Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Fiction

ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS de Andrea Yaryura Clark

In this moving, emotional narrative of love and resilience, a young couple confronts the start of
Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s, and a daughter searches for truth twenty years later.

ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS
by Andrea Y. Clark
Grand Central, Spring 2022
(via Writers House)

New York, 1998. Santiago Larrea, a wealthy Argentine diplomat, is holding court alongside his wife, Lila, and their daughter, Paloma, a college student and budding jewelry designer, at their annual summer polo match and soiree. All seems perfect in the Larreas’ world—until an unexpected party guest from Santiago’s university days shakes his usually unflappable demeanor. The woman’s cryptic comments spark Paloma’s curiosity about her father’s past, of which she knows little.
When the family travels to Buenos Aires for Santiago’s UN ambassadorial appointment, Paloma is determined to learn more about his life in the years leading up to the military dictatorship of 1976. With the help of a local university student, Franco Bonetti, an activist member of H.I.J.O.S—a group whose members are the children of the Desaparecidos, or the “Disappeared,” men and women who were forcibly disappeared by the state during Argentina’s “Dirty War”—Paloma unleashes a chain of events that not only leads her to question her family and her identity, but also puts her life in danger.
In compelling fashion, ON A NIGHT OF A THOUSAND STARS speaks to relationships, morality, and identity during a brutal period in Argentinian history, and the understanding—and redemption—people crave in the face of tragedy.

Andrea Y. Clark grew up in Argentina amid the political violence of the 1970s until her family moved to North America. After completing her university studies, she returned to Buenos Aires to reconnect with her roots. She followed with interest the stories then emerging about the children of the “Disappeared”—the youngest victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s—who were coming of age and grappling with the fates of their families. She conducted numerous interviews documenting their stories, which inspired her debut novel of historical fiction.

THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT de Mitch Albom

What would happen if we called on God for help and God actually appeared? In Mitch Albom’s profound new novel of hope and faith, a group of shipwrecked passengers pull a strange man from the sea. He claims to be “the Lord.” And he says he can only save them if they all believe in him.

THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT
by Mitch Albom
HarperCollins, November 2021
(via David BlackLiterary)

Adrift in a raft after a deadly ship explosion, nine people struggle for survival at sea. Three days pass. Short on water, food and hope, they spot a man floating in the waves. They pull him in. “Thank the Lord we found you,” a passenger says. “I am the Lord,” the man whispers.
So begins Mitch Albom’s most beguiling and inspiring novel yet. Albom has written of heaven in the celebrated number one bestsellers The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The First Phone Call from Heaven. Now, for the first time in his fiction, he ponders what we would do if, after crying out for divine help, God actually appeared before us? What might the Lord look, sound and act like? In THE STRANGER IN THE LIFEBOAT, Albom keeps us guessing until the end: Is this strange and quiet man really who he claims to be? What actually happened to cause the explosion? Are the survivors already in heaven, or are they in hell?
The story is narrated by Benji, one of the passengers, who recounts the events in a notebook that is later discovered—a year later—when the empty life raft washes up on the island of Montserrat. It falls to the island’s chief inspector, Jarty LeFleur, a man battling his own demons, to solve the mystery of what really happened.
A fast-paced, compelling novel that makes you ponder your deepest beliefs, The Stranger in the Lifeboat suggests that answers to our prayers may be found where we least expect them.

Mitch Albom is a bestselling author, screenwriter, playwright and nationally syndicated columnist. The author of five consecutive #1 New York Times bestsellers, his books have collectively sold more than thirty-three million copies in forty-two languages worldwide. Tuesdays With Morrie, which spent four straight years atop the New York Times list, is now the bestselling memoir of all time. Four of Albom’s books, including Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, For One More Day, and Have a Little Faith, have been made into highly acclaimed TV movies for ABC. Oprah Winfrey produced Tuesdays With Morrie, which claimed four Emmy awards including a best actor nod for Jack Lemmon in the lead role. Albom has founded six charities in and around Detroit, including the first-ever twenty-four-hour medical clinic for homeless children in America, and also operates an orphanage in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. Albom lives with his wife, Janine, in metropolitan Detroit.

WILL HE WONT HE d’Ali Land

Shutter Island meets The Silence of the Lambs in the new psychological thriller from international bestseller Ali Land, author of Good Me Bad Me.

WILL HE WONT HE
by Ali Land
Michael Joseph/Penguin UK, April 2022

Dr Luke Braithwaite is a forensic psychologist who works in a West London hospital that houses patients who have committed violent acts. Dr Braithwaite is tasked with approving the upcoming release of a highprofile inmate – 25-year-old Cyril Thorpe who, when he was a teenager, famously murdered eleven cats followed by his mother, leaving a little sister alone who continues to visit him at the hospital eight years later. Luke is drawn to Cyril and isn’t quite convinced that his version of events adds up. Alongside this, the police come to Luke with details of a local murder that bears resemblance to something in his own past. As the personal and professional pressure on him mounts, Luke starts to doubt everything he once thought he knew. And as the murders escalate, he starts to wonder if the killings truly are at random… or if they are somehow connected to him.

Ali Land graduated from university with a degree in Mental Health and worked as a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Nurse. Books from her teenage years—in particular The Wasp Factory and Lord of the Flies—helped inspire her first novel, Good Me, Bad Me, which was a Sunday Times Bestseller, a Richard and Judy Book Club pick, a Target Book Club read in the US, and has sold over 100,000 copies in the UK.

LOOK AT US de Terry Toma

A literary novel on marriage, the male gaze, and the subversion of the symbiotic nanny/parent relationship, told in “hammering, scorching, direct, spare prose, where the depiction of an average life . . . is balanced by the peculiarity of all involved.“

LOOK AT US
by T.L. Toma
Bellevue Literary Press, October 2021

Martin, a market analyst, and Lily, a corporate attorney, have a life that many would envy―they share an expensive New York apartment with their twin toddlers, sample the delicacies of Manhattan’s finest restaurants, and take Caribbean vacations. But when the couple’s nanny announces her imminent departure, they panic: how will they ever find a replacement capable of managing their spirited boys? Enter Maeve, a young Irish émigré. Neither of them imagines how indispensable she will become, either to the household or to their marriage. As the family’s domestic bliss takes an unexpected turn, a different type of intimacy evolves, leading to an explosive finale.
With shades of Mary Gaitskill, Toma’s characters behave badly and are keenly observed. Like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, LOOK AT US explores the symbiotic relationship of the stranger in the home, and there are masterful, tonal shifts here that manifest as knots in your stomach and an internal conflict as to which horse – if any – you’re backing.
A captivating, trenchant portrait of class and sexual dynamics, LOOK AT US reveals just how fragile our social arrangements really are.

T.L. Toma is the author of Border Dance. He studied philosophy at Brown University and Northwestern University, where he received his PhD. He has taught in prisons, migrant labor camps, and adult literacy programs and currently teaches at Laredo College, Palo Alto College, and Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi.

Terry Toma talks about LOOK AT US: video

THE LIFE OF THE MIND de Christine Smallwood

A debut novel following an adjunct professor whose days are disrupted by a miscarriage, forcing her to reckon with shame, relationships, the passage of time, the meaning of endings, and the illusion that our minds may free us from our bodies. A witty, intelligent story of an American woman on the edge, by a brilliant new voice in fiction.

THE LIFE OF THE MIND: A Novel
by Christine Smallwood
Hogarth Press, March 2021

As an adjunct professor of English with a 4-3 course load, Dorothy feels “like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had no idea what else to do but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise.” No one but her partner knows that she’s just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists—Dorothy being the kind of person who begins seeing a second because she’s too conflict-averse to break things off with the first. It’s not so much that Dorothy is ashamed of the miscarriage itself as she is of the sense of purpose the prospect of motherhood had provided, of how much she’d wanted it. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure? (That’s another thing she’s ashamed of.)
In the tradition of Sheila Heti, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Rachel Cusk, THE LIFE OF THE MIND is a novel about endings: of youth, of aspirations, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet our minds are all we have to make sense of a world largely out of our control—which is to say a world without us at the center as protagonists; a world where things happen, but there is no plot. And so Dorothy must make do with what she has, as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides. If that sounds depressing, it isn’t; in fact, it’s often hilarious. Most of all, it’s real. In literature—as Dorothy well knows—stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.

Christine Smallwood’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, n+1, and Vice. Her reviews, essays, and cultural reporting have been published in many magazines, including The New Yorker, Bookforum, T, and The New York Times Magazine, where she is a contributing writer. From 2014-2017 she wrote the “New Books” column for Harper’s, and has been an editor at The Nation. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University, is a co-founder of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and is a Fellow at The New York Institute for the Humanities.