Archives de catégorie : London 2021 Fiction

WINGWALKERS de Taylor Brown

Set in the 1930s, this is a novel about a husband and wife who travel across the United States performing acts of aerial daring and a chance encounter they have with William Faulkner that has unexpected consequences for all.

WINGWALKERS
by Taylor Brown
St. Martin’s Press, April 2022

One part epic adventure, one part love story, and—as is the signature for critically-acclaimed author Taylor Brown—one large part American history, WINGWALKERS follows Della and Zeno Marigold, a vagabond couple who fund their journey to the west coast in the middle of the Great Depression by performing death-defying aerial stunts from town to town. Woven into their story is that of the author (and thwarted fighter pilot) William Faulkner. Based on a tantalizing tidbit from Faulkner’s real life, this novel captures the true essence of a bygone era and sheds a new light on the heart and motivations of one of America’s greatest authors.

Taylor Brown grew up on the Georgia coast. He has lived in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, and the mountains of western North Carolina. He is the recipient of the Montana Prize in Fiction and a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. His novels include Fallen Land, The River of Kings, Gods of Howl Mountain, and Pride of Eden, and his short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Rumpus, Garden & Gun, The Bitter Southerner, Chautuaqua, Southwest Review, and many others. He lives in Savannah, Georgia.

SIX WEEKS TO LIVE de Catherine McKenzie

A gripping psychological suspense novel about a woman diagnosed with cancer who sets out to discover if someone poisoned her before her time is up, from the bestselling author of the “addictive and fast-paced” (Mary Kubica, New York Times bestselling author) thriller You Can’t Catch Me.

SIX WEEKS TO LIVE
by Catherine McKenzie
Atria, May2021

Jennifer Barnes never expected the shocking news she received at a routine doctor’s appointment: she has a terminal brain tumor—and only six weeks left to live. While stunned by the diagnosis, the forty-eight-year-old mother decides to spend what little time she has left with her family—her adult triplets and twin grandsons—close by her side. But when she realizes she was possibly poisoned a year earlier, she’s determined to discover who might have tried to get rid of her before she’s gone for good. Separated from her husband and with a contentious divorce in progress, Jennifer focuses her suspicions on her soon-to-be ex. Meanwhile, her daughters are each processing the news differently. Calm medical student Emily is there for whatever Jennifer needs. Moody scientist Aline, who keeps her mother at arm’s length, nonetheless agrees to help with the investigation. Even imprudent Miranda, who has recently had to move back home, is being unusually solicitous. But with her daughters doubting her campaign against their father, Jennifer can’t help but wonder if the poisoning is all in her head—or if there’s someone else who wanted her dead.

Catherine McKenzie is a bestselling author who has sold over a million books. She practiced law in Montreal for twenty years before retiring to write full time. She blogs for The Huffington Post, and her previ-ous novels I’ll Never Tell, Spin, Arranged, Forgotten, Hidden, Smoke, Fractured and The Good Liar are all international bestsellers that have been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent novel, You Can’t Catch Me, has been optioned for a television series by Paramount TV. An avid runner, skier, and amateur tennis player, Catherine lives and writes in Montreal, Canada.

THE SIGN FOR HOME de Blair Fell

A moving and fast-paced novel narrated by a DeafBlind young man and his new interpreter, an unlikely pair who together embark on a journey of liberation and heroism.

THE SIGN FOR HOME
by Blair Fell
Emily Bestler Books/Atria, Spring 2022

THE SIGN FOR HOME tells the story of Arlo Dilly, a DeafBlind 23-year-old man raised by conservative family members who limit his use of technology. While taking a basic English composition class, Arlo is assigned a new sign language interpreter named Cyril Brewster who is recovering from a romantic breakup and is looking for a new challenge in his career. When Cyril begins to interpret Arlo’s classes he soon realizes that Arlo’s understanding of language, love, and life have been limited, governed, and often censored by iron-fisted guardians. Showing Arlo more of the world and the independence he could have puts Cyril in conflict with Arlo’s family. Against this external conflict of language mediation, we travel inside Arlo’s mind and inside his perceptions of the most important moments of his life, including his own linguistic awakenings, and a heartbreaking memory of first love and first friendship derailed by unspeakable tragedy. When the buried memories are eventually unlocked by a class writing assignment, Arlo convinces Cyril to abandon his own professional ethics to facilitate a forbidden meeting with his old school friends and first love. The narration of The Sign For Home alternates between Arlo’s voice (with its distinctive Deaf syntax) and Cyril’s fast and funny point of view, with dialogue rendered in both standard English and an approximation of American Sign Language structure. The resulting novel is not only unique, but fast-paced, delectable, emotional, and powerful.

Blair Fell has worked as a certified ASL interpreter for 25 years. The first draft of this novel won the Lippman Prize for Creative Writing from the City College of New York. In addition to his work as an interpreter, Blair has written for television shows including Showtime’s wildly successful Queer As Folk, and for public television’s award-winning California Connected. His plays have been produced in multiple venues, and his personal essays have appeared in several prominent publications including Out Magazine, the Huffington Post, Next Magazine, and many others.

THE PARTY YEAR de Vinson Cunningham

A meditative book in the tradition of Teju Cole and Ben Lerner, weaving memory and history to interrogate some of our most human themes—race, religion, identity, politics, masculinity, and fatherhood.

THE PARTY YEAR
by Vinson Cunningham
Hogarth/PRH, Fall 2022

THE PARTY YEAR is a an ekphrastic, illuminating tour de force, inspired in part by Cunningham’s own time working on the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In these pages, fundraising staffer David Hammond travels around the country for donor events, landing everywhere from a trailer in New Hampshire to a Beverly Hills mansion. Hammond is a keen and thoughtful observer, whose reflections on memory and history are interwoven throughout in a flowing counterpoint between past and present, the personal and the larger-than-life. Through intimate, candescent prose, THE PARTY YEAR contemplates the stories and arts that define and bring beauty to our lives.

Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at The New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. A former White House staffer, he now teaches an MFA Writing course at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

SUBDIVISION de J. Robert Lennon

A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting trauma.

SUBDIVISION
by J. Robert Lennon
Graywolf Press, April 2021

An unnamed woman checks into a guesthouse in a mysterious district known only as the Subdivision. The guesthouse’s owners, Clara and the Judge, are welcoming and helpful, if oddly preoccupied by the perpetually baffling jigsaw puzzle in the living room. With little more than a hand-drawn map and vague memories of her troubled past, the narrator ventures out in search of a job, an apartment, and a fresh start in life. Accompanied by an unusually assertive digital assistant named Cylvia, the narrator is drawn deeper into an increasingly strange, surreal, and threatening world, which reveals itself to her through a series of darkly comic encounters reminiscent of Gulliver’s Travels. A lovelorn truck driver…a mysterious child…a watchful crow. A cryptic birthday party. A baffling physics experiment in a defunct office tower where some calamity once happened. Through it all, the narrator is tempted and manipulated by the bakemono, a shape-shifting demon who poses a distinctly terrifying danger. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, SUBDIVISION is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called “a master of the dark arts.” With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of perception and memory.

“An askew, uncanny―and consistently compelling―novel about memory, dislocation, and trauma. . . . [Lennon’s] tone is surreal and the result sometimes, à la Kafka, darkly funny. The novel features elements of the picaresque . . . , but it also has the everyday-suburban-made-strange-and-luminous quality of Steven Millhauser and the gleefully absurd, improvised feel of César Aira. . . . Sharp, inventive―and disorienting in all the good ways.”―Kirkus Reviews, starred review

J. Robert Lennon is the author of two story collections, Pieces for the Left Hand and See You in Paradise, and eight novels, including Mailman, Castle, Familiar, and Broken River. He holds an MFA from the University of Montana, and has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, Granta, The Paris Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books, and he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches writing at Cornell University.