UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Libraries, June 2

The Wings of the Sphinx by Andrea Camilleri;
Translated by Stephen Sartarelli.
PQ4863.A3894 A6513 2009

A young woman is found dead, her face half shot off and only a tattoo of a sphinx moth giving any hint of her identity. The tattoo links her to three similarly marked girls–all victims of the underworld sex trade–who have been rescued from the Mafia night-club circuit by a prominent Catholic charity. When Inspector Salvo Montalbano delves into the case, his inquiries elicit an outcry from the Church–and soon the three other girls are all missing.

The Chill by Romano Bilenchi;
Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein.
PQ4807.I4 G413 2009

Romano Bilenchi’s classic coming of age story, never before published in English, is set in northern Tuscany in the 1950s. The small hill towns and rolling Tuscan countryside provide a suggestive and constantly changing backdrop to a story that is thoroughly Italian in its particulars—its smells, sounds and sights—but universal in its themes.

Here, the changing seasons stir both the vibrant hues of Bilenchi’s Tuscany and the many moods of his young nameless protagonist. But the abiding atmosphere in this tale is, as the title suggests, wintery. Following the death of his beloved grandfather, a chill has descended upon the teenage narrator of this classic tale, leaving him estranged from friends, family, and eventually even from nature itself— although always vivid and animated, the natural splendor of central Italy becomes increasingly harsh and hostile throughout this story. The protagonist’s growing awareness of his own and others’ sexuality leads to a series of difficult, confusing encounters that push him even further within himself. Each small awakening, each intimation of the adult world, with all its alarming ribaldry and vulgarity, drives him further from his kind. His reluctant journey into the adult world culminates in a seemingly innocent erotic adventure that, when discovered, will possess all the destructive potential of a natural disaster and at the same time all the potential for rebirth of a new spring.

The Post-office Girl by Stefan Zweig;
Translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg.
PT2653.W42 R313 2008

The post-office girl is Christine, who looks after her ailing mother and toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon, as she is dozing among the official forms and stamps, a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. After a dizzying train ride, Christine finds herself at the top of the world, enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined.

But Christine’s aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the provincial post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness. Then she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran who is able to give voice to the disaffection of his generation. Christine’s and Ferdinand’s lives spiral downward, before Ferdinand comes up with a plan which will be either their salvation or their doom.

Stefan Zweig worked on The Post Office Girl, originally published as Rausch der Verwandlung in 1982, in intervals for more than twenty years. The manuscript of the book was found completed and awaiting only minor revisions after his suicide in 1941. Never before published in English, this extraordinary book is an unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel.

The Lost Army by Valerio Massimo Manfredi;
Translated from the Italian by Christine Feddersen-Manfredi.
PQ4873.A4776 A79513 2008

In the 4th century BC, in a village in Syria, a woman, dressed in rags and covered in blisters and sores, is seen approaching on the road coming from the north. Suspicious of her, the villagers shout and throw rocks at her. She is struck and falls. She seems dead…Her story encompasses one of the great collective acts of heroism of the ancient world. She was the mistress of Xenophon, a general in the vast army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries from virtually every Greek city state that was employed by Cyrus the Younger, in his quest to seize the throne of Persia from his brother, Artaxerxes II.  Manfredi, one of the world’s experts, has created a rip-roaring adventure seen from the perspective of the women who accompanied the soldiers on their long journey. This is a new and intense account of the most celebrated march in man’s history, by the acclaimed author of the “Alexander” trilogy.

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
PR9540.9.S485 B87 2009

The morning of August 9, 1945 breaks dreary and unspectacular in the city of Nagasaki. Nonetheless, twenty-one year-old Hiroko Tanaka is elated: she is in love. Her emerging romance with the displaced German Konrad Weiss offers release from the greyness of wartime deprivation. In this time of heightened xenophobia, their affair must be kept secret, particularly as Hiroko’s father has recently been outcast for questioning the patriotism of sending children on kamikaze missions. As Hiroko and Konrad furtively plan for a future after the war, there is no way they can comprehend the unspeakable devastation bearing down upon them.

Two years later, Hiroko arrives in Delhi at the home of Konrad’s sister Ilse and his brother-in-law James Burton. Upon Hiroko’s back are crane-shaped scars, seared into her skin when her kimono was incinerated by the bomb. She is on the run from unbearable memories, as well as from the stigma of being branded a hibakusha, a survivor of the bomb. Ilse, in an uncharacteristically impulsive move, welcomes Hiroko into her home, seeing in the brave young woman a possibility of release from her own conscripted existence. Hiroko quickly destabilizes the frigid hierarchy of the household, much to the relief of Sajjad Ashraf, James’s bored servant.

Tensions are running high in the Mohalla with the looming partition of India and Pakistan. Will Sajjad remain in his beloved Dilli/Delhi, or depart with so many others for the promise of Pakistan? Sajjad’s family has secured for him a wife, and he yearns for a legal career, still half-clinging to the hope that James will assist him. But James’s only use for him is as a chess opponent, an idle distraction as the Raj winds to a close. The Burtons are preparing to decamp for England, having already dispatched their son Harry to boarding school. But what James does not know is that Ilse is making other plans.

A romance blooms between Hiroko and Sajjad, much to the incredulity of the Burtons, whose own emotional lives have become entwined in the futures of their charismatic young charges. Despite outbursts of jealousies and a terrible act of betrayal, the Burtons nevertheless assist Hiroko and Sajjad in their flight to married life in Istanbul. Later the Ashrafs will move to Karachi to raise their son, Raza.

The lives of the Ashrafs and the Burtons will remain entwined for decades, though in ways they cannot anticipate. Across continents and through geopolitical flux, each family will continue to act as a catalytic force upon the other, sometimes in life-saving ways, and sometimes causing great peril. Why is it that some bonds flourish in times of crisis, and why do some fail? What defines the character that survives the cruelest of circumstances? And how is it that entire populations can support unspeakable acts en masse, while relating as individuals with compassion?

Longlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction, Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows is an enthralling meta-cultural epic, the panoramic tale of two families tangled together in some of the most devastating conflicts of modern history.

Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill by Dimitri Verhulst;
Translated from the Dutch by David Colmer.
PT6466.32.E5624 M4713 2009

Years ago, Madame Verona and her husband built a home for themselves on a hill in a forest above a small village. There they lived in isolation, practicing their music, and chopping wood to see them through the cold winters. When Mr. Verona died, the locals might have expected that the legendary beauty would return to the village, but Madame Verona had enough wood to keep her warm during the years it would take to make a cello – the instrument her husband loved – and in the meantime she had her dogs for company. And then one cold February morning, when the last log has burned, Madame Verona sets off down the village path, with her cello and her memories, knowing that she will have no strength to climb the hill again. Poignant, precise and perfectly structured, this is a story of one woman’s tender and enduring love – as a wife, and as a widow.

We Never Sleep by Kathrin Röggla;
Translated and with an afterword by Rebecca S. Thomas.
PT2678.O363 W5713 2009

In this masterfully constructed docu-novel Kathrin Röggla ventures into the dysfunctional, self-contained and self-destructive universe of a New Economy trade convention. Here, the horizon of human potential for feeling, experience, and identity is limited by the language and logic of business models. Through a hypnotically rhythmic sequencing of polyphonic dialogs, this explosive novel reveals how the models of efficiency and performance used to quantify business success turn destructive when used to measure human worth, evaluate human experience. Through the conversations of six representative figures, the IT supporter, the online editor, the senior associate, the key account manager, the partner and the intern, the reader is led deeper into the psychological desert of a labor force that has internalized values inimical to both its individual and collective survival. The pressure to perform is driven by the pace of the twenty-four hour work cycle and the frenzied competition motivated by the first signs of collapse and panic in the New Economy boom. Going days without sleep is a point of honor. There is no quitting time. The novel is both a darkly comedic and deeply disturbing view of the work world in the digital age.

My Brother Is an Only Child by Antonio Pennacchi;
Translated by Jordan Lancaster.
PQ4876.E485 F3713 2008

Translated from the Italian best-seller Il Fasciocomunista, and now a multi-award winning film, My Brother Is An Only Child is an unforgettable coming-of-age story of love, family and politics. Accio is a trouble-maker. Impulsive and explosive, he forever causes his parents despair. His brother, Manrico, is handsome, charismatic, and loved by all, but just as dangerous…  In the Italian small-town life of the 60s and 70s, the two brothers with their opposing political beliefs fall in love with the same woman and are drawn apart. My Brother Is An Only Child is a story about growing up, where fifteen years of Italian history pass by as we experience the adventures of Accio and Manrico, two brothers, very different, yet so alike…