23 July 2013
Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw
Four young Malaysians immigrate to China and settle in Shanghai where their lives intertwine.
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
An exciting literary debut: the unflinching and powerful story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and to America. Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo's debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her-from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee-while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
From the award-winning author of The Rehearsal comes a bold neo-Victorian murder mystery set in a remote gold-mining frontier town in nineteenth-century New Zealand, in which three unsolved crimes link the fates and fortunes of twelve men. Dickens meets Deadwood in this tour de force that will appeal to readers of Peter Carey, Jennifer Egan, Kate Atkinson, David Mitchell, and Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White . In 1866, a weary Englishman lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind his family's shame. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investigate what links three crimes that occurred on a single day, events in which each man finds himself implicated in some way: the town's wealthiest man has vanished. An enormous fortune in pure gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. A prostitute is found unconscious on a deserted road. But nothing is quite as it seems. As the men share their stories, what emerges is an intricate web of alliances and betrayals, secrets and lies in which everything is connected and everyone plays a part, whether they know it or not. Part mystery, part fantastical love story, and full of diabolical twists and turns, The Luminaries is a breathtaking feat of storytelling that reveals the ways our interconnected lives can shape our destinies. Bursting with characters and event, it is a story -- and a unique, richly atmospheric world -- that readers will gladly lose themselves in.
Harvest by Jim Crace
Not available in Parkland Regional library system at this time.
The Marrying of Chani Kaufman by Eve Harris
Not available in Parkland Regional library system at this time.
The Kills by Richard House
Not available in Parkland Regional library system at this time.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Two brothers bound by tragedy; a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past; a country torn by revolution: the Pulitzer Prize winner and #1 New York Times bestselling author gives us a powerful new novel--set in both India and America--that explores the price of idealism, and a love that can last long past death. Growing up in Calcutta, born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead of them. It is the 1960s, and Udayan--charismatic and impulsive--finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty: he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother's political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family's home, he comes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind--including those seared in the heart of his brother's wife. Suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland expands the range of one of our most dazzling storytellers, seamlessly interweaving the historical and the personal across generations and geographies. This masterly novel of fate and will, exile and return, is a tour de force and an instant classic.
Unexploded by Alison MacLeod
Not available in Parkland Regional Library System at this time.
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
One story is all stories,says Colum McCann, author of the award-winning Let the Great World Spin In his remarkable new novel, Colum McCann masterfully reaches across the centuries to braid together three unforgettable stories. In 1845, Frederick Douglass, a black American slave, lands in Ireland to champion ideas of democracy and freedom, only to find a famine unfurling around him. In 1919, two brave young airmen emerge from the carnage of World War I to pilot the first transatlantic flight from St. Johne(tm)s, Newfoundland, to the west of Ireland. And in 1998 an American senator criss-crosses the ocean in search of a lasting peace in Ireland. Taking these stories as his point of departure, Colum McCann weaves together the lives of Douglass, Alcock and Brown and Senator George Mitchell in a tapestry that is both ambitious and unforgettable.
Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson
Not available in Parkland Regional Library System at this time.
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
In Tokyo, 16-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.
The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan
Not available in Parkland Regional Library System at this time
The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
In the ancient town of Ephesus, Mary lives alone, years after her son's crucifixion. She has no interest in collaborating with the authors of the Gospel -- her keepers, who provide her with food and shelter and visit her regularly. She does not agree that her son is the Son of God; nor that his death was "worth it;" nor that the "group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye," were holy disciples. Mary judges herself ruthlessly (she did not stay at the foot of the Cross until her son died -- she fled, to save herself), and is equally harsh on her judgement of others. This woman who we know from centuries of paintings and scripture as the docile, loving, silent, long-suffering, obedient, worshipful mother of Christ becomes a tragic heroine with the relentless eloquence of Electra or Medea or Antigone. Tibn's tour de force of imagination and language is a portrait so vivid and convincing that our image of Mary will be forever transformed.
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