Archives par étiquette : The Friedrich Agency

DIE BEAUTIFUL de Buzzy Jackson

A debut novel based on the real and unforgettable life of Hannie Schaft, a young woman living in Nazi-occupied Holland who joined the Resistance, learned to shoot, and executed her Nazi targets with such precision that Hitler nicknamed her « the Girl with Red Hair ».

DIE BEAUTIFUL
by Buzzy Jackson
‎ Dutton, Winter 2023
(via The Friedrich Agency)

Hannie didn’t train to be a soldier — her youthful dream was to finish law school in Amsterdam and join the League of Nations. But Hannie’s volunteer work with the Red Cross puts her on the radar of key resistance recruiters, who spot her fearlessness and outrage, recognizing her for the heroine she’ll someday become. As the simmering menace of Nazi-occupied Holland reaches a boiling point, Hannie becomes ever more daring, assassinating powerful Nazis point blank, blowing up munitions factories, constantly improvising with last-minute Resistance orders. She also falls deeply in love at a tremendous cost. But throughout it all, Hannie’s greatest weapon is her determination not to become a monster herself: blijf altijd menselijk. Stay human.

Buzzy Jackson is the award-winning author of three books of nonfiction and has a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley. A recent fellow at the Edith Wharton Writing Residency, she is also a member of the National Book Critics’ Circle and writes for the Boston Globe and BookForum. Buzzy grew up in the mountains of California and Montana and now lives in Boulder, Colorado.

THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH de George Dawes Green

A new suspense novel from the Edgar award-winning author of The Caveman’s Valentine.

THE KINGDOMS OF SAVANNAH
by George Dawes Green
Celadon/St. Martin’s Press, July 2022
(via The Friedrich Agency)

When matriarch Morgana Musgrove calls upon her prodigal son Ransom to help her with a case, the defunct M. Musgrove & Family Detective Agency is back in business, albeit reluctantly. Tensions rise between the Musgroves and whispers of a mysterious lost “Kingdom”—descendants of the African-American soldiers who fought for King George, and afterwards formed a secret community, refusing to return to slavery—float in the sultry Savannah night. The family of investigators creeps closer and closer to exposing the city’s seedy underbelly, and a depraved history that a powerful few are determined to keep hidden, no matter the cost…

George Dawes Green, founder of The Moth and Unchained, is an internationally celebrated author. His first novel, The Caveman’s Valentine, won the Edgar Award and became a motion picture starring Samuel L. Jackson. The Juror was an international bestseller in more than twenty languages and was the basis for the movie starring Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. Ravens was chosen as one of the best books of 2009 by the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Mail, and many other publications. George Green grew up in Georgia and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY de Violet Kupersmith

A kaleidoscopic debut for fans of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and readers of literary magical realism, like the work of Isabel Allende, Salman Rushdie, and Tea Obreht.

BUILD YOUR HOUSE AROUND MY BODY
by Violet Kupersmith
Random House, Summer 2021
(chez The Friedrich Agency – voir catalogue)

1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience.
2009: Pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra.
2011: Winnie, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend, disappears without a trace.
Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds the three women together, and what happened to Winnie. Written with wit, ambition, and playfulness, this book takes us from sweaty nightclubs to ramshackle zoos, colonial mansions to ex-pat flats, sizzling back-alley street carts to the noisy seats of motorbikes. Spanning over fifty years and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a fever dream about possessed bodies and possessed lands, a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing marvel of a novel.

Violet Kupersmith is the author of the short story collection The Frangipani Hotel. She previously taught English with the Fulbright Program in the Mekong Delta, and was a creative writing fellow at the University of East Anglia. She has lived in Da Lat and Saigon, Vietnam, and currently resides in the U.S.

SATELLITE LOVE de Genki Ferguson

Set in 1999 Japan, SATELLITE LOVE is a heartbreaking and beautifully unconventional debut novel about a girl, a boy, and a satellite—and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human.

SATELLITE LOVE
by Genki Ferguson
McClelland & Stewart/PRH Canada, March 2021
(chez The Friedrich Agency – voir catalogue)

Anna Obata is a biracial teenager living in economically depressed Southern Japan just before the millennium. Left to fend for herself (and to look after her increasingly senile Grandfather) Anna copes with her devastating loneliness by calling upon her strongest inner resource: imagination. This is the story of girl who falls in love with a satellite, yes—but it is also the story of how the human mind attempts to repair itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds. Told in alternating perspectives by Anna, the satellite, and several others, SATELLITE LOVE is exquisitely strange and refreshingly unconventional.

Genki Ferguson was born in New Brunswick, Canada to a family of authors (his father is author Will Ferguson), and grew up reading Murakami. He spent much of his childhood in the subtropical island of Kyushu, Japan, where his mother’s family still resides. Fluent in Japanese and capable of making a decent sushi roll, Genki was also the recipient of the 2017 Helen Pitt Award for visual arts and is finishing a degree in Film Production, while working part-time at Book Warehouse, an indie store in Vancouver.

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