A genre-bending novel about three women trying to escape their pasts — a Hell-damned violin legend and teacher, a young transgender runaway and aspiring musician, and a spaceship captain fleeing a faraway war — who find each other, and unexpected magic, in California’s San Gabriel Valley.
LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS
by Ryka Aoki
Tor, September 2021
(chez DeFiore and Co. – voir catalogue)
Three vastly different women: Shizuka Satomi, an aging, Hell-damned violin prodigy and teacher; Katrina Nyugen, a young transgender runaway and aspiring violinist; and Lan Tran, a spaceship captain running from a faraway war. Each woman descends on California’s predominantly Asian and Hispanic San Gabriel Valley seeking to rewrite her doomed fate. Each secretly dreams, despite forces working against her and closing in, of belonging to someone, of becoming someone’s family. Yet each is resigned to a life of carrying her burden alone. The only chance for Shizuka, Katrina, and Lan to survive on Earth rests in their finally recognizing who they are to one another — before it’s too late. LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS will pull you in with its sensory pleasures, transportive depiction of place, masterful storytelling, and the warmth with which Aoki welcomes you into a neighborhood, as if you are already family. Aoki uses genre tropes to push the boundaries of imagination on behalf of her protagonists — people who, at the novel’s start, barely thought they were permitted to dream at all. Aoki’s characters, like herself, are women, queer, people of color. They are violinists full of innocence and regret. They are mothers trying to preserve the family business. They are refugees fleeing a war from beyond the stars. And they have come to the San Gabriel Valley, just outside of Los Angeles, a place where many drive past without a second thought, yet where others find magic and previously unthinkable love.
Ryka Aoki is the author of Seasonal Velocities, He Mele a Hilo (A Hilo Song), Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul and The Great Space Adventure. She has been honored by the California State Senate for her “extraordinary commitment to free speech and artistic expression, as well as the visibility and well-being of Transgender people ». Ryka was the inaugural performer for the first ever Transgender Stage at San Francisco Pride, and has performed in venues including the San Francisco Pride Main Stage, the Columbus National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival, the National Queer Arts Festival, and Ladyfest South. Ryka also appears in the recent documentaries “Diagnosing Difference” and “Riot Acts.” She has MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and is the recipient of a University Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Heico is an ornithologist fighting a losing battle to protect the birds in his beachside suburb. When a journalist asks for comment on a planned development, Heico exaggerates his reports on how many migratory birds use the site. Soon it is revealed that the proposed building is a mosque, and he finds himself embroiled in community resistance to the project. Still, he refuses to back down. As the delayed mosque project becomes a focal point for growing Islamophobia, Heico must confront his own ghosts, and the prejudices he insists he doesn’t have. Nahla is Heico’s house cleaner. Having recently arrived in Australia she is trying to find her place in a new country and a new marriage. Isolated and lonely, she sees the mosque as a symbol of what she hopes to find in Australia: community, familiarity, acceptance. But as resistance to the project intensifies, she must summon the courage and the language to speak out and claim her space in this new life.
Artificial intelligence is bringing a new digital order—it is changing war, surveillance, and disinformation, with profound effects on human freedom, global security, and power dynamics. THE BLACK BOX takes us inside the immensely competitive global struggle to lead in the four key elements of AI advantage: data, computing power, talent, and institutions. A world expert in AI-enabled weapons, Paul Scharre examines the strengths and weaknesses of today’s major superpowers, including China, the United States, Europe, and the Big Tech corporations that control the global supply of data and compute.
YOU DON’T OWE ANYONE is for perfectionists, workaholics, people pleasers, and strivers who feel stuck in the try-hard cycle. Sharing her experiences as a life coach and recovering perfectionist, Caroline Garnet McGraw shows us how we can free ourselves from the weight of expectations and encourages us to move our lives forward without apology. Inspired by the author’s viral essay « You Don’t Owe Anyone an Interaction, » this book invites us to make surprising choices that can help us get unstuck. Rather than offering more ways to effect change through sheer effort, these personal stories serve as a compassionate witness, a reflection of our own perfectionistic tendencies. They also are a wakeup call jolting us out of our martyr mentality and inspiring us to move in new, positive directions. Through simple, accessible coaching practices, YOU DON’T OWE ANYONE shows us what it looks like to refuse to over-function in the old ways. It invites us to make the same surprising choices that have helped McGraw and her clients move past perfectionism, empowering us to quiet our fears and heal our hearts.
Journalist Julia struggles to make ends meet as a freelance writer and dreams of the big, investigative story. She receives a tip-off about possible sexual assaults at a renowned research institute. Tired of the me-too debate, she only half-heartedly pursues the suspicion at first. But as soon as the first victim contacts her and Julia meets the attractive prime suspect, her journalistic instinct is awakened. At the institute she encounters a dangerous mixture of abuse of power, silence and cover-ups – and a shocking connection to her brother Robert, who disappeared without a trace twelve years earlier. Suddenly Julia has to ask herself unplea-sant questions: What does Robert have to do with the suicide of a Chinese doctoral student? Why was his body never found? Has she been missing something all these years?