An Orchestra of Minorities

An Orchestra of Minorities
Author: Chigozie Obioma
Publisher: Hachette UK
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316412414

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A heartbreaking story about a Nigerian poultry farmer who sacrifices everything to win the woman he loves, by Man Booker Finalist and author of The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma. "It is more than a superb and tragic novel; it's a historical treasure."-Boston Globe Set on the outskirts of Umuahia, Nigeria and narrated by a chi, or guardian spirit, An Orchestra of Minorities tells the story of Chinonso, a young poultry farmer whose soul is ignited when he sees a woman attempting to jump from a highway bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, Chinonso joins her on the roadside and hurls two of his prized chickens into the water below to express the severity of such a fall. The woman, Ndali, is stopped her in her tracks. Bonded by this night on the bridge, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. But Ndali is from a wealthy family and struggles to imagine a future near a chicken coop. When her family objects to the union because he is uneducated, Chinonso sells most of his possessions to attend a college in Cyprus. But when he arrives he discovers there is no place at the school for him, and that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements... Penniless, homeless, and furious at a world which continues to relegate him to the sidelines, Chinonso gets further away from his dream, from Ndali and the farm he called home. Spanning continents, traversing the earth and cosmic spaces, and told by a narrator who has lived for hundreds of years, the novel is a contemporary twist of Homer's Odyssey. Written in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.

The Fishermen

The Fishermen
Author: Chigozie Obioma
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316338362

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In this striking novel about an unforgettable childhood, four Nigerian brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family Told by nine-year-old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, The Fishermen is the Cain and Abel-esque story of a childhood in Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his absence to skip school and go fishing. At the forbidden nearby river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of the book's characters and readers. Dazzling and viscerally powerful, The Fisherman is an essential novel about Africa, seen through the prism of one family's destiny.

Homeland Elegies

Homeland Elegies
Author: Ayad Akhtar
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2020-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 031649643X

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A "profound and provocative" new work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Disgraced and American Dervish: an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Kirkus Reviews). One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction A Best Book of 2020 * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly "Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.

Ordinary Light

Ordinary Light
Author: Tracy K. Smith
Publisher: Knopf
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2015-03-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307962660

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National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

Autopsy of an Orchestra

Autopsy of an Orchestra
Author: M. Melanie Beene
Publisher:
Total Pages: 142
Release: 1988
Genre: Symphony orchestras
ISBN:

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Via Negativa

Via Negativa
Author: Daniel Hornsby
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0593081005

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A heartfelt, daring, divinely hilarious debut novel about a priest who embarks on a fateful journey with a pistol in his pocket and an injured coyote in his backseat. "A beautiful and meditative exploration of shattered faith." —Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half Father Dan is homeless. Dismissed by his conservative diocese for eccentricity and insubordination, he’s made his exile into a kind of pilgrimage, transforming his Toyota Camry into a mobile monk’s cell. Then he sees a minivan sideswipe a coyote. Unable to suppress his Franciscan impulses, he takes the injured animal in. With his unexpected canine companion in the backseat, Dan makes his way west, encountering other offbeat travelers and stopping to take in the occasional roadside novelty (MARTIN'S HOLE TO HELL, WORLD-FAMOUS BOTTOMLESS PIT NEXT EXIT!). But the coyote is far from the only oddity fate has delivered into this churchless priest’s care: it has also given him a bone-handled pistol, a box of bullets, and a letter from an estranged friend. By the time Dan gets to where he’s going, he’ll be forced to reckon once and for all with the great mistakes of his past, and he will have to decide: is penance better paid with revenge, or with redemption?

At Night All Blood Is Black

At Night All Blood Is Black
Author: David Diop
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374720479

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*WINNER OF THE 2021 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE* *ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021* Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 DUBLIN Literary Award "Astonishingly good." —Lily Meyer, NPR "So incantatory and visceral I don’t think I’ll ever forget it." —Ali Smith, The Guardian | Best Books of 2020 One of The Wall Street Journal's 11 best books of the fall | One of The A.V. Club's fifteen best books of 2020 |A Sunday Times best book of the year Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, David Diop’s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War. Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend? Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man’s descent into madness.

Ducks, Newburyport

Ducks, Newburyport
Author: Lucy Ellmann
Publisher: Biblioasis
Total Pages: 934
Release: 2019-08-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1771963085

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WINNER OF THE 2019 GOLDSMITHS PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 BOOKER PRIZE • A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2019 • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 • A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2019 "This book has its face pressed up against the pane of the present; its form mimics the way our minds move now toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry."—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens. Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets. She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda. But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman? When are you allowed to start swearing? With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy―and a revolution in the novel.

Little Family

Little Family
Author: Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2020-04-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0735211795

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From the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of A Long Way Gone. A powerful novel about young people living at the margins of society, struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together. Hidden away from a harsh outside world, five young people have improvised a home in an abandoned airplane, a relic of their country’s tumultuous past. Elimane, the bookworm, is as street-smart as he is wise. Clever Khoudiemata maneuvers to keep the younger kids—athletic, pragmatic Ndevui, thoughtful Kpindi, and especially their newest member, Namsa—safe and fed. When Elimane makes himself of service to the shadowy William Handkerchief, it seems as if the little family may be able to keep the world at bay and their household intact. But when Khoudi comes under the spell of the “beautiful people”—the fortunate sons and daughters of the elite—the desire to resume an interrupted coming of age and follow her own destiny proves impossible to resist. A profound and tender portrayal of the connections we forge to survive the fate we’re dealt, Little Family marks the further blossoming of a unique global voice.

Gun Love

Gun Love
Author: Jennifer Clement
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1524761680

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"Pearl's mother took her away from her family just weeks after she was born, and drove off to central Florida determined to begin a new life for herself and her daughter--in the parking lot next to a trailer park. Pearl grew up in the front seat of their '94 Mercury, while her mother lived in the back. Despite their hardships, mother and daughter both adjusted to life, making friends with the residents of the trailers and creating a deep connection to each other"--Amazon.com.