Amélie Nothomb

Adriana Hunter

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

California

Alternately disturbing and hilarious, unbelievable and shatteringly convincing, Amélie Nothomb's Fear and Trembling will keep readers clutching tight to the pages of this taut little novel, caught up in the throes of fear, trembling, and, ultimately, delight.

According to ancient Japanese protocol, foreigners deigning to approach the emperor did so only with fear and trembling. Terror and self-abasement conveyed respect. Amélie, our well-intentioned and eager young Western heroine, goes to Japan to spend a year working at the Yumimoto Corporation. Returning to the land where she was born is the fulfillment of a dream for Amélie; working there turns into comic nightmare.

Fear and Trembling

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New York

Alison Anderson

Florida

A moving fictionalized account of Nothomb's own father, who died of Covid related symptoms in early 2020, this is the acclaimed author's most personal and heartfelt novel.

First Blood

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Bernardine Evaristo

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Nebraska

A Novel

From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity among an interconnected group of Black British women

Girl, Woman, Other

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John Banville

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Virginia

Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers, where his own life becomes inextricably entwined with the members of the vacationing Grace family.

The Sea

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Booker Prize Nominated

Margo. Glantz

Ellen Jones

Tennessee

After her ex-husband dies unexpectedly, Nora García travels to the funeral, back to a Mexican village from her past and the art and music of their life together.

The Remains

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Belén López Peiró

Maureen Shaughnessy

A fractured documentary of family rape, secrets, and the cost of pursuing the truth. In Belén López Peiró's Why Did You Come Back Every Summer, family is home, and safety, and betrayal. Her uncle, a police commissioner, rapes her. His wife and daughter shelter, then refuse her. Her mother is his sister. And no one wants to believe her. This is a true story of intimate sexual violence. Told in multiple voices, and by the police reports filed and interviews made, the demand that truth makes, the cost it incurs, is filed away. Most important is the shifting, slipping loyalty everyone has to the ones they love. Who do you owe yourself to? Who owes you? What must be done to take yourself back? But now it's time to give yourself some closure and start to tell yourself another story. The story of your life, which doesn't end here. This is just the beginning.

Why Did You Come Back Every Summer

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Charco

Library copy. Pages are in great condition. I really enjoyed this book focused on the women of a modern housing development.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Mississippi

Arlington Park 

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Joan Didion

Alaska

An incisive compilation of political essays, originally written for The New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2000, explores the nature of American politics and political figures and the role of the media in transforming the American political landscape. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

Political Fictions

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Twelve early pieces never before collected offer an illuminating glimpse intothe mind and process of the bestselling author.

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

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Wisconsin

Essays

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s. Examining key events, figures, and trends of the era—including Charles Manson, the Black Panthers, and the shopping mall—through the lens of her own spiritual confusion, Joan Didion helped to define mass culture as we now understand it. Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

The White Album

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Didion

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Michigan

Diver Thrift Edition 2004

Accused of political subversion as a young man, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to 4 years of hard labor at a Siberian prison camp. Years later, he developed this semi-autobiographical memoir of a man condemned to penal servitude for murdering his wife. This haunting and remarkable work ranks amoung Dostoyevsky's greatest masterpieces.

The House of the Dead

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A compulsive gambler himself at a certain period of his life, Dostoyevsky wrote this novel with real authority. Set in the appropriately named Roulettenburg, a German spa with a casino and an international clientele, it concerns the gambling episodes, tangled love affairs, and complicated lives of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young gambler; Polina Alexandrovna, the woman he loves; a pair of French adventurers, and other characters.

The Gambler

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Ronald Meyer

South Carolina

Based on a St Petersburg news report, Dostoyevsky's searing tale of a man who drives his wife to suicide.

I could see that she was still terribly afraid, but I didn't soften anything; instead, seeing that she was afraid I deliberately intensified it.'In this short story, Dostoyevsky masterfully depicts desperation, greed, manipulation and suicide.Introducing Little Black Classics- 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Dostoyevsky's works available in Penguin Classics are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Double, The Gambler and Other Stories, The Grand Inquisitor, Notes From The Underground, Netochka Nezvanova, The House of The Dead, The Brothers Karamazov and The Village of Stepanchikovo.

The Meek One

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Dostoevsky

Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Maryland

A woman goes home to Naples after her mother's mysterious death in a "tour de force" by theNew York Times-bestselling author ofMy Brilliant Friend (Seattle Times).



Following her mother's untimely and unexplained drowning, which was preceded by a series of strange phone calls, forty-five-year-old Delia leaves Rome and embarks on a voyage of discovery through the beguiling yet often hostile streets of her native Naples. She is searching for the truth about her family and the men in her mother's life, past and present, including an abusive husband. What she discovers will be more unsettling than she imagines, but will also reveal truths about herself, in this psychological mystery marked by "tactile, beautifully restrained prose" (Publishers Weekly) about mothers and daughters and the complicated knot of lies and emotions that binds them.



"Ferrante's polished language belies the rawness of her imagery." --The New Yorker



"With the quick-paced mystery guiding the story, Delia explores her relationship with her mother, unraveling memories and secrets repressed since childhood and coming to terms with an upbringing filled with jealousy and violence . . .Troubling Love is vivid and powerful." --Library Journal

Troubling Love and Bilgewater *Europa bundle

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NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post * O, The Oprah Magazine * TIME Magazine * NPR * Financial Times * New York Post * Kirkus Reviews * Harper's Bazaar AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A NATIONAL INDIE BESTELLER In this powerful novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the New York Times best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, fourteen-year-old Giovanna is searching for her reflection in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: Naples of the heights, which wears a mask of refinement, and Naples of the depths, a place of excess and vulgarity, where her guide is the unforgettable Aunt Vittoria. With this new novel about the passage from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, Ferrante gives her readers another gripping, highly addictive, Neapolitan story. "Another spellbinding coming-of-age tale from a master."--People Magazine

The Lying Life of Adults

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Delaware

Ferrante

Leslie Jamison

Iowa

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

The Empathy Exams

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James L. White

Mark Doty

Pahes are clean. Binding is tight. Some bumping to corrners.

The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark Doty James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies—originally published in 1982, shortly after White's untimely death—has earned a reputation for its artful and explicit expression of love and desire. In this new edition, with an introduction by Mark Doty and previously unpublished works by White, his invaluable poetry is again available—clear, passionate, and hard-earned. The Salt Ecstasies is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

The Salt Ecstasies

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Sally Wen Mao

Poems

A brilliant second collection by Sally Wen Mao on the violence of the spectacle—starring the film legend Anna May Wong In Oculus, Sally Wen Mao explores exile not just as a matter of distance and displacement but as a migration through time and a reckoning with technology. The title poem follows a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram. Other poems cross into animated worlds, examine robot culture, and haunt a necropolis for electronic waste. A fascinating sequence spanning the collection speaks in the voice of the international icon and first Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong, who travels through the history of cinema with a time machine, even past her death and into the future of film, where she finds she has no progeny. With a speculative imagination and a sharpened wit, Mao powerfully confronts the paradoxes of seeing and being seen, the intimacies made possible and ruined by the screen, and the many roles and representations that women of color are made to endure in order to survive a culture that seeks to consume them.

Oculus

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Graywolf Press

Hilary Mantel

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest--insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.

Beyond Black (I)

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Illinois

Beyond Black

Gene Kerrigan

"An absorbing, beautifully written tale."--The Times A sophisticated crime story of contemporary Ireland, The Midnight Choir teems with moral dilemmas and Dublin emerges as a city of ambiguity: a newly-scrubbed face hiding a criminal culture of terrible variety. Small-time criminals have become millionaire businessmen, the poor are still struggling to survive, and the police face a world where the old rules no longer apply. "Believe me, you want The Midnight Choir with you on holiday," says The Sunday Business Post. "This is the kind of book you pass on to someone you like, and say 'read this.'"

The Midnight Choir

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Pascale Pujol

"Sexy encounters, irreverent humor, and subtle twists keep up the pace of this quirky tale about a variety of French appetites" (Publishers Weekly).

Sandrine works as a functionary in an employment office, but there is a lot more to her than one might suspect from her job description. With a volcanic personality and an imagination to match, she is also a world-class cook waiting for the right occasion to realize her dream of opening a restaurant of her own. With a master plan that one could only describe as Machiavellian, Sandrine ropes Antoine, an unemployed professor, into her venture. A carousel of extravagant characters follows: the giant Senegalese man, Toussaint N'Diaye; the magical chef, Vairam; the extravagantly flatulent Alsatian Schmutz and his twelve-year-old daughter Juliette (IQ 172!); the alluring psychologist and Kama Sutra specialist Annabelle Villemin-Dubreuil. Plans for the restaurant proceed smoothly until Sandrine discovers a shady newspaper operation next-door that leads her to a sinister magnate's plot . . . Set in the storied and culturally diverse Parisian quarter of Montmartre, made famous by artists, writers, and bon vivants of every ilk, this heartwarming, comic tale is a must for foodies, Francophiles, and lovers of a good story well told.

"This farcical novel envelops readers in the sights, sounds, and smells of Montmartre and is sure to be enjoyed by fans of Mary Simses, Laura Madeleine, and Nina George. With lively characters and a dreamy setting, Little Culinary Triumphs will awaken the Francophile in all."--Booklist

"Pujol keeps the tone light as she takes on serious themes of economics and immigration . . . The plot adds characters like ingredients in a recipe until everything finally sets like a creamy quiche. Will everybody get what they want--or deserve? Maybe, maybe not, but it's fun watching the schemes unfold."--The Star Tribune

Little Culinary Triumphs

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Jane Gardam

Second in the Old Filth trilogy. "An astute, subtle depiction of marriage . . . absolutely wonderful" (The Washington Post).

Acclaimed as Jane Gardam's masterpiece, Old Filth is a lyrical novel that recalls the fully lived life of Sir Edward Feathers. The Man in the Wooden Hat is the history of his marriage told from the perspective of his wife, Betty, a character as vivid and enchanting as Filth himself.
They met in Hong Kong after the war. Betty had spent the duration in a Japanese internment camp. Filth was already a successful barrister, handsome, fast becoming rich, in need of a wife but unaccustomed to romance. A perfect English couple of the late 1940s.
As a portrait of a marriage, with all the bittersweet secrets and surprising fulfillment of the fifty-year union of two remarkable people, The Man in the Wooden Hat is a triumph. Fiction of a very high order from a great novelist working at the pinnacle of her considerable power, it will be read and loved and recommended by all the many thousands of readers who found its predecessor, Old Filth, so compelling and thoroughly satisfying.

"Funny and affecting . . . It's remarkable."--The New York Times Book Review

"The latest occasion to celebrate Gardam . . . [a] superb novel."--Maureen Corrigan, NPR

"Told with quintessentially British humor . . . Gardam's prose is witty and precise."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"It's magnificent. . . . Funny, intelligent and immensely moving."--Kirkus Reviews

The Man in the Wooden Hat

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IndieMore

#paperback #jmcoetzee #youth #memoir #scenesfromaprovinciallife #nonfiction

Ohio

Scenes from Provincial Life II

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 

The second installment of J. M. Coetzee's fictionalized "memoir" explores a young man's struggle to experience life to its full intensity and transform it into art. The narrator of Youth has long been plotting an escape-from the stifling love of his overbearing mother, a father whose failures haunt him, and what he is sure is impending revolution in his native country of South Africa. Arriving at last in London in the 1960s, however, he finds neither poetry nor romance and instead begins a dark pilgrimage into adulthood. Youth is a remarkable portrait of a consciousness, isolated and adrift, turning in on itself, of a young man struggling to find his way in the world, written with tenderness and a fierce clarity.

Youth

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Washington

Boyhood, Youth, Summertime

The Nobel Prize-winning author's brilliant trilogy of fictionalized memoirs--now available in one volume for the first time.

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. 


Few writers have won as much critical acclaim and as many admirers in the literary world as J. M. Coetzee. Yet the celebrated author rarely spoke of himself until the 1997 arrival of Boyhood, a masterly and evocative tale of a young writer's beginnings. Continuing with the fiercely tender Youth and the innovative Summertime, Scenes from Provincial Life is a heartbreaking and often very funny portrait of the artist by one of the world's greatest writers.

Scenes from Provincial Life

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J. M. Coetzee

Derek Attridge

Literary Essays 2000-2005

A new collection of essays and literary criticism from the Nobel Prize winner. In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. As Derek Attridge observes in his introduction, reading Coetzee's nonfiction offers one the opportunity to see "how an author at the forefront of his profession engages with his peers, not as a critic from the outside, but as one who works with the same raw materials." In this collection of twenty recent pieces, Coetzee examines the work of some of the twentieth century's greatest writers. Insightful, challenging, yet accessible, these essays demonstrate Coetzee's sharp eye and unwavering critical acumen and will be of interest to his fans as well as to all readers of international literature.--From publisher description.

Inner Workings

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James McBride

Pennsylvania

Searching for James Brown and the American Soul

National Book Award winner James McBride goes in search of the real James Brownand his surprising journey illuminates not only our understanding of the Godfather of Soul but the ways in which our cultural heritage has been shaped by Browns legacy.

Kill 'Em and Leave

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Colorado

Fleeing her violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. By the best-selling author of The Color of Water.

The Good Lord Bird

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New Jersey

James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff

Missouri

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “A relentless exhibition of Groff’s freakish talent. In just over 250 pages, she gives us a character study to rival Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell .” – USA Today “An electric reimagining . . . feminist, sensual . . . unforgettable.” – O, The Oprah Magazine “Thrilling and heartbreaking.” –Time Magazine “[A] page-by-page pleasure as we soar with her.” –New York Times One of our best American writers, Lauren Groff returns with her exhilarating first new novel since the groundbreaking Fates and Furies. Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects. But in a world that is shifting and corroding in frightening ways, one that can never reconcile itself with her existence, will the sheer force of Marie’s vision be bulwark enough? Equally alive to the sacred and the profane, Matrix gathers currents of violence, sensuality, and religious ecstasy in a mesmerizing portrait of consuming passion, aberrant faith, and a woman that history moves both through and around. Lauren Groff’s new novel, her first since Fates and Furies, is a defiant and timely exploration of the raw power of female creativity in a corrupted world.

Matrix

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#laurengroff #historicalfiction #matrix #freeshippingon25

Connecticut

"Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets ... At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but ... things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed"--

Fates and Furies

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Lauren Groff TBR

Clarice Lispector

Benjamin Moser

While explaining to her sons why their fish is dead, the author relates stories of memorable animals in her life.

The Woman Who Killed the Fish

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Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O'Farrell

Louisiana

"I am more than happy to welcome a newcomer, Maggie O'Farrell, who, to quote Yeats, 'has learnt her trade.' After You'd Gone is beautifully written contemporary fiction." --Edna O'Brien, Sunday TimesA young woman named Alice Raikes boards a train to Scotland to visit her family. But when she arrives, she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London that very minute. Only a few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt.With Alice's life hanging in the balance, her family gathers at her bedside. As they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions rise to the surface. The more they talk, the more, it seems, they conceal from each other. Alice, meanwhile, sliding between different levels of consciousness, recalls her past and a recent love affair. Skipping around in time, knitting together the different points of view with astonishing dexterity and beautiful prose, Maggie O'Farrell has created a story of love and family relationships that is reminiscent of the very best of Edna O'Brien and Mary Gordon. With one of the most heart-stopping openings in modern fiction, After You'd Gone is a work of extraordinary psychological depth and impressive maturity.

After You'd Gone

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Alice Raikes boards a train at King’s Cross to visit her sisters in Scotland. Hours later, she steps into traffic on a busy London road and is taken to hospital in a coma. Who or what did she see in Edinburgh that made her return to London so suddenly? Was the accident a suicide attempt? And what exactly do her family, waiting at her bedside, have to hide? Sliding between different levels of consciousness, Alice listens to the conversations around her, and begins sifting through recollections of her past and a recently curtailed love affair.

Nevada

Gripping, insightful, and deft, The Distance Between Us by Maggie O'Farrell is a haunting story of the way our families shape our lives, from the award-winning author of Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait. On a cold February afternoon, Stella catches sight of a man she hasn't seen for many years, but instantly recognises. Or thinks she does. At the same moment on the other side of the globe, in the middle of a crowd of Chinese New Year revellers, Jake realises that things are becoming dangerous. They know nothing of one another's existence, but both Stella and Jake flee their lives: Jake in search of a place so remote it doesn't appear on any map, and Stella for a destination in Scotland, the significance of which only her sister, Nina, will understand.

The Distance Between Us

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Maggie O’Farrell

Günter Grass

A German art historian and a Polish art restorer find adventure and love in the cemetery business. Their vision is to offer plots in Gdansk to those Germans who had been exiled after World War II. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Line drawings by the Author. Translated by Ralph Manheim. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book


The Call of the Toad

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Gao Xingjian

"Painting starts where words fail or are inadequate in expressing what one wants to express." -- Gao Xingjian, Harvard University Gazette In December 2000, Gao Xingjian became the first Chinese-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In addition to having produced an impressive body of work in several genres -- fiction, plays, and essays -- this prolific artist has also distinguished himself as a painter. A collection of more than a hundred paintings, Return to Painting was first published in France for a major exhibition of his work in Avignon. The paintings -- India ink on rice paper -- span the artist's career from the 1960s until the present day. This book also includes an important essay by Gao, who is considered an artistic innovator in his native China, both in the visual arts and in literature.

Return to Painting

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Louise Gluck

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A Village Life, Louise Glück's eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place: All the roads in the village unite at the fountain. Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees— The fountain rises at the center of the plaza; on sunny days, rainbows in the piss of the cherub. —from "tributaries" Around the fountain are concentric circles of figures, organized by age and in degrees of distance: fields, a river, and, like the fountain's opposite, a mountain. Human time superimposed on geologic time, all taken in at a glance, without any undue sensation of speed. Glück has been known as a lyrical and dramatic poet; since Ararat, she has shaped her austere intensities into book-length sequences. Here, for the first time, she speaks as "the type of describing, supervising intelligence found in novels rather than poetry," as Langdon Hammer has written of her long lines—expansive, fluent, and full—manifesting a calm omniscience. While Glück's manner is novelistic, she focuses not on action but on pauses and intervals, moments of suspension (rather than suspense), in a dreamlike present tense in which poetic speculation and reflection are possible.

A Village Life

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Nobel Prize Award for Literature

Elizabeth Taylor

Caleb Crain

Haunted by unspoken tensions and stifled ardor, two lovers navigate shifting expectations and societal changes in inter-war England--a decade-spanning love story from an author who is "the missing link between Jane Austen and John Updike" (The Independent)
 
The mid-twentieth century British novelist Elizabeth Taylor numbered among her admirers Elizabeth Bowen, Ivy Compton-Burnett, and Kingsley Amis. She also regularly published stories in The New Yorker for close to two decades. For all that, her work, as steely as it is delicate, remains the secret of a small number of intensely devoted readers.

The publication of her finest novel, A Game of Hide and Seek, long unavailable in the United States, should help to change that. This is an unabashed love story, capturing all the uncertainty and inevitability and deceptiveness of true love, tracking the shifting currents of emotional life, and never yielding to melodrama. Set in Britain between the wars--a time of transition between old convention and new ways--the book's heroine is Harriet, the only child of a suffragette, whom we meet as a shy and domestic and not especially smart or pretty girl. At eighteen she falls in love with Vesey, but after Vesey must go away, she marries another man, Charles, and bears a child. Then Vesey returns.

Love is at the center of the book, but so too is Taylor's extraordinary knack for depicting characters. The minor figures in the book--from Harriet's mother's friend Caroline, with her progressive politics, to Charles, his coworkers, and his mother, to Betsy with her schoolgirl crush on her Greek teacher--are as memorable as the passion and heartache of Harriet and Vesey.

A Game of Hide and Seek

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Mavis Gallant

Peter Orner

No notes or highlighting. From a smoke- and pet-free home. See photos for cover/spine condition.

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Mavis Gallant’s novels are as memorable as her renowned short stories. Full of wit and psychological poignancy, A Fairly Good Time, here with Green Water, Green Sky, encapsulates Gallant’s unparalleled skill as a storyteller. Shirley Perrigny (née Norrington, then briefly Higgins), the heroine of A Fairly Good Time, is an original. Derided by the Parisians she lives among and chided by her fellow Canadians, this young widow—recently remarried to a French journalist named Philippe—is fond of quoting Jane Austen and Kingsley Amis and of using her myopia as a defense against social aggression. As the fixed points in Shirley’s life begin to recede—Philippe having apparently though not definitively left—her freewheeling, makeshift, and self-abnegating ways come to seem an aspect of devotion to her fellow man. Could this unreliable protagonist be the unwitting heroine of her own story? Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant’s first novel, is a darker tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, an American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter live like itinerants—in Venice, Cannes, and Paris—glamorous and dependent. With little hope of escape, Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the false notes of her mother.

Shelves by Valerie Kulpit

Valerie Kulpit

Amélie Nothomb

Booker Prize Nominated

Charco

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Didion

Dostoevsky

Ferrante

Graywolf Press

Hilary Mantel

IndieMore

J. M. Coetzee

James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff TBR

Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O’Farrell

Nobel Prize Award for Literature

NYRB Publisher

Polish Literature/Translated

Sarah Moss

Smith,Ali

Tolstoy

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Shelves by Valerie Kulpit

Valerie Kulpit

Amélie Nothomb

Booker Prize Nominated

Charco

Cusk, Rachel TBR

Didion

Dostoevsky

Ferrante

Graywolf Press

Hilary Mantel

IndieMore

J. M. Coetzee

James McBride TBR

Lauren Groff TBR

Lispector,Clarice

Maggie O’Farrell

Nobel Prize Award for Literature

NYRB Publisher

Polish Literature/Translated

Sarah Moss

Smith,Ali

Tolstoy

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