THE LAST WARNER WOMAN
Kei Miller
Adamine Bustamante is born in Jamaica, inside one of the island's last leper colonies. When she goes to a Revivalist Church, she discovers her gift of warning. But no one has bothered to warn Adamine that when she migrates to England her prophecies of hurricanes and earthquakes will no longer be respected. People will think she is crazy and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now, an old woman, Adamine wants to tell her own story but she must compete with Mr Writer Man, the novelist who is twisting her words for his own book, and Adamine doesn't know why. In a story about magic and migration, about stories and story-telling, we discover it is never one person who owns a story, or who has the right to tell it.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, hardcover, 9780297860778
|
NO PLACE FOR HEROES
Laura Restrepo
Translated from the Spanish
During Argentina's "Dirty War" of the late '70s and early '80s, Lorenza and Ramon, two passionate militants opposing Videla's dictatorship, met and fell in love. Now, Lorenza and her son, Mateo, have come to Buenos Aires to find Ramon, Mateo's father. Holed up in the same hotel room, mother and son share a common goal, yet are worlds apart on how they perceive it. For Lorenza, who came of age in the political ferment of the '60s, it is intertwined with her past ideological and emotional anchors (or were they illusions?), while her postmodernist son, a child of the '90s who couldn't care less about politics or ideology, is looking for his actual father—not the idea of a father, but the Ramon of flesh and blood.
Anything goes as this volatile pair battle it out: hilarious misunderstandings, unsettling cruelty, and even a temptation to murder. In the end, they begin to come to a more truthful understanding of each other and their human condition.
Laura Restrepo is the bestselling author of several prize-winning novels published in over twenty languages, including Leopard in the Sun, The Angel of Galilea, and her most recent, Delirium.
Nan Talese, hardcover, 9780385519915
|
LOVE, ANGER, MADNESS: A HAITIAN TRIPTYCH
Marie Vieux-Chauvet
Translated from the French by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur
Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant new translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005.
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a seminal writer of postoccupation Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1916 and died in New York in 1973. She is the author of five novels, including Dance on the Volcano, Fonds des Nègrease, Fille d'Haiti, and Les Rapaces.
Modern Library, paperback, 9780812976922
|
|
|
FRIVOLOUS WOMEN AND OTHER SINNERS / FRIVOLAS Y PECADORAS
Alicia Borinsky
Translated from the Portuguese by Cola Franzen
Tango and fairy tales mix freely in this seductive, irreverent, and sensual collection of poems. From a city that is at once Buenos Aires and all others, Alicia Borinsky brings to life reluctant mothers, slightly mad teachers, selfless wives, neighborhood witches, best friends, sworn enemies, torturers, vamps, cheats, and lovers—a gallery of characters who wink and boldly gaze back at us. Vignettes become poems and poems become vignettes, reflections that dance, reveal, conceal, enchant, confess, and dream.
Frivolous Women invites us to visit the darker and lighter sides of laughter and love and feel the tenderness of recovered memories as we cross the bridges of relationships and stroll down the mysterious streets of childhood. Alicia Borinsky reminds us that the revelations of poetry are always intimate and dangerous. Cola Franzen's agile and insightful translation, crafted in close collaboration with the poet, is faithful to the letter and spirit of the original Spanish in this bilingual edition.
Swan Isle Press, hardcover, 9780974888149
|
LIMA NIGHTS
Marie Aana
Carlos Bluhm leads the good life in upper-class Lima: He attends social functions with his elegant wife, goes out drinking with his three best friends, and has the occasional, fleeting assignation. Then he meets Maria Fernandez, a dancer at a tango bar in a rough part of town. The beautiful fifteen-year-old intoxicates him. An indigenous dark-skinned Peruvian, she represents everything his safe white world does not, and soon he can't get her out of his mind. They begin a passionate affair, one that will destroy his marriage and shatter the only reality he's ever known.
Flash forward twenty years: Against all odds, Carlos and Maria have remained together. But when Maria finally presses for a formal commitment, feelings long suppressed erupt in a tense endgame that sends both of them hurtling toward a dangerous resolution that will forever alter their lives.
"Arana's novel of taboo passion, tragic misperception, and life's hidden dimensions is as shattering as it is seductive" — Booklist
Dial Press, paperback, 9780385342599
|
THE TIME IT SNOWED IN PUERTO RICO
Sarah McCoy
It is 1961 and Puerto Rico is trapped in a tug-of-war between those who want to stay connected to the United States and those who are fighting for independence. For eleven-year-old Verdita Ortiz-Santiago, the struggle for independence is a battle fought much closer to home.
Verdita has always been safe and secure in her sleepy mountain town, far from the excitement of the capital city of San Juan or the glittering shores of the United States, where her older cousin lives. She will be a señorita soon, which, as her mother reminds her, means that she will be expected to cook and clean, go to Mass every day, choose arroz con pollo over hamburguesas, and give up her love for Elvis. And yet, as much as Verdita longs to escape this seemingly inevitable future and become a blond American bombshell, she is still a young girl who is scared by late-night stories of the chupacabra, who wishes her mother would still rub her back and sing her a lullaby, and who is both ashamed and exhilarated by her changing body.
Told in luminous prose spanning two years in Verdita's life, The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico is much more than a story about getting older. In the tradition of The House on Mango Street and Annie John, it is about the struggle to break free from the people who have raised us, and about the difficulties of leaving behind one's homeland for places unknown. At times joyous and at times heartbreaking, Verdita's story is of a young girl discovering her power and finding the strength to decide what sort of woman she'll become.
Three Rivers Press, paperback, 9780307460172
|
|
|
