UGA Libraries News & Events

New Fiction at the Libraries, Sept 8

American Music by Jane Mendelsohn
PS3563.E482 A8 2010

From the author of I Was Amelia Earhart, a luminous love story that winds through several generations—told in Jane Mendelsohn’s distinctive, mesmerizing style.

At its center: Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq war confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.

As Milo’s treatment progresses, the images begin to weave together in an intricate, mysterious tapestry of stories. There are Joe and Pearl, a husband and wife in the 1930s, whose marriage is tested by Pearl’s bewitching artistic cousin, Vivian. There is the heartrending story of a woman photographer in the 1960s and the shocking theft of her life’s work. And the story of a man and woman in seventeenth-century Turkey—a eunuch and a sultan’s concubine—whose forbidden love is captured in music. The stories converge in a symphonic crescendo that reveals the far-flung origins of America’s endlessly romantic soul and exposes the source of Honor and Milo’s own love.

A beautiful mystery and a meditation on love—its power and limitations—American Music is a brilliantly original novel.

Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger: New and Selected Stories by Lee Smith
PS3569.M5376 M77 2010

Smith slips effortlessly into the voices of her funny, smarter-than-they-look characters in her latest collection (after News of the Spirit), containing a handful of new works among some old favorites. In “Toastmaster,” a family’s dinner outing is parsed from the point of view of a brainy 11-year-old who sees through the motivations of his flaky mother and demonstrates his powers of observation when a group of joking, drunken men enter the restaurant. Similarly, “Big Girl” allows an overweight wife who has sacrificed everything for her awful husband to tell her story while attaining the ultimate emancipation.

Each tale is beautifully honed and captures in subtle detail and gentle irony the essential humanity of characters who might initially strike the reader as superficial or unsympathetic. “House Tour,” for instance, finds a cynical wife and mother contemplating her possible alcoholism when her house is overrun by an endearing group of similarly life-worn but irrepressible women who mistake her house for one on their home tour. Other tales about indomitable wives and mothers will be familiar to Smith’s fans and round out this thoroughly enjoyable collection. — Publishers Weekly

The Birth of Love: A Novel by Joanna Kavenna
PR6111.A88 B57 2010

The year is 1865. In Vienna, Dr. Ignasz Semmelweiss has been hounded into an asylum by his medical peers, ridiculed for his claim that doctors’ unwashed hands are the root cause of childbed fever. In present-day London, Bridget Hughes juggles her young son, husband, and mother as she plans her home birth, unprepared for the trial she is about to endure. Somewhere in 2135, in a world where humans are birthed and raised in breeding farms, Prisoner 730004 is on trial for concealing a pregnancy.

Through three stories spanning centuries, acclaimed novelist Joanna Kavenna explores the most basic plight of women, from the slaughterhouse of primitive medicine to a futurisic vision of technological oppression. Poised at the midpoint is Bridget, whose fervent belief in the wisdom of nature is tested in one of the most gripping accounts of labor to appear in fiction.

Original, powerful, and played out against a vast canvas, The Birth of Love is at once a novel about the creation of human life, science and faith, madness and compromise, and the epic journey of motherhood.

Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman
PS3603.H373 Y68 2010

In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege—the “up-patients.” They are tended to by head nurse Sunny Taylor, an American who has fled an ill-starred life only to retreat behind a mask of crisp professionalism. On a late-summer day a new patient arrives on Sunny’s ward— a faded, irascible former ballroom-dance instructor named Julia Dey. Sunny takes it upon herself to pierce the mystery of Julia’s reserve. Soon, Julia’s difficulty, her tightly coiled anger, places her at the center of the ward’s tangled emotional life. This fraught dynamic animates Maile Chapman’s ambitious first novel. As summer turns to fall, and fall to a long, dark winter, the patients hear rumors about changes being implemented at Suvanto by an American obstetrician, Dr. Peter Weber, who is experimenting with a new surgical stitch. Their familiar routine threatened, the women are not happy (they were not happy before), and the story’s escalating menace builds to a terrifying conclusion.

Even the Dogs: A Novel by Jon McGregor
PR6113.C48 E84 2010

On a cold, quiet day between Christmas and the New Year, a man’s body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on, but they’re dead, too, their bodies found in remote corners of the city. Victims of heroin overdose, they’re in the shadows, a chorus keeping vigil as the hours pass, paying homage as their friend’s body is taken away, examined, investigated, and cremated. All of their stories are laid out piece by broken piece through a series of fractured narratives—of lives fallen through the cracks, hopes flaring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world. These invisible people live in a parallel reality, out of reach of basic creature comforts, like food and shelter. In their sudden deaths, it becomes clear, they are treated with more respect than they ever were in their short lives. Intense, exhilarating, and shot through with hope and fury, Even the Dogs is an intimate exploration of life at the edges of society—littered with love, loss, despair, and a half-glimpse of redemption.

What We Are by Peter Nathaniel Malae
PS3613.A423 W53 2010

Follows 28-year-old Samoan-American Paul Tusifale as he strives to find his place in a culture that barely acknowledges his existence. Paul drifts on and off the radar in San Jose, California, fighting to define himself within a system that has no easy or predetermined place for him. At first he tries to live outside society, an unemployed drifter who takes a personal interest in defiantly–even violently–defending those in need. But when life as an urban Robin Hood fails to provide the answers he seeks, Paul takes a chance on the straight-and-narrow.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes
PS3613.A76594 M38 2010

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

The Changeling by Kenzaburō Ōe
Translated from the Japanese by Deborah Boliver Boehm.
PL858.E14 C4813 2010

Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburō Ōe is one of our most important and acclaimed international voices. In The Changeling, Ōe takes readers from the forests of southern Japan to the washed-out streets of Berlin as he investigates the impact our real and imagined pasts have on the course of our lives.

Writer Kogito Choko is in his sixties when he rekindles a childhood friendship with his estranged brother-in-law, the renowned filmmaker Goro Hanawa. As part of their correspondence, Goro sends Kogito a trunk of tapes he has recorded; they contain his reflections on their youth and estrangement. But as Kogito is listening to Goro’s cassettes one evening, he hears something odd. “I’m going to head over to the Other Side now,” Goro says in the recording, followed by a loud thud. “But don’t worry,” he continues, “I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” Later that night, Kogito’s wife rushes in; Goro has jumped to his death from the roof of his production company’s headquarters in a glitzy Tokyo neighborhood.

Goro’s suicide shakes Kogito to his core, but also spurs the aging writer on a mission to reacquaint himself with his late brother-in-law. Kogito begins a far-ranging search for clues about his friend’s path, a quest that takes him from Japan to Berlin-and finally on an interior journey to the rural island of his youth. There, during the first months of the Occupation of Japan, he and Goro become involved in a right-wing paramilitary group. Their ill-conceived plot to attack an American military base would change Goro-and their friendship-forever.

A sweeping, richly textured work, The Changeling blends motifs from Japanese history, the writings of Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Sendak, and snippets from modern filmmaking to form a stunning take of brotherhood, loss, and artistic ambition-one that confirms Kenzaburō Ōe as a defining talent of our age.

The Eighth Day by Mitsuyo Kakuta
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
PL872.5.A3 Y6513 2010

Told in two parts, Mitsuyo Kakuta’s second novel in English compellingly depicts a woman’s love for the child she has kidnapped–and what it is like to be that child after she is returned to her real family at the age of four.

The novel opens in 1985. Kiwako Nonomiya is distraught after the married man she had been in love with manipulates her into getting an abortion, then refuses to divorce his wife, reneging on a promise. One morning, while he and his wife are away, Kiwako sneaks into their home to get a look at their six-month-old child. Without a thought for the consequences, she carries the baby away.

What follows is a dramatic first-person account of Kiwako’s life on the run. For three and a half years she eludes the authorities, moving from one part of the country to the next seeking a safe place to raise the child–from Tokyo to Nagoya, to an all-female commune run by a religious cult near Nara, to a peaceful life on an island in the Inland Sea, with its many festivals. Throughout her flight, Kiwako commands our sympathy despite the nagging of our conscience.

The second part takes place in 2005. Erina, the abducted child, is now twenty and living on her own. She has few memories of her life with Kiwako, and only manages to piece together what happened by reading about the events in old newspapers and magazines. She struggles with her identity. The past seems to repeat itself. Will she turn out like Kiwako, or will she break the cycle and find her own future?

Why are we who we are? What does it mean to be a mother? And can we control our own destiny? These are the questions this riveting novel asks.

The Dogs and the Wolves by Irène Némirovsky
Translated from the French by Sandra Smith.
PQ2627.E4 C4513 2009

A wonderful, panoramic novel and an achingly poignant love story that goes back to Irène Némirovsky’s roots, from the bestselling author of Suite Française. Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind. Harry Sinner also comes to Paris to mingle in exclusive circles, until one day he buys two paintings which remind him of his past and the course of Ada’s life changes once more.But then recession and revolutions shake previously rich regimes. As summer draws to a close, Ada’s world is disintegrating, and she is faced with a fateful decision.

Light of My Eye by Paula Jacques
Translated by Susan Cohen-Nicole.
PQ2670.A2575 L8613 2009

In Light of My Eye, Paula Jacques, born in Egypt, recreates the vanished world of cosmopolitan Cairo with remembered affection and amusing dialogue. Her novel depicts the turbulent waning days of its once thriving Jewish community, during the strange and ominous time between the collapse of the Egyptian monarchy and Nasser’s rise to power. At its center are the pre-adolescent Mona Castro and her family, whose lives and destinies the author evokes in a series of scenes that veer between poignancy and wit.

Mona’s coming of age is marked by her youthful rebellion against her domineering mother, Becky; the illness of the beloved family patriarch, Joucky; and her half-innocent dalliance with an older man, a refugee from eastern Europe. The surrounding ensemble of relatives, whose family gatherings attempt to cope with a history that will overwhelm them, shifts the focus from Mona’ s tale to a chronicle of a proud, doomed family.

Night of the Golden Butterfly by Tariq Ali
PR6051.L44 N54 2010

Night of the Golden Butterfly concludes the Islam Quintet—Tariq Ali’s much lauded series of historical novels, translated into more than a dozen languages, that has been twenty years in the writing. Completing an epic panorama that began in fifteenth-century Moorish Spain, the latest novel moves between the cities of the twenty-first century, from Lahore to London, from Paris to Beijing.

The narrator is rung one morning and reminded that he owes a debt of honour. The creditor is Mohammed Aflatun—known as Plato—an irascible but gifted painter living in a Pakistan where “human dignity has become a wreckage.” Plato, who once specialized in stepping back from the limelight, now wants his life story written. As the tale unravels we meet Plato’s London friend Alice Stepford, now a leading music critic in New York; Mrs. “Naughty” Latif, the Islamabad housewife whose fondness for generals leads to her flight to the salons of intellectually fashionable Paris, where she is hailed as the Diderot of the Islamic world; and there’s Jindie, the Golden Butterfly of the title, the narrator’s first love.

Interwoven with this chronicle of contemporary life is the turbulent history of Jindie’s family. Her great forebear, Dù Wénxiù, led a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan in the nineteenth century and ruled the region from his capital Dali for almost a decade, as Sultan Suleiman. Night of the Golden Butterfly reveals Ali in full flight, at once imaginative and intelligent, satirical and stimulating.

Homicide Survivors Picnic  and Other Stories by Lorraine M. López
PS3612.O635 H66 2009

“In a voice that is all at once hilarious and mischievous, searing and seething and sardonic, Lorraine Lopez presents, in her most necessary book to date, a celebration of the liberating power of bad behavior,” writes Heather Sellers about Homicide Survivors Picnic: And Other Stories. Most of the stories are set in the South and focus around family relationships, by birth and choice, among characters from Latino and other backgrounds. Lydia, a childless linguist, takes care of her precious four-year-old niece while the mother faces jail. Social worker Rita rents the empty half of her duplex to her loser ex-husband, with disastrous results. And in the title story, teenager Ted winds up attending a homicide survivor’s picnic with his sister, who is mourning her recently slain boyfriend whom Ted barely knew. “We are moved by her characters’ difficult dilemmas without being traumatized,” writes Lynn Pruett. And Manuel Munoz agrees, “All of the refined and subtle humor we’ve come to expect from Lopez…. A marvelous collection.”

Swell by Iōanna Karystianē
translated from the Modern Greek by Konstantine Matsoukas.
PA5622.A7576 S84 2010

The moment of reckoning has come for Captain Mitsos Avgustìs. After twelve years at sea it is time to go home to the Island on which he was born: home to his wife Flora, his two daughters, his son, a granddaughter he has never met, and Litsa, his lover from all those years ago; a modern-day Penelope awaiting the return of her Ulysses. It will take all Avgustìs’s courage and strength to face the squalls and storms on land after a lifetime at sea-and all the while, he must resist the ocean’s siren song bidding him return, tempting him back to the cargo vessel, the Athos III, that he so reluctantly left. It is there that his demons lurk, there that his terrible secrets are buried, there that his true home lies. Statuesque like Poseidon, gruff yet tender, a true legend of the seven seas, Avgustìs will learn that no matter how many or how varied one’s experiences of life have been, there is always something new to learn.

And the price of learning certain lessons so late in life can be terribly steep. He will seek comfort in the gentle rolling of the ocean’s swell and the silent currents that have healed sailors’ wounds since time immemorial. A sweeping saga about love and hope set in modern-day Greece, Swell is Karistiani’s most moving and gripping novel yet.

Spinning Tropics: A Novel by Aska Mochizuki
Translated from the Japanese by Wayne P. Lammers.
PL873.O35 K53 2009

Meet Hiro. She’s tall, lanky and awkward—a twenty-something Japanese woman who has decamped to Vietnam from Tokyo to work as a language teacher.

Meet Dung. She’s shy, beautiful, and tough—a young Vietnamese woman studying Japanese, determined to create a better life for herself and her family.

When Dung becomes one of Hiro’s students, they are instantly drawn to each other. For both of them, it is their first time in love with another woman. But when Konno, an older Japanese businessman, befriends Hiro, Dung begins to grow unbearably jealous. What unfolds is a love triangle with very complicated, ultimately devastating, results.  Set against the backdrop of a Vietnam on the economic rise, debut novelist Aska Mochizuki vividly brings to life the buzz of motorcycles and the tastes of Vietnamese coffee and spicy papaya salads; the confines of the Vietnamese family; the lingering effects of long wars; the rich who ride the economic wave and the poor who are left behind. Spinning Tropics is a lush and evocative story of an intoxicating love affair.

Carbine: Stories by Greg Mulcahy
PS3563.U389 C33 2010

In these 41 brief, surprising stories, Mulcahy (Constellation) mines everyman’s deep sense of failure and spiritual alienation. Hat sets out a typical conflict: a middle-aged office worker, trapped in an interminable meeting with a bland facilitator, daydreams about starting over with his disgruntled spouse. In Graceland, a man reflects on a corny tourist photo of him and his wife snapped at the Elvis mecca and imagines it has captured the two stuck in a moment both past and future—exposing a culture eternally recycled and possessing varieties of chaos to come. In the longest story, Architecture of the French Novel, a doleful character ruminates on memories of a now dead acquaintance, Jules, and his wife, Penelope, striking a dark and obsessive chord. Above all, Mulcahy’s characters desire to assume some relevance, like Bill in Account, who wants to cease being invisible (Hey, you’re that guy, a stranger remarks to him, shocking him), move beyond failures of the past, and find purpose. Mulcahy packs a surprising amount of power into each of these understated and beautifully wrought pieces. — Publishers Weekly