Fiction Series #53)
By C. J. Lavigne. 2020
"Things that are and are not, she thinks, and the dog is a snake."In this fantastic and fantastical debut, C.J.…
Lavigne concocts a wondrous realm overlaying a city that brims with civic workers and pigeons. Led by her synesthesia, Verity Richards discovers a hidden world inside an old Ottawa theatre. Within the timeworn walls live people who should not exist—people whose very survival is threatened by science, technology, and natural law. Verity must submerge herself in this impossible reality to help save the last traces of their broken community. Her guides: a magician, his shadow-dog, a dying angel, and a knife-edged woman who is more than half ghost.With great empathy and imagination, In Veritas explores the nature of truth and the complexities of human communication.To Me You Seem Giant (Nunatak First Fiction Series #47)
By Greg Rhyno. 2017
It’s 1994 and Pete Curtis can’t wait to get out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Already, he’s playing drums in a…
band whose songs belong on mix-tapes everywhere. Even though his new girlfriend seems underwhelmed, he knows it’s just a matter of time before he and his pals break big. Ten years later, Pete is stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his former best friend and bandmate is a bona fide rock star. In his debut novel, with its compelling hook and realistically flawed characters, Greg Rhyno remembers the time signatures of mid-nineties. Told in two alternating decades, To Me You Seem Giant is a raucous and evocative story about the difficulties of living in the present when you can’t escape your past.Broke City (Santa Rosa Trilogy #3)
By Wendy McGrath. 2019
Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in…
the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa.Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingland, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.Written with tight lyricism, Broke City is a brimming working-class gothic novel that reveals Christine's deepening knowledge of the adult world around her and of her own complicated place in that world.Things You've Inherited From Your Mother (Nunatak First Fiction Series #40)
By Hollie Adams. 2015
"Everyone deals with grief in their own personal way. Take Carrie, for example. Getting over her mother’s death from ovarian…
cancer takes the form of ramping up passive-aggressive office warfare, continuing her campaign to show her ex-husband she’s over him (further increasing the distance between herself and her teenage daughter, natch), ridding herself of her mother’s overweight cat Poncho, and consuming heroic quantities of red wine, spiked coffee and coffin nails. Nobody’s perfect. Situated at the midpoint between the booze-soaked mayhem of Absolutely Fabulous and the middle-aged ennui of Anakana Schofield’s Malarky, Things You’ve Inherited From Your Mother is a riotous assemblage of found objects, Choose Your Own Adventure-style in jokes and useful facts about mice. In her startlingly funny first novel, Hollie Adams takes the conventional wisdom about “likeable” literary heroines and shoves it down an elevator shaft."Echolocation
By Karen Hofmann. 2014
In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and…
relationships. With ironic accuracy and sensuous imagery, Hofmann considers a range of human foibles: a newlywed couple who transform into feral beasts during the hardships of a remote research expedition; backbiting faculty members who strip down during a post-conference BBQ; an heretical nun who explores the possibility of a new life by imaginatively excavating the fossils of BC's Burgess Shale; and an ambitious bylaw officer determined to make her mark on the city's streets. In Echolocation, Karen Hofmann has found new ways to sound the depths of the human heart.What is Going to Happen Next
By Karen Hofmann. 2017
Karen Hofmann’s empathetic and cathartic novel, What is Going to Happen Next, pieces together the lives of five members of…
the Lund family following their enforced dispersal after the death of the father and the hospitalization of the mother in the remote West Coast community of Butterfly Lake. It explores their self-doubts and aspirations in the ways they cope with their separation and reunion through their work and personal relationships, and reveals the ways in which their past is filtered through memory and desire. It also skillfully exposes a Vancouver class system from the perspectives of diverse socio-economic conditions and lifestyles. What is Going to Happen Next is character-driven and well-wrought, with a tenderness that propels the reader forward alongside the Lunds who are learning to fuse together as a chosen family.Mountain Blues
By Sean Arthur Joyce. 2018
Welcome to Eldorado, a small mountain town in the Kootenays, chock-a-block with aging hippies, eccentrics, loggers, and protestors. When Roy…
Breen moves to Eldorado after over a decade of working as a journalist in Vancouver, he is impressed by the soaring glacial vistas and the friendliness of the townsfolk, as well as the quality of the coffee they pour. Unfortunately the threat of cutbacks is looming over the local hospital and Roy must find a way to balance his journalistic integrity with the need to join his new neighbours in fighting to keep the hospital open.In the vein of Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, poet Sean Arthur Joyce’s debut novel Mountain Blues is a tale of warmth and joviality.North East: A Novel
By Wendy McGrath. 2014
In North East, Wendy McGrath expands on the story she began with Santa Rosa, as a working class couple living…
in 1960s Edmonton drift further apart while their young daughter tries to understand subtle shifts she senses taking place under the surface of her family and her neighbourhood. A visit to her grandparents’ farm in the country reveals the abject poverty the couple came to the city to escape, and the internecine marital strife that threatens to be born anew. McGrath’s crystalline, evocative prose conjures an image of the past that defies nostalgia, conjuring images of a city that is in the midst of rewriting its own history. Through the all-seeing eyes of her child protagonist McGrath conjures indelible scenes of harsh domesticity and small victories, of endless summertime days spent around the home and evenings at the drive-in theatre.Blind Spot (Nunatak First Fiction Series #38)
By Laurence Miall. 2014
“Some days I wish something truly bad would happen so that I would have something genuine to worry about.”When his…
parents’ car is hit by a train, Luke, a failed actor, returns to his Edmonton hometown to attend their funeral, wrap up their affairs, and prepare their house to be sold off. But while all others around him grieve, Luke remains detached, striking up a relationship with a woman in a neighbouring house... and stumbling across evidence that his mother may have engaged in a longstanding extramarital affair herself.In Luke, Laurence Miall has crafted an unforgettable literary antihero, a man disconnected from the pain of those around him, yet blind to his own faults. With clean, forceful language and a familiarity with the darker corners of the male psyche, Blind Spot is a gripping literary debut.Ruins and Relics (Nunatak First Fiction Series #27)
By Alice Zorn. 2009
These are short stories about people who harbour relics from their past: a postcard from Vienna, the cigarette burns that…
scar a boy's chest, a stolen USB pen, blue concentration camp numbers tattooed on a forearm, a man's sense of his own body as HIV overtakes him. Alice Zorn's remarkable debut collection displays these talismans of personal history and transforms them into extraordinary stories about relationships between partners, family, friends, and strangers.After Alice: A Novel (Nunatak First Fiction Series #37)
By Karen Hofmann. 2014
"After retiring from the heady world of academia, Sidonie von Täler has returned to the small Okanagan Valley town she…
escaped in her youth for the lights of the big city. The family orchard has since gone to seed, and even decades later Sidonie still finds herself living in the shadow of her deceased older sister Alice. As she gets down to work sifting through the detritus of her family’s legacy, Sidonie is haunted by memories of trauma and triumph in equal measure, and must find a way to reconcile her past and present while reconnecting with the family members she has left. Karen Hofmann’s debut novel blends a poetic sensibility with issues of land stewardship, social stratification and colonialism, painting the geological and historical landscape of the Okanagan in vivid and varied colours."