UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Libraries, Sept 29

The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell
PR6065.F36 H36 2010

Maggie O’Farrell has a singular knack for sensing the magnetic fields that push and pull people in love, and in The Hand That First Held Mine, she summons those invisible forces to tell two stories. The first is the spirited journey of Lexie Sinclair, a bright, tempestuous woman who finds her way from rural Devon to the center of postwar London’s burgeoning art scene. Her force of personality makes her a natural critic (she’s a wonderful tour guide to Soho’s Bohemian circles), and she soon falls deeply in love. Fast forward fifty years and you’ll meet Ted and Elina: a contemporary London couple who’ve just had their first child, both afflicted with a crisis of memory–Elina can recall only bits and pieces of her life before the baby, while Ted fights off memories he can’t even recognize. O’Farrell alternates these plots artfully, always keeping the incorrigible Lexie in forward motion, while letting Ted and Elina wade further back in time. Inevitably, the two stories collide, and the result is a remarkably taut and unsentimental whole that embraces the unpredictable, both in love and in life. –Anne Bartholomew at amazon.com

Small Kingdoms by Anastasia Hobbet
PS3558.O33638 S63 2010

Set in Kuwait during the ominous years between the two Gulf Wars, Small Kingdoms traces the intersecting lives of five people—rich and poor, native and foreigner, Muslim, Christian, and non-believer—when they discover that a teenaged Indian housemaid is being brutally abused by her employer.

Tensions are high.  Just miles away in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is threatening a second invasion of this tiny desert kingdom, which he destroyed six years before, in 1990. Even without a war on the horizon, rescuing a maid employed in a private home is a sticky matter in this rigid, class-conscious society, where the rich protect their own; and any intervention involves great personal risk.

Emmanuella, an impoverished cook from India, risks losing her job and thus her ability to support her family back home. Kit, the young wife of an American businessman in the Gulf, could face grave damage to her marriage. Mufeeda, an upper-class Kuwaiti woman, must buck the powerful status quo of her family and her class, as well as her own history.

And there’s Hanaan, a rebellious young Arab woman who may have as much to lose as the desperate maid. Having fallen in love with Theo, an American doctor working in the country, she has already faced violent retribution from her family. How much more violence lies ahead she doesn’t know. Stubborn, charismatic, and dismissive of her society’s strict codes of behavior for unmarried women, she will step forward to help the captive maid.

An Upstairs/Downstairs of the Arab world, Small Kingdoms tells the intimate story of ordinary people facing an extraordinary test in the face of another war.

Savages by Don Winslow
PS3573.I5326 S39 2010

A breakthrough novel that pits young kingpins against a Mexican drug cartel, Savages is a provocative, sexy, and sharply funny thrill ride through the dark side of the war on drugs and beyond. Part-time environmentalist and philanthropist Ben and his ex-mercenary buddy Chon run a Laguna Beach–based marijuana operation, reaping significant profits from their loyal clientele. In the past when their turf was challenged, Chon took care of eliminating the threat. But now they may have come up against something that they can’t handle—the Mexican Baja Cartel wants in, and sends them the message that a “no” is unacceptable. When they refuse to back down, the cartel escalates its threat, kidnapping Ophelia, the boys’ playmate and confidante. O’s abduction sets off a dizzying array of ingenious negotiations and gripping plot twists that will captivate readers eager to learn the costs of freedom and the price of one amazing high. Following “the best summertime crime novel ever” (San Francisco Chronicle on The Dawn Patrol), bestselling author Winslow offers up a smash hit in the making. Savages is an ingenious combination of adrenaline-fueled suspense and true-crime reportage by a master thriller writer at the very top of his game.

Elegies for the Brokenhearted: A Novel by Christie Hodgen
PS3608.O47 E54 2010

A skirt-chasing, car-racing uncle with whiskey breath and a three-day beard. A -walking joke, a sitting duck, a fish in a barrel- named Elwood LePoer. A dirt-poor college roommate who conceals an unbearable secret. A failed piano prodigy lost in middle age. A beautiful mother haunted by her once-great aspirations. In Elegies for the Brokenhearted, Mary Murphy tells her own story as she paints lively portraits of the people with whom she’s crossed paths. Having weathered her mother’s erratic movement among homes and multiple husbands, the absence of her runaway sister, and a discouraging search for purpose, Mary’s reflection on her own path intertwines with the histories of the people she’s loved and lost. With a rhythmically unique voice and distinctive wry humor, Christie Hodgen builds an unconventional narrative about the difficult search for identity, belonging, and family.

The Sisters from Hardscrabble Bay by Beverly Jensen
PS3610.E5625 S57 2010

In 1916, Idella and Avis Hillock live on the edge of a chilly bluff in New Brunswick-a hardscrabble world of potato farms and lobster traps, rough men, hard work, and baffling beauty. From “Gone,” the heartbreaking story of their mother’s medical crisis in childbirth, to the darkly comic “Wake,” which follows the grown siblings’ catastrophic efforts to escort their father, “Wild Bill” Hillock’s body to his funeral, the stories of Idella and Avis offer a compelling and wry vision of two remarkable women. The vivid cast includes Idella’s philandering husband Edward, her bewilderingly difficult mother-in-law- and Avis, whose serial romantic disasters never quell her irrepressible spirit. Jensen’s work evokes a time gone by and reads like an instant American classic.

The Surf Guru: Stories by Doug Dorst
PS3604.O78 S87 2010

With the publication of his debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, Doug Dorst was widely celebrated as one of the most creative, original literary voices of his generation-an heir to T.C. Boyle and Denis Johnson, a northern California Haruki Murakami. Now, in his second book, The Surf Guru, his full talent is on display, revealing an ability to explore worlds and capture characters that other writers have not yet discovered.

In the title story, an old surfing-champion-turned-surfwear- entrepreneur sits on his ocean-front balcony watching a new generation of surfers come of age on the waves, all but one of whom wear wet suits emblazoned with the Surf Guru’s name. An acid-tongued, pioneering botanist who has been exiled from the academy composes a series of scurrilous (and hilarious) biographical sketches of his colleagues and rivals, inadvertently telling his own story. A pair of twenty-first- century drifters course through a series of unusual adventures in their dilapidated car, chased west out of one town and into the next, dreaming of hitting the Pacific.

Dorst’s characters have all successfully cultivated a particular expertise, and yet they remain intent on moving toward the horizon, seeking hope in something new. Likewise, each of Dorst’s stories is a virtuoso performance balancing humor and insight, achieving a perfect pitch, pulsing with a gritty and punchy, distinctly American realism- and yet always pushing on into the unexpected, taking us some place new.

Three Sisters by Bi Feiyu
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt and Sylvia Li-chun Lin.
PL2931.5.I18 Y8613 2010

In a small village in China, the Wang family has produced seven sisters in its quest to have a boy; three of the sisters emerge as the lead characters in this remarkable novel. From the small-town treachery of the village to the slogans of the Cultural Revolution to the harried pace of 1980s Beijing, Bi Feiyu follows the women as they strive to change the course of their destinies and battle against an “infinite ocean of people” in a China that does not truly belong to them. Yumi will use her dignity, Yuxiu her powers of seduction, and Yuyang her ambition—all in an effort to take control of their world, their bodies, and their lives.

Like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, and J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Three Sisters transports us to and immerses us in a culture we think we know but will understand much more fully by the time we reach the end. Bi’s Moon Opera was praised by the Los Angeles Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and other publications. In one review Lisa See said: “I hope this is the first of many of Bi’s works to come to us.” Three Sisters fulfills that wish, with its irreplaceable portrait of contemporary Chinese life and indelible story of its three tragic and sometimes triumphant heroines.

Cairo Swan Song by Mekkawi Said
Translated by Adam Talib.
PJ7862.A5236 T3413 2009

Cairo, Mother of the World, embraces millions – but some of her children make their home in the streets, junked up and living in the shadows of wealth and among the monuments that the tourists flock to see. Mustafa, a former student radical who never believed in the slogans, sets out to tell their story, but he has to rely on the help of his American girlfriend, Marcia, who he is not sure he can trust. Meanwhile, his former leftist friends are now all either capitalists or Islamists.

Alienated from a corrupt and corrupting society, Mustafa watches as the Cairo he cherishes crumbles around him. The men and women of the city struggle to find lovers worthy of their love and causes worthy of their sacrifice in a country that no longer deserves their loyalty. The children of the streets wait for the adults to take notice. And the foreigners can always leave.

East Winds, West Winds by Mahdi Issa al-Saqr
Translated by Paul Starkey.
PJ7862.A6475 R5913 2010

Originally published in Cairo in 1998, this carefully crafted novel represents a welcome addition to a body of literature that has so far received less than the attention it merits by comparison with that of Egypt and the Levant. Set among the oil wells of the Basra region of southern Iraq, where the writer spent much of his working life, the novel draws on the author’s own experiences to paint a picture at once subtle and vivid of relations between the British and their local employees in the 1950s.

Much of the action is seen through the eyes of the young, bookish narrator, who is clearly modeled on the author himself. It soon becomes clear that a world of difference separates the lives of Abu Jabbar, Hussein, Istifan, and the rest from that of their European bosses with their company dances and other strange social customs. Although the novel has a strongly nationalistic flavor, it is also suffused with a lingering sense of nostalgia for a gentler age, which will inevitably prompt reflections on the more recent British and US involvement in that unhappy country.

In the Company of Angels: A Novel by Thomas E. Kennedy
PS3561.E4277 I5 2010

Born in 1944 in New York City, Thomas E . Kennedy spent his youth hitchhiking and writing his way around the United States before moving to Europe, where he has quietly published over twenty books. In the decade from 1995 to 2005, he wrote the Copenhagen Quartet, four novels set in the Danish capital, his adopted home. Published in Ireland and Denmark, the Copenhagen Quartet won international awards and was hailed as a “masterpiece” by Duff Brenna. Critics concurred, establishing Kennedy as a daring writer of rare grace and vision. Yet his work has never seen major publication in his native country. In the Company of Angels is the first novel of the Quartet to appear here, a powerful story of two damaged souls struggling from darkness to light. Imprisoned for teaching political poetry to his students, Bernardo Greene has been tortured for months in Pinochet’s Chile when he is visited by two angels who promise that he will survive to experience beauty and love once again. Months later, in Copenhagen, where he has come for treatment, the Chilean exile befriends Michela Ibsen, herself a survivor of domestic abuse. In the long nights of summer, the two of them struggle to heal, to forgive those who have left them damaged, and to trust themselves to love. Taking on the very best and the very worst of human experience, In the Company of Angels is a moving, achingly human story that achieves a fable-like quality rare in contemporary fiction. Dense with wisdom and humanity, this already acclaimed novel is a riveting testament to the resilience and complexity of the human heart.

As If We Were Prey: Stories by Michael Delp
PS3554.E44447 A8 2010

In As If We Were Prey Michael Delp presents working-class male characters who are tried, tested, and pushed to their limits. Struggling with the demons of childhood and the indignities of adult life, they work dead-end jobs, keep the peace within their families, and attempt to assert themselves against authority whenever they can. While Delp’s characters are fathers and sons, students and teachers, they all share a sense of alienation and melancholy that propels them to antics and ill-conceived plans. Although they hope that their rash actions will prove their independence, they generally only reveal their essential vulnerability.

Set mostly in small-town northern Michigan, Delp follows boys and full-grown men who know how to fight, fish, and hunt, but struggle to use those skills to overcome the emptiness and dysfunction of their day-to-day lives. A boy takes revenge on the neighborhood bully and watches his downfall with unexpected emotion, a man visits a tourist attraction with a caged bear and empathizes with the creature, a teacher quits his job and hits the road as a one-man trivia quiz show, a father shares his childhood stories of defeat with his young daughter and inspires her to settle a score, two men catch a giant bass and keep it in the bathtub all winter to fatten it to prize-winning size, and a Vietnam vet and shop teacher switches into combat mode to teach his students a chilling lesson.

The stories in As If We Were Prey are both humorous and haunting, fast-paced and tender. Fans of Delp’s writing as well as all readers of fiction will enjoy these stories of men pushing the limits of their lives.

Eden Springs: A Novella by Laura Kasischke
PS3561.A6993 E34 2010

In 1903, a preacher named Benjamin Purnell and five followers founded a colony called the House of David in Benton Harbor, Michigan, where they prepared for eternal life by creating a heaven on earth. Housed in rambling mansions and surrounded by lush orchards and vineyards, the colony added a thousand followers to its fold within a few years, along with a zoo, extensive gardens, and an amusement park. The sprawling complex, called Eden Springs, was a major tourist attraction of the Midwest. The colonists, who were drawn from far and wide by the magnetic “King Ben,” were told to keep their bodies pure by not cutting their hair, eating meat, or engaging in sexual relations. Yet accounts of life within the colony do not reflect such an austere atmosphere, as the handsome, charming founder is described as loving music, dancing, a good joke, and in particular, the company of his attractive female followers.

In Eden Springs, award-winning Michigan author Laura Kasischke imagines life inside the House of David, in chapters framed by real newspaper clippings, legal documents, and accounts of former colonists. Told from the perspective of the young women who were closest to Benjamin Purnell, the novella follows a growing scandal within the colony’s walls. A gravedigger has seen something suspicious in a recently buried casket, a loyal assistant to Benjamin is plotting a cover-up, talk is swirling about unmarried girls having babies, and a rebellious girl named Lena is ready to tell the truth. In flashbacks and first-person narrative mixed with historical artifacts, Kasischke leads readers through the unraveling mystery in a lyrical patchwork as enticing and satisfying as the story itself.

Eden Springs lets readers inside the enchanting and eerie House of David, with an intimate look at its hedonistic highs and eventual collapse. This novella will appeal to all readers of fiction, as well as those with an interest in Michigan history.