An American baby boomer's searing memoir of the ordeals of her Polish mother and half sister as slave laborers in Siberia who escaped and survived, leaving a legacy of trauma to the next generation.
An extraordinary talent bursts on the fantasy scene with a remarkably engaging novel. Lady Angarred Hashan was raised in exile far from Pergodi, the capital city. Angarred never knew what had caused her father's exile; she only knew that at the age of four, she was brought to Hashan House, an isolated and crumbling manor, and raised by servants. Her mother, she was told, had died. Angarred spent hours in her mother's rooms, handling the fine dresses of Emindal cloth---when she wasn't running wild through the forests and fields. Her father was distant and obsessed with regaining his place at court. The only visitors they ever saw were secretive men and women who brought news of the events at court---news of wars and alliances, of the queen's failure to conceive an heir, of the Princess Roharren's madness and Prince Norue's growing power, and of the disappearance of the magicians. The visitors came and went, plotting revenge for mysterious slights, eating and drinking their way through the storerooms while Hashan House fell down around them. But one day, while hunting in the forest, Lord Hashan was murdered. And Angarred, in her outrage, determined to go to the capital and seek justice from the king---for, surely, the murderer of a lord, even an exiled lord, should be punished! But the naïve young woman finds a swirling world of palace intrigue, a dying queen, and an ensorcelled king. With the help of Mathewar, a handsome but very troubled, magician, she journeys from the crowded streets of Pergodi to the Enchanted Forest, from the deadly land of the Others to the arches of the Giant's Bridge, as she begins to unravel the secrets of the kingdom and her own history.
Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.
The swooning Victorian ladies and the 1950s housewives genuinely needed to be liberated. That much is indisputable. So, First-Wave feminists held rallies for women's suffrage. Second-Wave feminists marched for Prohibition, jobs, and abortion. Today, Third-Wave feminists stand firmly for nobody's quite sure what. But modern women--who use psychotherapeutic antidepressants at a rate never before seen in history--need liberating now more than ever. The truth is, feminists don't know what liberation is. They have led us into a very boring dead end. Eve in Exile sets aside all stereotypes of mid-century housewives, of China-doll femininity, of Victorians fainting, of women not allowed to think for themselves or talk to the men about anything interesting or important. It dismisses the pencil-skirted and stiletto-heeled executives of TV, the outspoken feminists freed from all that hinders them, the brave career women in charge of their own destinies. Once those fictionalized stereotypes are out of the way--whether they're things that make you gag or things you think look pretty fun--Christians can focus on real women. What did God make real women for?
Biography of the Franciscan Sister (1838-1918) who worked for many years among the lepers on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai, originally published in 1980 as A song of pilgrimage and exile (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Exiled from Yugoslavia, Tania Romanov's family immigrated to a promising future in San Francisco. But her Russian father's resistance to assimilation leaves her with deep resentment--and unanswered questions after his death. Serendipity and a descendant of the Tsar catapult Tania on a life-changing quest for forgiveness and redemption.
Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which later grew into Book of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. Cohen himself expressed, "I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother."
A "novel based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, following a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia"--
Between the eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, countless African Americans passed as white, leaving behind families and friends, roots and community. It was, as Allyson Hobbs writes, a chosen exile, a separation from one racial identity and the leap into another. This revelatory history of passing explores the possibilities and challenges that racial indeterminacy presented to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions. It also tells a tale of loss. As racial relations in America have evolved so has the significance of passing. To pass as white in the antebellum South was to escape the shackles of slavery. After emancipation, many African Americans came to regard passing as a form of betrayal, a selling of one’s birthright. When the initially hopeful period of Reconstruction proved short-lived, passing became an opportunity to defy Jim Crow and strike out on one’s own. Although black Americans who adopted white identities reaped benefits of expanded opportunity and mobility, Hobbs helps us to recognize and understand the grief, loneliness, and isolation that accompanied—and often outweighed—these rewards. By the dawning of the civil rights era, more and more racially mixed Americans felt the loss of kin and community was too much to bear, that it was time to “pass out” and embrace a black identity. Although recent decades have witnessed an increasingly multiracial society and a growing acceptance of hybridity, the problem of race and identity remains at the center of public debate and emotionally fraught personal decisions.