The Postcard is a powerful and deeply moving account of a Jewish family, Anne Berest’s family, who were almost completely wiped out at Auschwitz in 1942.
The four names on the postcard that unexpectantly arrived in 2003 lists four names. Anne lists them on the page vertically, the same way names are listed in a Jewish memorial document: Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, Jacques.
Told as an unfolding mystery about these four people, The Postcard is an origin story but also one about survivorship. It is about mothers and daughters, about reconnecting to one’s faith, and about secrets.
It is one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read.
Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.
In Demon Copperhead, I was staggered by this
very human story of a boy trying to survive in a community (Lee County,
Tennessee) preyed upon for decades, the final blow coming from Purdue Pharma
tearing apart the lives of a generation of kids like Demon.
Kingsolver’s gift
is in telling us what we need to know in a way that allows us to inhabit this
boy, this place, and its people. We emotionally engage with Demon’s unfeigned
voice that speaks to our hearts and souls, and we are forever changed.
Demon's story begins with his traumatic birth to a single mother in a single-wide trailer, looking 'like a little blue prizefighter.' For the life ahead of him he would need all of that fighting spirit, along with buckets of charm, a quick wit, and some unexpected talents, legal and otherwise.
In the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, poverty isn't an idea, it's as natural as the grass grows. For a generation growing up in this world, at the heart of the modern opioid crisis, addiction isn't an abstraction, it's neighbours, parents, and friends. 'Family' could mean love, or reluctant foster…
This is Happiness is an enchanting, big-hearted,
and unhurried novel about a small Irish village in the 1950s or 60s that is on
the brink of change.
The prose is exquisite and descriptive, as authentic a
book as any I’ve read. I
almost wish I listened to the audio version because it is a treat to read
aloud and hear every single word.
I couldn’t help writing down the many
philosophical nuggets I wanted to savor.
Shortlisted for Best Novel in the Irish Book Awards
Longlisted for the 2020 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
From the acclaimed author of Man Booker-longlisted History of the Rain
'Lyrical, tender and sumptuously perceptive' Sunday Times
'A love letter to the sleepy, unhurried and delightfully odd Ireland that is all but gone' Irish Independent
After dropping out of the seminary, seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe finds himself back in Faha, a small Irish parish where nothing ever changes, including the ever-falling rain.
But one morning the rain stops and news reaches the parish - the electricity is finally arriving. With it…
In the
bigoted milieu of 1945, six days after the official end of World War II, Bess
Myerson, the
daughter of poor Russian immigrants living in the Bronx, remarkably rises to become Miss America, the
first, and to date only, Jewish woman to do so. At stake is a $5,000 scholarship
for the winner.
An
intimate fictional portrait of Bess Myerson’s early life, Bessie reveals
the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating yet talented
preteen into an exemplar of beauty, a peripheral quality in her world. It is the unfamiliar secular
society of pageantry she must choose to escape her roots as she searches for
love and acceptance, eager to make her mark on the world.
