A gripping tale of adventure and searing reality, Lucky Boy gives voice to two mothers bound together by their love for one lucky boy. “Sekaran has written a page-turner that’s touching and all too real.”—People “A fiercely compassionate story about the bonds and the bounds of motherhood and, ultimately, of love.”—Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans Eighteen years old and fizzing with optimism, Solimar Castro-Valdez embarks on a perilous journey across the Mexican border. Weeks later, she arrives in Berkeley, California, dazed by first love found then lost, and pregnant. This was not the plan. Undocumented and unmoored, Soli discovers that her son, Ignacio, can become her touchstone, and motherhood her identity in a world where she’s otherwise invisible. Kavya Reddy has created a beautiful life in Berkeley, but then she can’t get pregnant and that beautiful life seems suddenly empty. When Soli is placed in immigrant detention and Ignacio comes under Kavya’s care, Kavya finally gets to be the singing, story-telling kind of mother she dreamed of being. But she builds her love on a fault line, her heart wrapped around someone else’s child. “Nacho” to Soli, and “Iggy” to Kavya, the boy is steeped in love, but his destiny and that of his two mothers teeters between two worlds as Soli fights to get back to him. Lucky Boy is a moving and revelatory ode to the ever-changing borders of love.
Corden has written a charming and insightful account of his professional and personal life, from his childhood in Breslau, Germany, until his retirement in Melbourne. The book is divided into two parts. Part I considers Corden's early life, from a young boy growing up in Nazi Germany, to his immigration from England to Australia and what that means for the author's self-identity. Part II addresses Corden's work on the Australian Protection Policy for which he is perhaps best known, before reflecting upon the author's time at Oxford University and the Australian National University, and, finally, moving on to review contributions made at the IMF, Johns Hopkins University, and The World Bank. This book will be of interest to all aspiring economists, as well as established economists familiar with Corden's work. It is an inspiring and profound record of the intellectual journey made by one of Australia's best known economists.
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.
Thomas Buergenthal, now a Judge in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, tells his astonishing experiences as a young boy in his memoir A Lucky Child. He arrived at Auschwitz at age 10 after surviving two ghettos and a labor camp. Separated first from his mother and then his father, Buergenthal managed by his wits and some remarkable strokes of luck to survive on his own. Almost two years after his liberation, Buergenthal was miraculously reunited with his mother and in 1951 arrived in the U.S. to start a new life. Now dedicated to helping those subjected to tyranny throughout the world, Buergenthal writes his story with a simple clarity that highlights the stark details of unimaginable hardship. A Lucky Child is a book that demands to be read by all.
Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there's jazz on nearly every page - The New York Times In 1974, the young and callow Englishman George Armitage goes to Madras in the hopes of returning with at least the beginning of his Ph.D. dissertation. Instead, he comes home with a bride named Viji, an Indian woman he barely knows. This seemingly unlikely pair eventually wind up in Sacramento, where they buy a ranch house and give birth to triplets. In this new American world of shag carpets and pudding pops, Viji seeks consolation in her prayer room, which she visits frequently to gossip, sass, and seek advice from the framed portraits of her dead relatives. It is here where Viji feels most herself and where these deceased family members feel 'as real to her as she'd been to them.' The relative calm of Viji's California existence is interrupted when George's father shows up on their doorstep, unexpected and unannounced. So when Viji's sister sends an out-of-the-blue invitation to visit India, she prepares for her first trip home in nearly eleven years, not knowing for sure if she'll ever return to the States. The Prayer Room re-examines the meaning of family - the people who live down the hall and the people who live only in our memories.
Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy is filled with hints of unsettledness: bus tickets, a storm front, a rootless father, any number of nervously-smoked cigarettes. In cars, vans, pickups, and big rigs, characters seem almost continually on the move. What remains in place, however, is the poet-his unwavering allegiance to memory and attention, as if the poems are a response to Lowell's question "Yet why not say what happened?" In a plain style that is deceptively simple, Lilley chooses just the right word or concrete detail, creates subtle sonic echoes, and leaps suddenly, briefly, into startling metaphors, so these clear-eyed poems are an expression, finally, of something deep and nearly unnameable-some sense that, whatever our afflictions and yearnings, it is still possible, and necessary, to love what we have been given. It is possible to consider ourselves lucky. We are lucky to have this beautiful, wise book. -Chris Forhan, author of My Father Before Me: A Memoir, Black Leapt In, The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, and Forgive Us Our Happiness Mark Lilley's debut collection, Lucky Boy, is a graceful and devastating volume, offered through the voice of a survivor. These poems narrate the struggles, dysfunctions and failures of an American family through fearless disclosures, exquisite language, and gentle ironies. I am deeply struck by this poet's unwavering eye and ear and narrative balance-his aesthetic depth and steadiness in the thick of these disastrous, broken characters and settings. Lilley's tonal control is heroic, given the traumatized interior of these narrations. Lilley's poems remind us that the poem comes bravely, urgently out of the seizure of human despair. It is their artistic and humane victory to transport us to these realms with compassionate insights, empathy and hard-earned tenderness. These poems take us on the impossible yet inevitable journey to personal reckoning. Mark Lilley's lovely and relentless poems answer our human failures with a quiet embrace, acceptance, and a loving ferocity. This is a book always to keep within reach. -George Eklund, author of Altar, Wanting To Be an Element, The Island Blade, and Each Breath I Cannot Hold Enter the deeply emotional world of Mark Lilley's Lucky Boy and you will encounter people striving to escape the inescapable, whether their fates or their hearts. As these poems skillfully navigate the hard truths of poverty, alcoholism, and infidelity, they are punctuated by acts of kindness-from a trucker, a bereft mother, a river. Lilley's poetry itself is a profound act of unequivocal kindness. In its devotion and attentiveness to the broken family, each poem "hold[s] [a] match steady until the stub glows." These poems depict both the wronged and the wrongdoer with an abiding compassion. By the book's end, we are listening to a river, understanding that everyone's been wronged somehow. Lilley's beautifully understated images sing to us as we grieve "through patches of clover and foamflower, / and what they found downstream." I love these lyrical vignettes for their tenderness, for how they address losses often too deep to name. "Why men drift, where men linger, / what happens when a woman receives word." They speak with the hard-earned eloquence of a grief addressed and absorbed. This is a book the world needs, especially now. It is a reminder to be empathetic, humble, and forgiving. These poems will teach you to care. -Alessandra Lynch, author of Daylily Called It a Dangerous Moment and It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight
