A kaleidoscopic debut for fans of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and readers of literary magical realism, like the work of Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tea Obreht.
BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY
by Violet Kupersmith
Random House, Summer 2021
(chez The Friedrich Agency – voir catalogue)
1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience.
2009: Pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra.
2011: Winnie, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend, disappears without a trace.
Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds the three women together, and what happened to Winnie. Written with wit, ambition, and playfulness, this book takes us from sweaty nightclubs to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions to ex-pat flats, sizzling back-alley street carts to the noisy seats of motorbikes. Spanning over fifty years and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a fever dream about possessed bodies and possessed lands, a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing marvel of a novel.
Violet Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel. She previously taught English with the Fulbright Program in the Mekong Delta, and was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in the U.S.
Clip and Sadie Chu couldn’t be more different. Popular, athletic Clip wants to become his school’s first seventh-grade soccer captain, while brainy star student Sadie is determined to prove that she can do anything her boastful brother can.
Behind every powerful man is a trained woman, and behind every trained woman is the Society. It started with tea parties and matchmaking, but is now a countrywide secret. Gossips pass messages in recipes, Spinsters train to fight, and women work together to grant safety to abused women and children. The Society is more than oaths―it is sisterhood and purpose. In 1926, seventeen-year-old Elsie is dropped off in a new city with four other teenage girls. All of them have trained together since childhood to become the Wife of a powerful man. But when they learn that their next target is earmarked to become President, their mission becomes more than just an assignment; this is a chance at the most powerful position in the Society. All they have to do is make one man fall in love with them first.
Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the humans around her, and compelled to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire now imprisoned in the shape of a man, perpetually restless and free-spirited. Having met as two unlikely immigrants in 1899 Manhattan, their lives have become deeply intertwined, but they must decide what, exactly, they mean to each other—all while living disguised as humans, constantly fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters. Meanwhile, Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad has left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe for her own untreatable condition. And in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem that she names Yossele. When she is sent to an uptown orphanage, the hulking golem will become her only friend and companion. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the 20th century to the beginning of World War I, THE HIDDEN PALACE follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their own natures and desires conspire to tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other creatures of their own kinds?
When a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hits California, Ruby is trapped in a laundromat with Charlie, a boy she had her first conversation with only moments before. She can’t see anything beyond the rubble that she’s trapped beneath, but she’s sure someone will come save them soon. As the hours and days tick by, Ruby and Charlie struggle to stay hopeful—and stay alive. Ruby has only Charlie’s voice and her memories to find the hope to keep holding on. Will the two make it out alive? And if they do, what will they have lost to the earthquake? Riveting, tense, and emotionally complex, AFTERSHOCKS weaves together the terror and hope of a catastrophic event while showing the ways that disasters can change and unite us.