Böcker av Norton Girault

It's 1916 in the city of New Orleans when Andre Boulanger is born to an octoroon prostitute and a Creole man of high social standing. The child's grandmother hires a hit man to kill baby Andre and his mother to eliminate the "taint" in the bloodline, but Andre is spared... He looks white enough to sell to a childless white couple, and the hit man finds that couple in Arthur and Hannah Arcineux. The Arcineuxs change Andre's name to Sebastian. He becomes a sculptor, a man about town, and, after serving as a Navy lieutenant in WWII, he marries a high society New Orleans woman, Lucinda O'Rourke. But when Lucinda gives birth to a black baby, Sebastian renounces her and the child, thinking she has been unfaithful to him with a black man. Sebastian leaves for Jamaica, and Lucinda's father concocts a plan to pretend the baby died at childbirth. He pays Cally, the family maid, to take the baby away and keep it hidden. Cally names the child Vincent and raises him as her own. After finding his great-grandmother's diary, Sebastian must come to terms with his true identity-and come face-to-face with Vincent, the black son he abandoned years earlier.

Powerful Short Stories - Life in the 20th CenturyNorton Girault is a master of the short fiction genre. His stories demonstrate a complexity of tone-comedy, humor, and irony-to support themes that span the decades of the 20th century: the perennial struggle of the artist; the consequences of war; misguided heroes; and the difficulty of human relationships, both in love and between the races.-In "Out Among the Rooster Men," a young man is conflicted when he witnesses his father's confrontation with his uncle, who has driven a black hired hand off his Texas ranch with a shotgun.-"My Name is Chu Myong Suk" is set aboard a minesweeper during the Korean War and tells of a North Korean officer being interrogated and tortured for information on a minefield."-In "Hands," a retired chief boatswain mate dog-naps a seeing-eye dog that he believes is being abused by its sadistic blind owner. -"Crazy on the Batture" is about a young black woman and the young white painter who persuades her to pose for him on the banks of the Mississippi River in the early 1940s.-Set in Washington DC in the 1970s, "The Souvenir" reveals the conflict between a WWII father and his Vietnam War veteran son.-In "You Must Remember This," a Navy nurse Lieutenant, who appears in an earlier story in the collection, recalls and reevaluates the experience of kissing her enlisted Phamacist's Mate assistant, who served with her in air evacuating the wounded from Iwo Jima.These are just a few of the stories offered in this treasury-a collection with tremendous range, depth, and a common thread of theme and character.