UGA Libraries News & Events

New fiction at the Libraries, Oct 7

The Great Lover by Jill Dawson
PR6054.A923 G74 2009

Nell Golightly is living out her widowhood in Cambridgeshire when she receives a strange request: a Tahitian woman, claiming to be the daughter of the poet Rupert Brooke, writes to ask what he was like: how did he sound, what did he smell like, how did it feel to wrap your arms around him? So Nell turns her mind to 1909 when, as a seventeen-year-old housemaid, she first encountered the young poet. He was already causing a stir – not only with his poems and famed good looks, but also by his taboo-breaking behaviour and radical politics. Intrigued, she watched as Rupert skilfully managed his male and female admirers, all of whom seemed to be in love with him. Soon Nell realised that despite her good sense, she was falling for him too. But could he love a housemaid? Was he, in fact, capable of love at all?

In a dazzling act of imagination, Jill Dawson gives voice to Rupert Brooke himself in a dual narrative that unfolds in both his own words and those of her spirited fictional character, Nell. A memorable tale of love in many guises, of heartbreak and loss, the novel brings Brooke vividly to life as it shows him to have been a far more interesting, complex and troubled figure than the romanticised version allows.

Tender by Mark Illis
PR6059.L45 T46 2009

Tender is the story of the Dax family. Or the stories of the Dax family. When Ali and Bill meet it’s 1974, she’s a physiotherapist with a broken heart, he’s a cycle courier who dreams of writing a Hollywood film. In the next story it’s their first wedding anniversary, in the next Ali’s pregnant, and so we go on, revisiting the family on key occasions over thirty years, watching relationships develop, children grow up, big moments occur, as life unfolds in its normal, and sometimes far from normal, way. The point of view shifts from story to story, so that we see things first through Ali’s eyes, then Bill’s, and later through the eyes of their children, Sean and Rosa. And then there’s Ali’s brother, Frank, popping up now and then with his own unique way of viewing the world. And what happens? At various times, Ali has murder on her mind, Bill fears his life is turning into sit-com, Rosa is bullied, Sean plots escape and Frank …no one really knows what’s going on in Frank’s head. Just an ordinary family, then, trying to cope with life, and each other. A family with a history that develops in front of your eyes. A family with stories to tell.

Leaving the World: A Novel by Douglas Kennedy
PR6061.E5956 L43 2010

Years after vowing to herself and her parents to never marry, have children and lead the resentful life they chose, Jane, now a Harvard professor, falls unexpectedly pregnant. Resolved as she’s been to childlessness, she begins to warm to the idea of motherhood, even with a partner who is increasingly absent. But a devastating turn of events takes the decision out of her hands in a way she could never have predicted.

Her familiar world torn apart, Jane feels forced to leave her old life behind. She resigns from her job, cuts all ties with friends and family and moves to a place where no one will find her. Isolated, she feels she has finally succeeded in leaving her world.

Yet when a young girl disappears, prompting a high-profile police investigation, Jane is drawn in. Convinced that the person at the heart of the case is much closer to her new community than anyone realizes, she has to make a decision to either stay hidden or bring to light a shocking truth.

Jesus in America: And Other Stories from the Field by Claudia Gould
PS3607.O884 J47 2009

Claudia Gould draws on fieldwork she conducted, as an anthropologist, in North Carolina, where she earlier spent large parts of her childhood, among a net of paternal relations. From that ethnography and from lifelong observation, she crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist Christian belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them pull us into the complicated, variable core of religious experience among southern American Christians. Jesus in America, a perceptive work rich with cultural insight, is a singular addition to the growing genre of ethnographic fiction.

The Love Children by Marilyn French
PS3556.R42 L68 2009

Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room epitomized the feminist movement and became one of the most influential books of our time. Now, in her last novel, she has captured the complexities of life for the daughters of The Women’s Room generation in her highly anticipated new novel The Love Children.

It is the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Grateful Dead is playing on the radio and teenagers are wearing long hair and blue jeans. Jess Leighton, the daughter of a temperamental painter and a proto-feminist Harvard professor, is struggling to make sense of her world amid racial tensions, Vietnam War protests, and anti-government rage. With more options than her mother’s generation, but no role model for creating the life she desires, Jess experiments with sex and psychedelic drugs as she searches for happiness on her own terms. In the midst of joining and fleeing a commune, growing organic vegetables, and operating a sustainable restaurant, Jess grapples with the legacy of her mother’s generation.

Going through Ghosts: A Novel by Mary Sojourner
PS3569.O45 G65 2010

Maggie Foltz is a fifty-five-year-old cocktail waitress in a rundown casino in the southern Nevada Mojave Desert. She spends her days serving drinks to lonely old folks playing the slot machines and her nights trying to escape her bitter past. When she befriends Sarah, a young Native American woman who is hired to cook in the casino coffee shop, her life begins to change. Maggie finds herself falling in love with a memory-haunted Vietnam veteran and warily begins to hope that together they can find peace. Then Sarah is mysteriously murdered, and Sarah’s ghost enlists Maggie to accompany her on a quest for the wisdom that she needs in order to move into the next world. The story ranges from the smoky casino into the harsh magnificence of the desert and the reservation where Sarah’s people are trying to preserve their culture and find their own place in a modern world that seems to want them to be either shamans or losers. Sojourner’s characters are compellingly real, and the Mojave setting has rarely been depicted as sensitively or truthfully. This is a memorable story of love, redemption, and solace, told by one of the West’s finest writers.

When a Tree Falls by Beatriz Rivera
PS3568.I8287 W48 2010

Otilia Mancuso is a self-professed Xanax poster girl who works, sleeps, breathes, loves and bribes in Hudson County. She has lived in a high rise next to the Holland Tunnel ever since she was elected to the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Her sudden and unexpected election–to a seat vacated by the untimely death of her predecessor in a sleazy motel–made her the first woman to be elected legislator at the county level.

But now, all Otilia wants is to click her heels together and disappear from the mess she’s in. Faced with the threat of serving hard time for her part in an illicit love affair, Otilia finds herself charged with four counts of aiding and abetting extortion and three counts of mail fraud. How could delivering an envelope full of money for her lover–a psychiatrist providing millions of dollars worth of services to county facilities–to the county executive be considered bribery?

Cuban-American writer Beatriz Rivera serves up another offbeat love story full of oddball characters in absurd situations: Dr. Chico Chanca, a clog-wearing, tea-drinking psychiatrist who is obsessed with yoga, financial success, and cheap-motel sex; his gorgeous wife Laura, a passionate animal rights advocate and brilliant veterinarian who has a predilection for expensive designer clothing, organic food, and breast implants; and Amber Delrio, the owner of Sacred Greens Farm and a yoga school who has taken an eternal vow of chastity.

Loosely based on the machinations of New Jersey politicians, the off-the-wall antics of Rivera’s eccentric characters are sure to entertain and amuse.

News from Home: Stories by Sefi Atta
PS3601.T78 N49 2010

From Zamfara up north to the Niger delta down south, with a finale in Lagos, this collection of stories and a novella respond to and amplify the newspaper headlines in a range of Nigerian voices. Men, women, and children speak out to us from these stories, from immigration centers and police barracks, from street corners and maternity wards. Ghanaian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali says, Sefi Atta “writes like one who has lived the life of each single character in her dazzling collection of short stories.”

Base Ten: A Novel by Maryann Lesert
PS3612.E75 B37 2009

Compelling and fiercely honest, Base Ten exposes the daily battles of women scientists fighting to preserve a family life and succeed in a discipline that functions on the archaic belief that every scientist has a “wife” at home.

Reared to believe that she could do anything, astrophysicist Jillian Greer dreamed of going into space. When she and her research partner Kera Sullivan invented a specialized telescope, it looked as though these two dogged scientists would fulfill the dream they shared.

But ten years later, as Kera trains in a space simulator, Jillian is married and a mother, packing lunches and helping her kids with homework. As her fortieth birthday (the unofficial age limit of the space program) draws near, Jillian decides that things have to change. Leaving her family for ten days, one day for each year she has put her career on hold, she seeks solitude in the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, where she struggles to see if she can find her way back to the stars.

Munira’s Bottle by Yousef al-Mohaimeed
Translated by Anthony Calderbank.
PJ7850.U4538 Q3713 2010

In Riyadh, against the events of the second Gulf War and Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, we learn the story of Munira—with the gorgeous eyes—and the unspeakable tragedy she suffers as her male nemesis wreaks revenge for an insult to his character and manhood. It is also the tale of many other women of Saudi Arabia who pass through the remand center where Munira works, victims and perpetrators of crimes, characters pained and tormented, trapped in cocoons of silence and fear. Munira records their stories on pieces of paper that she folds up and places in the mysterious bottle given to her long ago by her grandmother, a repository for the stories of the dead, that they might live again.

This controversial novel looks at many of the issues that characterize the lives of women in modern Saudi society, including magic and envy, honor and revenge, and the strict moral code that dictates male–female interaction.

Mother Nature by Emilia Pardo Bazán
Translated from the Spanish by Walter Borenstein.
PQ6629.A7 M313 2010

Mother Nature (1887) is the sequel to Emilia Pardo Bazán’s most famous novel, The House of Ulloa, written one year earlier. It continues where the earlier work left off, when the priest, Julian, who had vainly struggled to protect the life and interests of the doomed mother of Manuela, sees the girl cavorting through the meadow with Perucho, who will turn out to be her half-brother. The reader will follow the course of the ill-starred relationship between the two, which turns from childish affection to romantic love.

Pardo Bazán’s novel demonstrates the impact of the incipient social and biological sciences on creative writing, thus reflecting the influence of Émile Zola’s Naturalistic tendencies, while still maintaining tinges of Romanticism. It addresses questions that remain very contemporary and controversial, and poses the opposition of nature to virtue, romantic love as ennobling or basely instinctual, and gives the reader an example of the problem of incest and other forms of sexual transgression. She recognizes the role of religion and its influence on morality, the conflict between regional and centralized culture, the contrast between rural and urban visions of life, as well as the eternal struggle of women for better education, freedom, and self-determination. The pages of the novel contain some of the finest examples of her literary craft, and give evidence of its expressive dialogue, dramatic tension, and vivid portrayals of characters, scenes, and situations.

Dimanche and Other Stories by Irène Némirovsky
Translated from the French by Bridget Patterson.
PQ2627.E4 D5613 2010

Written between 1934 and 1942, these ten gem-like stories mine the same terrain of Némirovsky’s bestselling novel Suite Française: a keen eye for the details of social class; the tensions between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives; the manners and mannerisms of the French bourgeoisie; questions of religion and personal identity. Moving from the drawing rooms of pre-war Paris to the lives of men and women in wartime France, here we find the beautiful work of a writer at the height of her tragically short career.

Departing at Dawn: A Novel of Argentina’s Dirty War by Gloria Lisé
Translated by Alice Weldon.
PQ7798.422.I74 V5413 2009

March 23, 1976. Berta watches as her lover, Atilio, a union organizer, is thrown from a window to his death on the sidewalk below. The next day, Colonel Jorge Rafael Videla stages a coup d’etat and a military dictatorship takes control of Argentina. Though never a part of Atilio’s union efforts, Berta is on a list to be “disappeared” and flees to relatives in the countryside. There she becomes part of the family she knows only from old photographs: Aunt Avelina, who blasts records from an old player; Uncle Nepomuceno, who watches slugs slither in the garden every afternoon; and Uncle Javier, who sits in his tiny grocery store day and night. When Berta learns that government officials are still looking for her, she realizes she must run even further to save her life.

Gloria Lise describes a terrifying period in her nation’s history with a touch that is light yet penetrating. A powerful portrait of Argentinians caught up in traumas that have haunted the country ever since.