Niall Williams writes poetic prose about an Irish family in County Clare, Ireland.
A bedridden daughter seeks to know her deceased father by exploring past generations of family history. This novel is more than a family story. It is a love letter to Ireland itself. By exploring the past, the protagonist discovers herself and experiences a healing experience by this discovery.
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That's how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.
So says Ruthie Swain. The bedridden daughter of a dead poet, home from college after a collapse (Something Amiss, the doctors say), she is trying to find her father through stories--and through generations of family history in County Clare (the Swains have the written stories, from salmon-fishing journals to poems, and the maternal MacCarrolls have…
Over two years as a NYTimes Best Seller, this lengthy novel is a true, modern epic story.
Twin brothers Marion and Shiva Stone, born of a secret union between a south Indian nun and a brash British surgeon, are orphaned and separated at a young age. They must learn to navigate the world together as they grow up in Ethiopia on the brink of a revolution.
This global story covers Africa, India, and the United States in a family saga with chaotic history as a backdrop to a family story of finding one another. A great read!
My brother, Shiva, and I came into the world in the late afternoon of the twentieth of September in the year of grace 1954. We took our first breaths in the thick air of Addis Ababa, capital city of Ethiopia. Bound by birth, we were driven apart by bitter betrayal. No surgeon can heal the would that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning...
I always enjoy stories (books or films) that are character-driven, especially those that introduce you to the main character or characters and stay with them over decades.
In this book, we follow the lives of two orphaned Australian sisters who arrive in England in the 1950s: Fair Grace marries a wealthy and officious bureaucrat while independent, dark-haired Caroline falls in love with the unscrupulous Paul Ivory, while the sweet Ted Tice pines for her. Decades later, we witness the bonds and betrayals that follow the earlier choices.
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review
Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard-the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves
The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life…
Stories orient the life of a people through time, establishing the reality of their world.
This collection of stories is imagined, though sometimes inspired by fact. They came about because of a marriage that carried me away to far-off India, which, in time, became my spiritual home. India is a vast and complex country that can change a life, containing the highest mystical experiences alongside the lowest dregs of humanity. From my own experience of living many years in India, the sublime mythology of this incredible and complex culture so permeates the personal that myth often becomes reality–and reality myth.
The aim of these fifteen diverse stories is to serve as a portal into the daily lives and emotional realities that reflect India's rich depth and humanity.
