UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Main Library (Apr 14)

A Designated Man by  Moris Farhi
PR6056.A65 D47 2009

Osip returns home to a remote island in the Mediterranean, hoping that it will provide him a haven after the traumas of war. On his arrival, he narrowly escapes death at the hands of Bostan, a supreme feudist. The island, he discovers, is still governed by the archaic code of honour which has condemned the inhabitants to perpetual bloodshed and obliterated countless families, including Osip’s own. Helped by the aged Kokona, and by her earthy lover, Dev, Osip restores the watermill he has inherited. Soon, he and Bostan cross paths again. Beguiled by Bostan, Osip befriends him. When Bostan is ambushed by other feudists and left for dead, Osip rushes to his aid. While dressing his wounds, he discovers Bostan’s true identity. When Bostan recovers, the two of them set out to end the eternal feuding. This is a deeply affecting fable that resounds with hope.

A Chance Acquaintance by Charles Chadwick.
PR6103.H33 C43 2009

A convicted murderer and a woman, shunned for her ugliness, meet by chance on a bus. Stan, recently released from prison, works in a warehouse; he tends to keep to himself, except for the odd thieving job. As for Elsie, it is as if she hardly exists as a person at all. Her mother tells her it’s what lies underneath that matters, but Elsie knows those are just words. People find her unbearable to look at.

Slowly, these two misfits are drawn together. Stan, on the run from an ex-con, asks Elsie for help. They go to stay in her uncle’s seaside cottage in Dorset, and, over the ensuing weeks, sharing the chores, tending the garden, they become at ease in each other’s company – two lonely souls playing at married life. They befriend a child and her grandmother who live nearby. But when Stan’s pursuer closes in, things take a surprising turn…

The One That Got Away: Short stories by Zoë Wicomb
PR9369.3.W53 O54 2009

Set mostly in Capetown and Glasgow, Wicomb’s new collection of short stories straddles dual worlds. An array of characters drawn with extraordinary acuity inhabit a complexly interconnected, twenty-first-century universe. The fourteen stories in this collection, most previously unpublished, explore a spectrum of human relationships: marriage, friendship, family ties, neighbors, and relations between those who serve and are served. Wicomb’s intriguing characters include the adolescent girl Elsie navigating between her new life in the icy city of Glasgow and her family’s vexed history in South Africa, and Dot and Julie, a pair of friends once united by the color of their skin and now discovering how time and marriage have divided their paths. Wicomb’s fluid, shifting technique questions conventional certainties and makes for exhilarating reading, full of ironic twists, ambiguities, and moments of startling insight.

Prizes: Selected short stories by Janet Frame
PR9639.3.F7 P75 2009

The most comprehensive selection of Janet Frame’s stories ever published, this exceptional collection has been chosen from the four different volumes released during her lifetime. Featuring the best of her stories, the book includes pieces that were written over four decades, including stories from her debut collection, The Lagoon and Other Stories. First published in 1951, those stories were written while Frame was confined in a mental hospital. When the collection won the Hubert Church Award, a threatened brain operation (akin to a lobotomy) was averted.

The stories in this new book also include selections from You Are Now Entering the Human Heart, published in the 1980s after a hiatus from writing. The last stories she published before her death, her writings from this time reveal Frame’s unflinching ability to explore the drama of madness, isolation, and identity.

This new book also includes five short stories that have not been collected before, completing a volume that testifies to the brilliance of Janet Frame’s life and literary talent.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
PS3554.I86 O64 2009

Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair.

When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There’s little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, “one amazing thing” from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival–and about the reasons to survive.

The Farmer’s Daughter by  Jim Harrison
PS3558.A67 F33 2010

In three novellas as dark as they are exuberant, Harrison delivers protagonists who are smart, lusty in that classic Harrison fashion and linked by The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me, a Patsy Cline song that appears throughout and could easily serve as the characters’ theme song. The first novella recounts the story of Sarah, who is dragged to rural Montana by her neglectful parents and, at age 15, is the victim of a sexual assault that provides her with an undying thirst for revenge. The collection’s second and strongest novella features a recurring Harrison character, Brown Dog, a half-Indian free spirit who cares for his ailing stepdaughter who is afflicted with fetal alcohol syndrome. (He also has sex a lot.) The final piece presents Samuel, who as a child traveling in Mexico contracted viruses that now cause werewolflike spells that render him a permanent stranger. Harrison (Legends of the Fall) shows he is still at the top of his game with these compressed gems. Taken together, they present another fine accomplishment in a storied career.
– Publishers Weekly

Union Atlantic: A novel by Adam Haslett
PS3608.A85 U55 2009

At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a young banker, Doug Fanning, and a retired schoolteacher, Charlotte Graves, whose two dogs have begun to speak to her. When Doug builds an ostentatious mansion on land that Charlotte’s grandfather donated to the town of Finden, Massachusetts, she determines to oust him in court. As a senior manager of Union Atlantic bank, a major financial conglomerate, Doug is embroiled in the company’s struggle to remain afloat. It is Charlotte’s brother, Henry Graves, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, who must keep a watchful eye on Union Atlantic and the entire financial system. Drawn into Doug and Charlotte’s intensifying conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school senior who unwittingly stirs powerful emotions in each of them.

Irresistibly complex, imaginative, and witty, Union Atlantic is a singular work of fiction that is sure to be read and reread long after it causes a sensation this spring.

Model Home: A novel by Eric Puchner
PS3616.U25 M63 2010

Warren Ziller moved his family to California in search of a charmed life, and to all appearances, he found it: a gated community not far from the beach, amid the affluent splendor of Southern California in the 1980s. But his American dream has been rudely interrupted. Despite their affection for one another–the “slow, jokey, unrehearsed vaudeville” they share at home–Warren; his wife, Camille; and their three children have veered into separate lives, as distant as satellites. Worst of all, Warren has squandered the family’s money on a failing real estate venture.As Warren desperately tries to conceal his mistake, his family begins to sow deceptions of their own. Camille attributes Warren’s erratic behavior to an affair and plots her secret revenge; seventeen-year-old Dustin falls for his girlfriend’s troubled younger sister; teen misanthrope Lyle begins sleeping with a security guard who works at the gatehouse; and eleven-year-old Jonas becomes strangely obsessed with a kidnapped girl.

When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move into one of the houses in Warren’s abandoned development in the middle of the desert. Marooned in a less-than-model home, each must reckon with what’s led them there and who’s to blame–and whether they can summon the forgiveness needed to hold the family together. Subtly ambitious, brimming with the humor and unpredictability of life, Model Home delivers penetrating insights into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect, from a writer “uncannily in tune with the heartbreak and absurdity of domestic life” (Los Angeles Times).
–review from amazon.com

All reviews from goodreads, unless otherwise indicated.