Book picks similar to
Father of the Four Passages by Lois-Ann Yamanaka
hawaii
fiction
1st-editions-of-note
young-adult
Refiners Fire Pack, #1-3
Lynn Austin - 2004
Each book in this powerful Civil War trilogy from award-winning novelist Lynn Austin's powerful Civil War trilogy offers a unique and shattering perspective on the conflict while exploring the deep affect the war had on the faith of a nation.
Watermelon Nights
Greg Sarris - 1998
Johnny is trying to organize the remaining members of his displaced tribe; at the same time he contemplates leaving his grandmother's home for the big city. As the novel shifts perspective, tracing the controversial history of the tribe, we learn how the tragic events of Elba's childhood, as well as Iris's attempts to separate herself from her cultural roots, make Johnny's dilemma all the more difficult. Gritty yet rich in detail and emotion, Watermelon Nights stands beside the novels of Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Sherman Alexie as an important work not only in Native American literature, but in contemporary American fiction.
A Box of Matches
Nicholson Baker - 2003
Every day he gets up before dawn, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, lights a fire with one wooden match, and thinks. What Emmett thinks about is the subject of this wise and closely observed novel, which covers vast distances while moving no further than Emmett’s hearth and home. Nicholson Baker’s extraordinary ability to describe and celebrate life in all its rich ordinariness has never been so beautifully achieved.
Bewilderness
Karen Tucker - 2021
Irene, a lonely nineteen-year-old in rural North Carolina, works long nights at the local pool hall, serving pitchers and dodging drunks. One evening, her hilarious, magnetic coworker Luce invites her on a joy ride through the mountains to take revenge on a particularly creepy customer. Their adventure not only spells the beginning of a dazzling friendship, it seduces both girls into the mysterious world of pills and the endless hustles needed to fund the next high.Together, Irene and Luce run nickel-tossing scams at the county fair and trick dealers into trading legit pharms for birth-control pills. Everything is wild and wonderful until Luce finds a boyfriend who wants to help her get clean. Soon the two of them decide to move away and start a new, sober life in Florida—leaving Irene behind.Told in a riveting dialogue between the girls' addicted past and their hopes for a better future, Bewilderness is not just a brilliant, funny, heartbreaking novel about opioid abuse, it's also a moving look at how intense, intimate friendships can shape every young woman's life.
A Splendid Little War
Derek Robinson - 2012
Not for long. By 1919, White Russians were fighting the Bolsheviks (Reds) for control of their country, and Winston Churchill (then Minister for War) wanted to see Communism 'strangled in its cradle'. So a volunteer R.A.F. squadron, flying Sopwith Camels and DH9 bombers, went there to duff up the Reds. 'There's a splendid little war going on,' a British staff officer told them. 'You'll like it.' Looked like fun. But the war was neither splendid nor little. It was big and it was brutal, a grim conflict of attrition, marked by cruelty, betrayal and corruption. Before it ended, the squadron wished that both sides would lose. If that was a joke, nobody was laughing. "A Splendid Little War" tests the pilots' gallows humour in a world of armoured trains and elegant barons, gruesome religious sects and anarchist guerrillas, unreliable allies and pitiless enemies. The comedy of this war, if it exists, is very bleak. Derek Robinson is at once our finest living comic novelist and a master of military fiction. Biggles was never like this.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong - 2019
Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
Jane Austen: The complete Novels
Jane Austen - 2017
This book contains the complete novels of Jane Austen in the chronological order of their original publication.- Lady Susan- Sense and Sensibility- Pride and Prejudice- Mansfield Park- Emma- Persuasion- Northanger Abbey- The Watsons- Sanditon
Still Life With Volkswagens
Geoff Nicholson - 1994
Nazi skinheads are cruising the streets and a millionaire tycoon and a weather girl have been kidnapped. It falls to Barry Osgathorpe to discover who is responsible.
A Simple Murder
Phillip Thompson - 2011
But when he reports on a murder aboard the Marine base on Oahu, he discovers a sinister plot to kill hundreds of innocent tourists.
What We Did On Our Holiday
John Harding - 2000
She senses her biological clock ticking away and wants children while he doesn't. Not because he doesn't like children but because he feels a child would be just one responsibility too many.Nick's problem is his parents. He's devoted to them of course, but sometimes even he finds his patience wearing a little thin which in turn brings on the guilt. But they are rather a handful. They're conservative, highly eccentric and increasingly infirm. His Mum's so enormously overweight that her heart's now a bit dicky and she is certainly no longer up to looking after Dad by herself. He's got Parkinson's Disease - not the shaking kind, as Mum's always reminding people - but he's unable to do even the simplest task himself and needs constant care and attention.Nick knows the time has come to take the matter in hand but things need to be handled carefully. And so he and Laura take them to Malta for what they hope will be a happy final family holiday. Nick thinks his only problem is going to be avoiding Laura's amorous advances but this particular island turns out to be a sun-kissed cupboard with more than its fair share of skeletons...Tackling a taboo subject with sensitivity, understanding, great affection and good humour, What We Did On Our Holiday is a remarkably uplifting, moving and reassuring novel about a time in our lives when it seems roles are reversed and we find ourselves looking after the very people we'd always assumed would be there to look after us.
Season of Migration to the North and The Wedding of Zein
Tayeb Salih - 1980
Shooting the Moon
V.M. Jones - 1958
But under the surface new currents are stirring — forces that threaten everything he believes indestructible. As events spiral out of control, Pip is brought face to face with a dramatic choice that changes his life forever as he learns what it means to confront issues of life and death alone. And in the face of ultimate loss, what matters most of all?
The Mountains Sing
Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai - 2020
Tran Dieu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Noi, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Ho Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that will tear not just her beloved country but her family apart. Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Viet Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope. This is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai’s first novel in English.
The Perfect Age
Heather Skyler - 2004
She is a lifeguard at the pool at the Dunes hotel in Las Vegas, caught off guard by the new attention from men and boys, not quite sure of her own footing in the world. Her mother, Kathy, suddenly finds herself in a place equally uncertain: her children getting older, her stable marriage perhaps too stable, the slow days of summer leaving her adrift. When Kathy meets Helen’s boss, the manager at the pool, her life is on the brink of a different sort of change.Following Helen and Kathy through three summers, this novel is an intimate picture of two sexual awakenings under one roof and their aftershocks on a family. The Perfect Age is set in workaday Las Vegas, where people are married at drive-through chapels, and escort services are advertised alongside 99-cent shrimp cocktail. The novel takes the reader beyond the glitz of showgirls and Elvis impersonators and reveals the everyday life in homes and schools, and among the lukewarm waters of Lake Mead and the semi-cool of the surrounding mountains. In The Perfect Age, Heather Skyler explores the nature of beauty, sex, and class divisions in a society where things are at once normal and bizarre, showing us that the validity of life’s deepest experiences—love, betrayal, acceptance—is never compromised by age.
The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery - 2006
Renée, the concierge, is witness to the lavish but vacuous lives of her numerous employers. Outwardly she conforms to every stereotype of the concierge: fat, cantankerous, addicted to television. Yet, unbeknownst to her employers, Renée is a cultured autodidact who adores art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture. With humor and intelligence she scrutinizes the lives of the building's tenants, who for their part are barely aware of her existence. Then there's Paloma, a twelve-year-old genius. She is the daughter of a tedious parliamentarian, a talented and startlingly lucid child who has decided to end her life on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth birthday. Until then she will continue behaving as everyone expects her to behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter. Paloma and Renée hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them. They discover their kindred souls when a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu arrives in the building. Only he is able to gain Paloma's trust and to see through Renée's timeworn disguise to the secret that haunts her. This is a moving, funny, triumphant novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.
