Archives de catégorie : Frankfurt 2021 Adult Fiction

MADAME EXUPÉRY UND DIE STERNE DES HIMMELS de Sophie Villard

With him, her dreams learned to fly. But they came too close to the stars.

MADAME EXUPÉRY UND DIE STERNE DES HIMMELS
(Madame Exupéry and the Starry Skies)
by Sophie Villard
Penguin Germany, September 2021

Paris, 1930. When the young artist Consuelo meets Antoine de Saint-Exupéry at a party, it’s love at first sight. The temperamental Salvadorean becomes the muse of the enigmatic pilot, who would much rather be writing and drawing than flying planes.
His deep love for her inspired « The Little Prince »: Consuelo is the beloved rose that the prince protects with a glass globe, and which is always in his thoughts no matter where his travels take him.
The book made Antoine world-famous, but life by his side was not easy. Consuelo had to deal with his unfaithfulness, and fought hard to establish herself as an artist in her own right – until 1944, when Antoine took off on his fateful flight across the Mediterranean …

Sophie Villard is the pen name of a successful German author. She studied journalism and political science, and lives near Dresden with her family. Her novel about the famous art collector Peggy Guggenheim was a Spiegel bestseller, and her new book as well is about another inspiring and important female figure: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wife and muse Consuelo, to whom we owe the story of the Little Prince.

A HOUSE BETWEEN EARTH AND THE MOON de Rebecca Scherm

Rebecca Scherm’s long awaited new gripping story of one scientist in outer space, another who watches over him, the family left behind, and the lengths people will go to protect the people and planet they love.

A HOUSE BETWEEN EARTH AND THE MOON
by Rebecca Scherm
Viking, March 2022
(via Writers House)

Scientist Alex Welch-Peters has believed for twenty years that his super-algae can reverse the effects of climate change. His obsession with his research has jeopardized his marriage, his relationships with his kids, and his own professional future. When Sensus, the colossal tech company, offers him a chance to complete his research, he seizes the opportunity. The catch? His lab will be in outer space on Parallaxis, the first-ever luxury residential space station built for billionaires. Alex and six other scientists leave their loved ones to become Pioneers, the beta tenants of Parallaxis.
But Parallaxis is not the space palace they were sold. Day and night, the embittered crew builds the facility under pressure from Sensus, motivated by the promise that their families will join them. Meanwhile, back on Earth, with much of the country ablaze in wildfires, Alex’s family tries to remain safe in Michigan. His teenage daughter Mary Agnes struggles through high school with the help of the ubiquitous Sensus phones implanted in everyone’s ears, archiving each humiliation, and wishing she could go to Parallaxis with her father—but her mother will never allow it.
The Pioneers are the beta testers of another program, too. As they toil away two hundred miles in the sky, Sensus is designing an algorithm that will predict human behavior. Tess, a young social psychologist Sensus has hired to watch the Pioneers through their phones, begins to develop an intimate, obsessive relationship with her subjects. When she takes it a step farther—traveling to Parallaxis to observe them up close—the controlled experiment begins to unravel.
Prescient and insightful, A HOUSE BETWEEN EARTH AND THE MOON is at once a captivating epic about the machinations of big tech and a profoundly intimate meditation on the unmistakably human bonds that hold us together.

Praise for Rebecca Scherm’s first novel, Unbecoming (Viking 2015):

“Startlingly inventive” —The New York Times Book Review
“terrific debut” —The Wall Street Journal
“a genuine work of art” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“A clever, engrossing thriller” —Huffington Post
“A marvel” —Buzzfeed

Rebecca Scherm is the author of Unbecoming, a novel. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow. She lives in Michigan.

BROTHER ALIVE de Zain Khalid

An astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father.

BROTHER ALIVE
by Zain Khalid
Grove Atlantic, August 2022
(via Neon Literary)

In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and come to live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and precarious neighborhoods, Coolidge. The three boys are a conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul, Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern, but they are inseparable, whether scheming or fighting or investigating the traces of their shared history. But Youssef has another sibling he keeps secret from his family, an imaginary familiar who seems hyper-real, a wondrous pet who lives in Youssef’s mind, a shapeshifting creature he calls Brother.
The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known for his radical sermons extolling the virtues of opting out of Western ideologies. He is a distant father, never touching his boys physically, but supplementing their education with texts like The Blind Owl and The Foundations of Arithmetic. In the evenings, he likes nothing more than to pour whiskey into his coffee and escape into his study, where he corresponds with compatriots from his time in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health, the reason for his visits to a botanical garden in the middle of the night, and the truth about the boys’ parents he would be ashamed to share.
Imam Salim’s deeds and decisions will take him back to Saudi Arabia, where the boys were born and will be forced to follow. As they settle into an opulent, futuristic world that is designed to account for a new, more sustainable modernity than of the West, they will have to change if they want to survive. They soon realize that they are not the only ones who have returned home—the arrival of Youssef’s Brother will not go unnoticed.
With stylistic brilliance and intellectual acuity, in Brother Alive Zain Khalid brings characters to vivid life with a bold energy that matches the great themes of his novel—family, capital, power, sexuality, and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

Zain Khalid has been published in The New Yorker, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. He has also written for television. Brother Alive is his first novel. He lives in New York City.

HAIRPIN BRIDGE de Taylor Adams

From the author of the “full-throttle thriller” (A. J. Finn) No Exit—a riveting new psychological page-turner featuring a fierce and unforgettable heroine.

HAIRPIN BRIDGE
by Taylor Adams
William Morrow/HarperCollins, June 2021
(via Lorella Belli)

Three months ago, Lena Nguyen’s estranged twin sister, Cambry, drove to a remote bridge sixty miles outside of Missoula, Montana, and jumped two hundred feet to her death. At least, that is the official police version. But Lena isn’t buying it. Now she’s come to that very bridge, driving her dead twin’s car and armed with a cassette recorder, determined to find out what really happened by interviewing the highway patrolman who allegedly discovered her sister’s body. Corporal Raymond Raycevic has agreed to meet Lena at the scene. He is sympathetic, forthright, and professional. But his story doesn’t seem to add up. For one thing, he stopped Cambry for speeding a full hour before she supposedly leapt to her death. Then there are the sixteen attempted 911 calls from her cell phone, made in what was unfortunately a dead zone. But perhaps most troubling of all, the state trooper is referred to by name in Cambry’s final enigmatic text to her sister: Please Forgive Me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic. Lena will do anything to uncover the truth. But as her twin’s final hours come into focus, Lena’s search turns into a harrowing, tooth-and-nail fight for her own survival—one that will test everything she thought she knew about her sister and herself…

Taylor Adams graduated from Eastern Washington University with the prestigious Edmund G. Yarwood Award. His directorial work has screened at the Seattle True Independent Film Festival and he is an avid fan of suspenseful fiction and film. He lives in Washington state.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO de Vauhini Vara

An epic, imaginative debut novel about family, modernity, technology, and what it means to be human, told through the soul of an Indian software engineer-entrepreneur and his daughter.

THE IMMORTAL KING RAO
by Vauhini Vara
W.W. Norton, May 2022
(via Writers House)

Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao―literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father’s murder.
Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut. His wife, Margie, was an artist with a marketing genius. Together they created a new world order, led by a corporate-run government. Athena’s future is now in the hands of its Shareholders―unless she can rejoin the Exes, a resistance group sustaining tech-free lifestyles on low-lying islands.
Lyrical, satirical, and profound, The Immortal King Rao obliterates genre to confront the digital age. This gripping, brilliant debut poses an urgent question: can anyone―peasant laborers, convention-destroying entrepreneurs, radical anarchists, social-media followers―ever get free?

Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. Her fiction has been honored by the O. Henry Prize and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. From a Dalit background, she lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.