 Memorial Hall Library
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Literary Fiction August 2019 |
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The nickel boys : a novel
by Colson Whitehead
A follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning, The Underground Railroad, follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida
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Middle England : a novel
by Jonathan Coe
A satirical tale by the award-winning author of Number 11 is set against a backdrop of the Olympics and Brexit years in London and depicts characters ranging from politically divided newlyweds to the radical daughter of an austere columnist.
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Jacob's ladder
by Liudmila Ulitskaia
A family saga set against a backdrop of Russian history is told through the writings of an early 20th-century patriarch and the experiences of his granddaughter in 1970s Moscow. By the award-winning author of The Big Green Tent
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Marilou is everywhere
by Sarah Smith
Enduring impossible hardships stemming from her mother's frequent disappearances, 14-year-old Cindy runs away and assumes the identity of a glamorous missing teen from an affluent community, where she struggles with her first encounters with maternal love.
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The volunteer : a novel
by Salvatore Scibona
"A long-awaited new novel from a National Book Award Finalist, the epic story of a restless young man who is captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the United States government. A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision,the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning. With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling"
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The Cuban Comedy
by Pablo Medina
Bringing 1960s Cuba to life, this hilarious social and political satire follows Elena, the daughter of a firewater distiller, as she, after winning a national poetry prize, leaves her village behind to enter Havana where its residents are adjusting to a new way of life, post-revolution. Original.
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The capital
by Robert Menasse
In a U.S. release of a German Book Prize winner, a Greek Cypriot attempts to revamp the European Commission's image by proclaiming Auschwitz as its birthplace, enmeshing an eccentric cast of characters into the hazards of a fiercely nationalistic union.
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A Girl Returned
by Donatella Di Pietrantonio
A 13 year old girl is sent away from the only family she's ever known to begin a new life of struggle, tension and conflict in Abruzzo in central Italy in the English-language debut of the award-winning Italian novelist. Original.
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The dry heart
by Natalia Ginzburg
"Finally back in print, a frighteningly lucid feminist horror story about marriage The Dry Heart begins and ends with the matter-of-fact pronouncement, 'I shot him between the eyes.' Everything in between is a plunge into the chilly waters of loneliness,desperation, and bitterness, and as the tale proceeds, the narrator's murder of her flighty husband takes on a certain logical inevitability. In this powerful novella, Natalia Ginzburg's writing is white-hot, fueled by rage, stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality; she transforms an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that might pose the question: Why don't more wives kill their husbands?"
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A particular kind of black man
by Tope Folarin
A Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing offers a novel about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uncomfortable assimilation into American life. 50,000 first printing.
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Memorial Hall Library
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Andover, MA 01810
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www.mhl.org
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