As a second-generation Italian American, I’ve always had one foot in the past, fascinated by the way a family history can shape who we are and deepen our understanding of our place in the world. The characters I love are searching for that kind of connection. As a writer, I’ve always thought nothing deepens a story more than a glance into the past, and now, living and writing in a medieval hill town in Italy, surrounded by the remnants of history, I believe it more than ever. I step outside and the past roars in, reminding me how it shapes the present—and each one of us.
I’ve read Animal Dreams eight times, and each time I connect with the protagonist, Codi, as strongly as I did the first time. Codi is returning home to Grace, Arizona, partly because she has no idea what to do with her life, partly because her father isn’t well, and partly because she has unfinished business to tend to, though she doesn’t let herself acknowledge that. She’s an expert at running away from the truths she’s buried and the people who could expose them, but her façade shatters when she returns to Grace, a world barren and fertile and unforgettable. Why did I read this book eight times? Because I love Codi’s vulnerability and strength, her quirkiness and intelligence, her complexity and confusion, all conveyed through Kingsolver’s gorgeously poetic prose.
Set in the southwestern mining town of Grace, Arizona, this novel revolves around Codi, her sister Hallie and their severe and distant father, Doc Homer. The author has previously written "The Bean Trees" and "Homeland", the latter a collection of short stories.
This book made me fall in love with Puglia, the hot, dusty “heel of the boot” with its lemons, olives, and cactus, its boxy farmhouses. Not that the story, bouncing from Paris to New York to a long-gone Rome, doesn’t deliver—the narrator, Alina, talks about a family secret passed from woman to woman, disintegrating memories, a past she must understand before the movers arrive and the house with its mural of a naked woman painted on a patio wall is no longer theirs. Present and past, the known and the unknown combine, and all of it is tied to alluring, sensual Puglia. As a storyteller, Marciano demands your attention, painting the life story of a family whose Italy is unlike the one you think you know.
This second novel by the author of the acclaimed Rules of the Wild is very much in the tradition of The Leopard or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, a compelling story of three generations in twentieth-century Italy. Casa Rossa, the home of the Strada family, is a magnificent farmhouse standing amidst the olive groves of Puglia. The story opens as the house is being sold. Alina, the daughter entrusted with packing it up, is piecing together the fragments of her family's past. Her grandmother, Renee, a beautiful Tunisian pied noir, muse and model to Alina's painter grandfather, left him for…
The retrospective gaze in this semiautobiographical novel zeroes in on friendship rather than family or romantic love. The friendship between the struggling-to-rise Morgans and the blue-blooded Langs, nearly academic royalty, is instantaneous and deep, with an imbalance that creates a delicious sense of precariousness. Stegner is a master of low-key suspense, gently stoking our curiosity about what comes next and what makes these people tick. Known for his California-based masterpiece Angle of Repose, here Stegner ventures into the Midwest, New England, and Italy, into academia, into aspiration and longing, and the forces that can alter a friendship. I love that he sets part of the book in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, my spiritual home. With his customary vividness, Stegner lets me see the mountains and smell the pines.
A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century.
When two young couples meet for the first time during the Great Depression, they quickly find they have much in common: Charity Lang and Sally Morgan are both pregnant, while their husbands Sid and Larry both have jobs in the English department at the University of Wisconsin. Immediately a lifelong friendship is born, which becomes increasingly complex as they share decades of love, loyalty, vulnerability and conflict.…
I fell in love with emotionally damaged, vodka-slugging, social outcast Eleonor Oliphant on page one. I’ve never read a novel with trauma at its core that made me laugh as much as this one did. Eleanor’s voice is confessional and unprepossessing, cynical and delightfully unfiltered. The trauma that seared her emotionally scarred her physically too, and she’s reconciled to a life of deprivation and loneliness and weekends spent in a drunken stupor. My heart broke for her when, searching for love, she chases a fantasy, and I rooted for her to take off her blinders when IT-guy Raymond befriends her (and wants more). After 325 pages with Eleonor, I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
"Beautifully written and incredibly funny, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is about the importance of friendship and human connection. I fell in love with Eleanor, an eccentric and regimented loner whose life beautifully unfolds after a chance encounter with a stranger; I think you will fall in love, too!" -Reese Witherspoon
No one's ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine.
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of…
Although it’s fiction, this book dives deep into left-wing politics, boomeranging from 1967 to the ’40s and ’50s. With references to the Bible’s “Book of Daniel” and a story drawn from the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (here, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson), this is the wrenching tale of the Isaacsons’ son Daniel trying to make sense of his parents’ deaths—he is writing his PhD dissertation on American politics to, as he puts it, “empty my heart.” I read this book in grad school and was slow to warm to it; then the story grabbed me hard and I finished it feeling dazed. Doctorow’s in-depth research and insights into history make a fascinating foundation for the kind of storytelling that stays with you long after the final page.
Based on the trial and execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of delivering information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel includes a new introduction by Jonathan Freedland in Penguin Modern Classics.
As Cold War hysteria inflames America, FBI agents pay a surprise visit to a Communist man and his wife in their New York apartment. After a trial that divides the country, the couple are sent to the electric chair for treason. Decades later, in 1967, their son Daniel struggles to understand the tragedy of their lives. But while he is…
Can a person live someone else’s memories? That’s what Kira, a neonatal ICU nurse, is asking herself. Wracked by grief, she’s having what she thinks are vivid, disturbing dreams—until they start happening while she’s awake. Not dreams but memories, she decides. And not hers. Questioning her mental state, driven to discover what these fragments of someone’s life mean, Kira digs obsessively into the past, putting her marriage at risk.
Meanwhile, her grandmother Maddalena’s tale unfurls, a tragic love story set at Manzanar, a World War II Japanese American internment camp. As Kira discovers that her life is intertwined with Maddalena’s in ways she could never have imagined, she comes face-to-face with her grief and her self-doubt—and her future.
Transforming Pandora, women's fiction with a metaphysical undercurrent, is written with humour and a light touch. As the plot slips between two time frames, separated by more than thirty years, the reader explores her life and loves: her ups and downs.
In the opening chapter, Pandora is attempting to come to terms with her husband's death. At a friend's suggestion, she reluctantly attends an evening of clairvoyance, after which her life is transformed by a mysterious spirit who sets her on a new path.
Her romantic life is reignited when she encounters a new man, but complicated by the…
Pandora, 51, childless, and still beautiful, is attempting to come to terms with her husband's death. Having a history of being drawn to the esoteric, yet remaining a healthy sceptic, she reluctantly attends an evening of clairvoyance and raises a spirit who sets her on a new path...
