Every night when I turn the lights out in my sixteenth-floor living room before I go to bed, I experience a shock of pleasure as I see the banks of lighted windows rising to the sky, crowding round me, and feel myself embraced by the anonymous ingathering of city dwellers.
'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries aneccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism - and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief.At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.
It had been Graham Greene's ideato explore tropical West Africa. The map of Liberia was virtually blank,the interior marked 'cannibals'. It was a far cry from the literary London of 1935,and the result of the 350-mile trek was the masterclass in travel writing that is Journey Without Maps. But the gifted author was not travelling alone. His cousin Barbara had, over perhaps a little too much champagne, rashlyagreed to go with him. Unbeknown to him, she also took up pen and paper on their long and arduous journey.Too Late to Turn Back is the amusing, mock-heroic and richly evocative adventure of a young woman who set out from the world of Saki and the Savoy Grill armed only with a cheery stoicism and an eye for an anecdote. From her exasperation at her cousin's refusal to pull his socks up to her concern over his alarmingly close scrape with death, from her yearning for smoked salmon to the missionary who kept a pet cobra, what emerges is a surprisingly refreshing andcharming travelogue of comic misadventure, fizzing with good.
It is the day of her younger brother's wedding and our narrator is struggling to compose her toast. She was nine years old when she travelled with her parents to Thailand to meet her brother Danny, and while their childhood in California was a happy one, when she holds their story up to the light, it refracts in ways she didn't expect. How to put words to their love?What follows is a heartfelt letter addressed to Danny and an excavation of their years growing up. Invoking everything from the classic Victorian adoption plot to childless women in literature to documents from Danny's case file, her narration is also a confession of sorts: to the parts of her life that she has kept from Danny, including her own struggle with infertility. And as the hours until the wedding tick down, she uncovers the words that can't and won't be said aloud.In Immediate Family, a fiercely tender debut novel, one luminous with love, Ashley Nelson Levy explores the complexities of motherhood, infertility, race, and the many definitions of family.
Prenumerera på vårt nyhetsbrev för att få fantastiska erbjudanden och inspiration för din nästa läsning.
Genom att registrera dig accepterar du vår personuppgiftspolicy.
