Archives de catégorie : Nos incontournables

ASYLUM de Judy Bolton-Fasman

How much do we really know about the lives of our parents and the secrets lodged in their past? Judy Bolton-Fasman’s fascinating saga recounts the search for answers to the mysteries embedded in the lives of her Cuban-born mother and her elusive, Yale-educated father.

ASYLUM
by Judy Bolton-Fasman
Mandel Vilar Press, August 2021
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

In the prefatory chapter, “Burn This,” Judy receives a thick letter from her father and conjectures that the contents will reveal the long hidden explanations, confessions, and secrets that will unlock her father’s cryptic past. Just as she is about to open the portal to her father’s “transtiendas,” his dark hidden secrets, Harold Bolton phones Judy and instructs her to burn the still unopened letter. With the flick of a match, Judy ignites her father’s unread documents, effectively destroying the answers to long held questions that surround her parents’ improbable marriage and their even more secretive lives.
Judy Bolton, girl detective, embarks on the life-long exploration of her bifurcated ancestry; Judy inherits a Sephardic, Spanish/Ladino-speaking culture from her mother and an Ashkenazi, English-only, old-fashioned American patriotism from her father. Amid the Bolton household’s cultural, political, and psychological confusion, Judy is mystified by her father’s impenetrable silence; and, similarly confounded by her mother’s fabrications, not the least of which involve rumors of a dowry pay-off and multiple wedding ceremonies for the oddly mismatched 40-year-old groom and the 24-year-old bride. Contacting former associates, relatives, and friends; accessing records through the Freedom of Information Act; traveling to Cuba to search for clues, and even reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish for a year to gain spiritual insight into her father; these decades-long endeavors do not always yield the answers Judy wanted and sometimes the answers themselves lead her to ask new questions.
Among Asylum’s most astonishing, unsolved mysteries is Ana Hernandez’s appearance at the family home on Asylum Avenue in West Hartford, Connecticut. Ana is an exchange student from Guatemala whom Judy comes to presume to be her paternal half-sister. In seeking information about Ana, Judy’s investigations prove to be much like her entire enterprise–both enticing and frustrating. Was Ana just a misconstrued memory, or is she a still living piece of the puzzle that Judy has spent her adult life trying to solve?
Readers will relish every step and stage of Judy’s investigations and will begin to share in her obsession to obtain answers to the mysteries that have haunted her life. The suspense, the clairvoyant prophecies, the discoveries, the new leads, the dead-ends, the paths not taken—all capture our attention in this absorbing and fascinating memoir.

Judy Bolton-Fasman is an award-winning writer on culture―literary, visual and film―for JewishBoston.com and whose column on parenting and family life appears regularly in the Jewish Advocate. She frequently contributes to The New York Times “Motherlode blog” and the Boston Globe. Her work has also appeared in Lilith Magazine, O Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Cognoscenti, Brevity and Catapult. She is a four-time recipient of the Simon Rockower Award for Essay from the American Jewish Press Association. Judy grew up on Asylum Avenue near Hartford, CT and now lives with her husband, daughter and son just outside of Boston.

OTHER HOUSES de Paddy O’Reilly

A masterful and tender story about people who live at the fringes of society, from payday to payday. Acutely observed and lyrical, Paddy O Reilly’s novel paints a haunting picture of class, aspiration and the boundaries we will cross for love.

OTHER HOUSES
by Paddy O’Reilly
Affirm Press Australia, March 2022
(via Kaplan/Defiore Rights)

All those memories. A man on his knees. The dark burn of Coke washing down a yellow wall. The night someone strung dead bats along the school fence, their black leather wings shredded into streamers. I never want to revisit that life.
Lily works as a cleaner. Each day she moves through the houses of wealthy Melbournians, unseen, scrubbing away the detritus of other people’s privilege. Her partner Janks, a reformed drug addict, churns vats of cheesy dip in a factory. With every measly pay check they inch further and further away from their former lives of poverty and addiction. Both Janks and Lily are determined that their daughter Jewelee won’t end up like them. She’ll have a career, not a deadend job. She’ll have savings, not debt. She’ll be able to afford a cleaner, not be the cleaner. Her future will be bright. But, like Sisyphus, one wrong move in their upward battle will see them back at square one, fighting to just get by.

Paddy O’Reilly is an Australian author. She wrote the novels The Factory, The Fine Colour of Rust and The Wonders, two collections of award-winning short stories, and a novella. Her novels have been shortlisted for major awards, and her stories have been widely published, anthologised and broadcast in Australia and overseas.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS de Todd Rose

Drawing on cutting-edge neuroscience, behavioral economic, and social psychology research, acclaimed author, former Harvard professor, and think tank founder Todd Rose reveals how so much of our thinking about each other is informed by false assumptions that drive bad decisions that make us dangerously mistrustful as a society and hopelessly unhappy as individuals.

COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS:
Conformity, Complicity, and the Science of Why We Make Bad Decisions
by Todd Rose
Hachette Go, February 2022
(via Javelin)

The desire to fit in is one of the most powerful, least understood forces in a society. Todd Rose believes that as human beings we continually act against our own best interests out of our brains’ misunderstanding of what we think others believe.  A complicated set of illusions driven by conformity bias distorts how we see the world around us. From toilet paper shortages to kidneys that get thrown away rather than used for desperately needed organ transplants, from racial segregation to the perceived “electability” of women for political office, from bottled water to “cancel culture,” we routinely copy others, lie about what we believe, cling to tribes, and silence others. We are so profoundly social that when we are incongruent with the group that we do lasting damage to our self-worth, diminish our well-being and never realize our full potential. It’s why we all too often chase the familiar trappings of money, fame, and success that leave us feeling empty even when we do achieve them. It’s why we’ll blindly espouse a viewpoint we don’t necessarily believe in so that we blend in with the group. We trap ourselves in prisons of our own making that prevent us from living the happy, fulfilled lives we envision. The question is, Why do we keep believing the lies and hurting ourselves? Todd Rose reveals the answer is deeply hard-wired in our DNA, with brains that are more socially dependent than we realize or dare to accept. Most of us would rather be fully in sync with the social norms of our respective groups than true to who we are.
Using originally researched data, COLLECTIVE ILLUSIONS shows us where we get things wrong and just as important, how we can be authentic in forming our opinions while valuing truth. Rose offers a counterintuitive, empowering, and hopeful explanation for how we can bridge the inference gap, make decisions with a newfound clarity, and achieve fulfillment. Only then can we transform ourselves, and ultimately, society.

Social scientist Dr. Todd Rose is the co-founder of Populace, a think tank dedicated to building a world where all people have the chance to live fulfilling lives in a thriving society. He is also a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality and previously directed the Mind, Brain, and Education program. He is the author of Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment and The End of Average: Unlocking Our Potential by Embracing What Makes Us Different.

THE WATCHMAKER’S DAUGHTER de Larry Loftis

A WWII biography of Corrie ten Boom, a groundbreaking female Dutch watchmaker who sheltered Jews and refugees from the Nazis, and persevered despite the loss of most of her family and being sent to a concentration camp.

THE WATCHMAKER’S DAUGHTER
by Larry Loftis
William Morrow/HarperCollins, March 2023
(via Javelin)

Photo credit: Spencer Freeman

From New York Times and internationally bestselling author Larry Loftis, the definitive biography of Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian watchmaker who worked with her family to help many Jews escape from the Nazis during WWII by hiding them in her home before getting arrested and sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Larry Loftis is the New York Times and international bestselling author of the nonfiction spy thrillers, Code Name: Lise—The True Story of the Woman Who Became WWII’s Most Highly Decorated Spy, and Into the Lion’s Mouth: The True Story of Dusko Popov—World War II Spy, Patriot, and the Real-Life Inspiration for James Bond, which have been published in multiple languages around the world. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Mr. Loftis was a corporate attorney and adjunct professor of law.

THE WILDERWOMEN de Ruth Emmie Lang

Two sisters embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the truth behind their mother’s mysterious disappearance. Ohioana Book Award finalist Ruth Emmie Lang returns with a new cast of ordinary characters with extraordinary abilities

THE WILDERWOMEN
by Ruth Emmie Lang
St. Martin’s Press, November 2022
(via Harvey Klinger)

Five years ago, Nora Wilder disappeared. The oldest of her two daughters, Zadie, should have seen it coming, because she can literally see things coming. But not even her psychic abilities were able to prevent their mother from vanishing one morning, never to return.
Zadie’s estranged younger sister, Finn, can’t see into the future, but she has an uncannily good memory, so good that she remembers not only her own memories, but the echoes of memories other people have left behind. On the afternoon of her graduation party, Finn is seized by an “echo” more powerful than anything she’s experienced before: a woman singing a song she recognizes, a song about a bird…
When Finn wakes up alone in the woods with no idea of how she got there, she realizes who the memory belongs to. Nora. Now, it’s up to Finn to convince her sister not only that their mom is still out there, but that she wants to be found. Against Zadie’s better judgement, her and Finn hit the highway, using Finn’s echoes to retrace Nora’s footsteps and uncover the answer to the question that has been haunting them for years: Why did she leave?
But it isn’t long before Zadie realizes there is a dark side to her sister’s gift. The more time Finn spends in their mother’s past, the harder it is for her to return to the present, to return to herself. As Zadie feels her sister start to slip away, she will have to decide what lengths she is willing to go to to find their mother, knowing that if she chooses wrong, she could lose them both for good.

« Exquisitely drawn characters imbue Lang’s unconventional plot with verisimilitude and heart, inspiring readers to ponder whether the world is stranger and more beautiful than it appears. Effervescent, ethereal, and suffused with wonder. » — Kirkus (starred review)

« Lang’s melancholy, atmospheric writing sets the perfect tone as the Wilder sisters unravel the mystery. The result is a cozy supernatural outing perfect for an autumn night. » —Publisher’s Weekly

Ruth Emmie Lang was born in Glasgow, Scotland and has the red hair to prove it. When she was four years old, she immigrated to Ohio where she has lived ever since. She has since lost her Scottish accent, but still has the hair. Ruth currently lives in Cleveland, Ohio with her husband and dreams of someday owning a little house in the woods where she can write more books. Her first novel, Beasts of Extraordinary Circumstance, was a finalist for the 2017 Book of the Year Award from Book of the Month Club and was a Target Book Club Pick in 2018.