UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Libraries

Ghosts And Lightning by Trevor Byrne
PR6102.Y76 G47 2009

Set in contemporary Dublin and the surrounding countryside, Ghosts and Lightning is a picaresque account of Denny Cullen’s life after he is called back home to attend his mother’s funeral. Denny—a sweet-natured but disillusioned young man who feels powerless in the face of death, dope and the dole queue—is the steadiest in a cast of unstable characters. Denny and his lads fill their empty days with hooliganism, raucous parties, violence and even an exorcism, but their fearlessness and humor make them as irresistible as an expertly pulled pint of Guinness.

Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson.
PT9876.23.A49 I8313 2009

Fredrik Welin is a reclusive ex-surgeon living alone on a tiny island in the north of Sweden. His only companions are a pair of aged pets, and the only society callers to his living room are ants that are transforming his table into an enormous anthill. Every morning, the loner goes out to the frozen lake, cuts a hole in the ice, and then plunges himself into the freezing water to remind himself that he is still alive. Four women enter his life: Harriet, his ex, whom he abandoned years ago; Louise, his unknown daughter; Agnes Klarstrom, the patient who ended his medical career; and Sima, a troubled young woman.

The Others by Seba al-Herz
PJ7832.I75 A3413 2009

A best-selling book when it appeared in Arabic, The Others is a literary tour de force, offering a window into one of the most repressive societies in the world. Seba al-Herz tells the story of a nameless teenager at a girls’ school in the heavily Shi’ite Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. Like her classmates, she has no contact with men outside her family. When the glamorous Dai tries to seduce her, her feelings of guilt are overcome by an overwhelming desire for sexual and emotional intimacy. Dai introduces her to a secret world of lesbian parties, online flirtations, and hotel liaisons—a world in which the thrill of infatuation and the shame of obsession are deeply intertwined. Al-Herz’s erotic, dereamlike story of looming personal crisis is a remarkable portrait of hidden lives. Seba al-Herz is the pseudonym of a twenty-six-year-old Saudi woman from al-Qatif in Saudi Arabia. This is her first novel.

On Black Sisters’ Street by Chika Unigwe
PR9387.9.U52 O5313 2009

Before Efe came to Belgium, she imagined castles and clean streets and snow as white as salt. Belgium: “…a country wey dey Europe. Next door to London.”

At the house on the Zwartezusterstraat four very different women have made their way from Africa to claim for themselves the riches of Europe. Sisi, Ama, Efe and Joyce are prostitutes, the girls who stand in the windows of the red-light district, promising to make men’s dreams come true – if only for half an hour and fifty euros. The murder of Sisi, the most enigmatic of the women, shatters their already fragile world and, as the women gather to mourn, the stories they have kept hidden are finally told.

Drawn together by the tragedy, the women reveal, each in her own voice, what has brought them to their present lives. Joyce, a great beauty whose life has been destroyed by war; Ama, whose dark moods manifest a past injustice; Efe, whose efforts to earn her keep are motivated by a particular zeal; and, finally, Sisi whose imagination takes her far beyoind the squalor of her relaity. These are stories of terror, of displacement, of love, and of a sinister man named Dele…

Raw, vivid and suffused with the power of the oral storytelling tradition, On Black Sisters’ Street is a moving story of the illusion of the West through African eyes, and its annihilation. It is also, however, a story of courage, of unity and of hope.

The Bridge over the River by Johannes Gramich
PT2707.R36 B75 2008

A haunting novel about growing up in a world unhinged by war; a novel about longing, loss, and the search for home. Lynette is a dreamer. She likes to imagine herself floating on a magic carpet above the city where she lives, 1940s Prague. But suddenly her dream becomes a nightmare. The wooden puppet with the moustache drives his black limo through the gates of the castle. She tries to escape into the fairytale world of the wild Waterman but the brutal events of history haul her into the real world. Suddenly, Czechs, Germans, and Jews, who have lived side by side for years, become sworn enemies. Brutally expelled with her family from her homeland, joining the great exodus of Germans from Bohemia.but to what promised land?

My Little War by Louis Paul Boon. Translated by Paul Vincent.
PT6407.B57 M5513 2010

Following in the footsteps of Celine and Joyce, and anticipating the gritty worldview of Burroughs and Bukowski . . .  The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life’s work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that dominated fiction in his country, Boon started including overheard conversations, newspaper articles, manifestos, and other sights and noises of daily life in his work. Happily foul-mouthed and dirty-minded, eager to wade into the mud, Boon was resolutely unliterary while pursuing the most literary of goals: a new kind of writing, and a more honest way of looking at the world.

The Union Jack by Imre Kertesz. Translated by Tim Wilkinson.
PH3281.K3815 A5413 2009

An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising’s brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on “the absurd order of chance,” he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening—an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity.

The Tales of Sabalan: two short novels by Mohammad Reza Bayrami. Translated from the Persian by M.R. Ghanoonparvar.
PK6561.B398 K8413 2008

The Tales of Sabalan, written in post-revolutionary Iran, is the story of a young boy who is forced to grow up quickly, to assume the role of the male head of the household at a tender age because of the untimely death of his father. It includes two short novels, “Kuh Mara Seda Zad” (The Mountain Called Me) and “Bar Labeh-ye Partgah” (On the Edge of the Precipice).

The Ancient Ship by Zhang Wei. Translated by Howard Goldblatt.
PL2837.W35 G813 2008

Originally published in 1987, two years before the Tiananmen Square protests, Zhang Wei’s award-winning novel is the story of three generations of the Sui, Zhao, and Li families living in the fictional northern town of Wali during China’s troubled postliberation years.

Spanning four decades following the creation of the People’s Republic in 1949, The Ancient Ship is a bold examination of a society in turmoil, the struggle of oppressed people to control their own fate, and the clash between tradition and modernization. In the course of the narrative, the townspeople of Wali face the moments that have defined China’s history during the latter part of the twentieth century: the land reform programs, the famine of 1959-1961, the Great Leap Forward, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the Cultural Revolution. Translated into English for the very first time, The Ancient Ship is a revolutionary work of Chinese fiction that speaks to people across the globe.