My mother, father, and I were each born in different countries, and into different languages. In my childhood, we were a hybridized wonder—one part jetsam, one part flotsam—and a country unto ourselves. Our house was filled with all kinds of books, our dinnertimes with lively conversation (and occasional shouting), our plates with food cooked according to the recipes of family ghosts. I can honestly say that no other family was like ours, especially not in the American suburbs of the 1980s. As a writer, I have always been fascinated by the tug-and-pull of intergenerational trauma, and by the dislocation of immigration and exile.
Vera and Nadezhda are sisters who must set aside their differences to ward off an interloper: a gold-digging “fluffy pink grenade” who gets her claws into their exceedingly difficult emigre father. The ensuing battle uncovers hidden chapters of a dark family history, and Lewycka is both masterful and unflinching in her treatment of traumatic history. I was expecting a light read from start to finish, and while the book is very funny, it is also disarmingly profound.
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainianis bestselling author Marina Lewycka's hilarious and award winning debut novel.
'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'
Sisters Vera and Nadezhda must aside a lifetime of feuding to save their emigre engineer father from voluptuous gold-digger Valentina. With her proclivity for green satin…
When August’s grandfather—the bedrock of a multi-generational Wiradjuri family—dies, she must return to Australia, and to the town of Prosperous. There, she comes face-to-face with the things that have driven her out, a process that began long before her birth. The book’s three narrators chart the casualties of colonialism: the loss of indigenous culture, the stamping out of language, the land that is taken and forever altered. But the book is so much more than a catalogue of losses, and Winch’s song is ultimately one of identity—and history—reclaimed.
"A beautifully written novel that puts language at the heart of remembering the past and understanding the present."-Kate Morton
"A groundbreaking novel for black and white Australia."-Richard Flanagan, Man Booker Prize winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North
A young Australian woman searches for her grandfather's dictionary, the key to halting a mining company from destroying her family's home and ancestral land in this exquisitely written, heartbreaking, yet hopeful novel of culture, language, tradition, suffering, and empowerment in the tradition of Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Amy Harmon.
Knowing that he will soon die, Albert "Poppy" Gondiwindi…
For Katya Geller’s mother, mathematics is the key to all things, a lesson she effectively imparts to her daughter. But when Katya learns that her mother is sick, she is transported into a past that no longer adds up. Her father’s death and her mother’s subsequent undoing, her childhood in the USSR, her arrival in the US, and her own restless history of love combine for a ride that is wild, hilarious, and deeply affecting. The novel is also a stylistic marvel by a writer unafraid to move in brave and unexpected ways.
As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Nothing is adding up.
With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United…
Pramesh, a hostel manager, lives a quiet life with his wife and daughter. His job is to help guests who have traveled to the city of Banares in the hope of good deaths. But when a body is pulled from the Ganges, a complicated family history surfaces alongside it, one that threatens the joyful stability of the present. Champaneri’s prose is stunning. Reviewers have aptly called the book “transcendent”, and I found myself entirely transported by this meditation of life, death, and things past.
Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Priyanka Champaneri’s transcendent debut novel brings us inside India’s holy city of Banaras, where the manager of a death hostel shepherds the dying who seek the release of a good death, while his own past refuses to let him go.
Banaras, Varanasi, Kashi: India’s holy city on the banks of the Ganges has many names but holds one ultimate promise for Hindus. It is the place where pilgrims come for a good death, to be released from the cycle of reincarnation by purifying fire. As the dutiful manager of a…
Nobody writes complicated families the way that Fox does. The novel describes a going-away party that is an emotional crime scene of unvoiced (and voiced) resentments by neglected, grown-up children. The book (along with Fox’s memoir, Borrowed Finery) is not just an examination of dysfunction, it is a journey into the dark heart of family, and a portrayal of the damage that is perpetuated and never undone.
A classic American novel from the author of 'Borrowed Finery'.
On the eve of their trip to Africa, Laura Maldonada Clapper and her husband, Desmond, sit in a New York City hotel room, drinking scotch-and-sodas and awaiting the arrival of three guests: Clara, Laura's timid daughter from a previous marriage; Carlos, Laura's flamboyant brother; and Peter, a melancholy editor whom Laura hasn't seen for over a year.
But what begins as a bon voyage party soon becomes a bitter, claustrophobic clash of family resentment. From the hotel room to the tiny restaurant to which the five embark, Laura presides over…
Set both in New York and on a fictional Adriatic island, the novel follows two sisters. When Jadranka, the younger, leaves Rosmarina to work as an au pair in the United States and subsequently disappears, Magdalena must begin a search that leads her from the safety of Rosmarina to New York’s thriving but unrooted immigrant communities. The book explores the legacy of a Croatian island where beauty is fused inextricably with hardship, where nonconformity—especially by women—is stifled by cultural taboo, and where the lure of leaving is countered by the summons of family and home. It is part literary mystery and part meditation on what it means to remake oneself in a new world.
I have been writing for many years, and my main preference is political thrillers with criminal overtones. I first became interested in politics when I worked at several political conferences in the 60’s and 70’s. I have been involved in several criminal cases, including my own, and within my family, I have a nephew in the police force. For many years I have had the opportunity to mix with the upper tiers of society as well as the criminal classes and this has given me great insight into creating my characters and plots.
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
Pete West, a political columnist, travels to Prague to find a missing diplomat, later found murdered. He attempts to discover more about a cryptic note received from the diplomat and is immediately entangled in the secret Bilderberg Club’s strategy to form a world federation.
Pete meets a Czechian agent who wants asylum. She has a murdered EU Commissioner’s diary containing clues to the civil unrest planned by the club, encrypted in algebraic chess notations. West seeks answers and links up with retired MI6 officer Tosh. While escaping would-be captors, they decode enough chess moves to reveal the anarchy of the…
