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The True History of Paradise... ICBC Rating - Easter, 1981. With Jamaica in a state of emergency, the Landing family gathers to bury one of its own. For Monica Landing, who had not spoken to her daughter in fifteen years, the death of Lana is the cruelest kind of loss. For Lana's younger sister, Jean, it is an incomprehensible tragedy. All she knows is that her beloved homeland, with its blue mountains and rich African rhythms, holds no future for her. But flight means crossing a landscape where soldiers turned executioners and armed gangs rule. It means making her way through the memoriesthat engulf her, with perhaps the only man she has ever loved by her side. In this time of apocalypse, past and present merge in Jean's remembrances of childhood; in the guiding visions that have always been with her; in the voices of her ancestors that tell of hardship and struggle, love and survival...voices of both the living and the dead. Told from a multiplicity of perspectives, The True History of Paradise captures the grace, beauty, and brutality that are indelible parts of the Jamaican experience. The story of three women born into a divided, troubled paradise becomes the history of a country, of generations of wanderers coming together in a place that can neither sustain nor be sustained by them, but which will shape them forever. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - After twenty-five years of self-imposed exile in Paris, legendary African American artist Chlöe Emmanuel faces a daunting prospect: the chance of a triumphant return to the United States. She came to the City of Light in search of freedom . . . the freedom to paint, freedom from a love that nearly destroyed her, freedom from the racial strife in the country she once called home. Swept into the seductive world of high fashion and art gallery intrigues, Chlöe finds that Paris posed its own set of challenges--the pressures of living up to her acclaimed reputation, the difficulty of expressing her feelings without a brush, the vow always to remain strong and directed, and the hope of never again allowing a man to turn her away from her dreams. While Chlöe reflects on her life, her relationships, and the meaning of her art, she begins to wonder: Is her artistic success linked to her "inability to love," as an enigmatic lover once suggested? If that is true, Chlöe must somehow help her younger "sister" and closest friend, Michael Davies Northcross, who is confronting a devastating personal crisis of her own. A distinguished African-American professor in England, married to a brilliant British scholar, Michael has modeled her life on the lies that Chlöe has lived. When a visiting professor challenges not only her marriage but her reasons for staying devoted to a white man, Michael must sort through the half-truths and deceptions-- and find her way back to that fragile place where real love exists. Unwilling to sacrifice the dreams they dared to make real, Chlöe and Michael are forced to the limits of their strength and independence. They must gamble everything to recapture what they have lost . . . in a dazzling game called Blackgammon. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - How did a beautiful, talented college student fall in love with a man serving twenty to life for murder? And why did she marry him? At a time when one in four black men are caught in the web of the criminal justice system, Asha Bandele shatters the myths of prisoners' wives and tells a story of embracing the beauty of love in the ugliest circumstances and of people's ability to change, to do better, to grow. Whether she is describing her restricted but romantic courtship with Rashid -- when letters were like dates, like "whispers on the slow, blue-light dance floor" -- or riding the bus upstate with the other wives and girlfriends, asha bandele creates haunting images and reflections so powerful and unique that they beg to be reread and savored. At the same time that she recalls the extreme ups and downs that accompany a relationship constantly scrutinized by guards and surveillance cameras, she confronts her own dark secrets and sadness. The love of a man with an ugly past but a firm belief in redemption is what heals her broken spirit and grants her the courage and confidence to embrace life again. This is a love story extraordinary in its circumstances but universal in its message. With unblinking honesty, Asha Bandele writes about the tenuous balance of power upon which most relationships rest, the deep needs that bring two people together, the jealousy and insecurity that can drive them apart. But most of all, The Prisoner's Wife reminds us why we love -- what we give up for it and what we receive from it. An immensely gifted poet whom the Bay Guardian has called "an essential new voice in African-American literature," Asha Bandele has written a remarkably candid book that resonates with poetic language and abundant insight. Read our Review About the Author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem...
ICBC Rating - From the warm shores of seventeenth-century Barbados to the harsh realties of the slave trade, and the cold customs of Puritanical New England, Tituba, the only black victim of the Salem witch trials, recalls a life of extraordinary experiences and mystical powers. At the age of seven, Tituba watched as her mother was hanged for daring to wound a plantation owner who tried to rape her. Tituba was raised from then on by Mama Yaya, a gifted woman who shared with her the secrets of healing and magic. But it was Tituba's blind, all-consuming love of the slave John Indian that led her from safety into slavery, and the bitter, vengeful religion practiced by the good citizens of Salem, Massachusetts. Though protected by the spirits, Tituba could not escape to the lies and accusations of that hysterical time. As history and fantasy merge, Maryse Condé, acclaimed author of Tree of Life and Ségu, creates the richly imagined life of a fascinating woman in this lush novel. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - Southern India 1969. Here, armed only with the invincible
innocence of children, Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for
themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely,
lovely mother, who loves by night the same man her children adore
by day...their blind grandmother, who plays Handel on her violin...their
beloved uncle, a Rhodes Scholar pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher...their
enemy, an ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt...and the ghost of an imperial
entomologist's moth. But when their English cousin and her mother
arrive for a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change
in an instant, that lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease
forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense
of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what
lies at the heart of it. In her first novel, award-winning Indian screenwriter Arundhati Roy conjures a whoosh of wordplay that rises from the pages like a brilliant jazz improvisation. The God of Small Things feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - Lalita Tademy had always been intensely interested in her family's stories, especially ones about her great-grandmother Emily, a formidable figure who died with her life savings hidden in her mattress. Probing deeper for her family's roots, Tademy soo found herslef swept up in an obsessive two-year odyssey -- and leaving her corporate career for the little Louisiana farming community of Cane River. It was here, on a medium-sized Creole plantation owned by a family named Derbannes, that author Lalita Tademy found her roots -- and the stories of four astonishing women who battled vast injustices to create a legacy of hope and achievement. They were women whose lives began in slavery, who weathered the Civil War, and who grappled with the contradictions of emancipation through the turbulent early years of the twentieth century. Through it all, they fought to unite their family and forge success on their own terms. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - Tía Gorda has always claimed Soledad was born con la pata caliente -- with feet burning to be anywhere but here. In truth, Soledad couldn't wait to get beyond the stifling confines of West 164th Street, away from her superstitious, contentious family with their endless tragedies and petty fights; from the leering men with their potbellies, the slick-skinned teen girls with their raunchy mouths and snapping gum. At eighteen, Soledad couldn't get away from the volume and the violence of the barrio some call Dominican Heights fast enough. Two years later, an art student at Cooper Union with a gallery job and a hip East Village walk-up, Soledad feels eminently cool and infinitely far from the neighborhood where she grew up. But when Gorda calls with the news that Olivia, Soledad's mother, has lapsed into an emotional coma, Soledad knows she hasn't escaped la familia. Gorda insists Soledad's return is the only thing that will cure Olivia. Fighting the memories of the life she has left -- the broken hydrants on littered corners, her jealous cousin Flaca, her bizarre mother and, curiously, images of her mother's Dominican youth -- Soledad returns home to Washington Heights. Her journey has only begun. As Soledad tries to salvage her damaged relationship with Olivia, tame Flaca's raucous behavior, tolerate her zany tía Gorda and resist falling for Richie, a soulful, intense man from the neighborhood, she also faces the greatest challenge of her life: confronting the ghosts from her mother's past. Rich, evocative and wise, Soledad is a wondrous story of culture and chaos, of family and integrity, myth and mysticism. Angie Cruz is a dazzling new voice, a Latina literary light whose passionate debut in Soledad surely marks the beginning of a remarkable career. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book ICBC Rating - The Antelope Wife extends the branches of the families who populate Louise Erdrich's earlier novels, and once again, her unsentimental, unsparing writing captures the Native American sense of despair, magic, and humor. Rooted in myth and set in contemporary Minneapolis, this poetic and haunting story spans a century, at the center of which is a mysterious and graceful woman known as the Antelope Wife. Elusive, silent, and bearing a mystical link to nature, she embodies a complicated quest for love and survival that impacts lives in unpredictable ways. Her tale is an unforgettable tapestry of ancestry, fate, harrowing tragedy, and redemption, that seems at once modern and eternal. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - In this quietly powerful and eminently readable novel, award-winning Kenyan novelist Marjorie Macgoye deftly interweaves the story of one young woman's tumultuous coming of age with the history of a nation emerging from colonialism. Sixteen year old Paulina leaves her traditional rurla village with high hopes to meet her new husband in Nairobi, which in 1956 is still in the midst of "the Emergency" as the British seek to suppress anti-colonial revolts. Her naivete is soon tempered by the realities of political turmoil, urban poverty, and married life, and by the pain of her own inability to bear a child. Soon on her own, Paulina must rely upon her skills and determination in a struggle for survival, independence, and identity. Her remarkable inner journey comes to embrace the experience of an entire nation also struggling to find its way. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - Dreaming in Cuban is a beautifully written saga about three generations of Cuban women and their separate responses to the revolution. García tells the story through dramatic events with the supernatural and the cosmic. Evocative and rich, it is a haunting narrative of a family divided politically and geographically by the Cuban revolution and of the generational fissures that open on each side: in Cuba, between a grandmother who is a fervent Castro supporter and a daughter who retreats into an Afro-Cuban santeria tradition; in America, between another daughter, militantly anti-Castro, and her own rebellious punk-artist daughter, who mocks her obsession, and struggles to balance her search for her identity as a Cuban and as an American. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
ICBC Rating - TBA Waris Dirie ran away from her oppressive life in the African desert when she was barely in her teens, illiterate and impoverished, with nothing to her name but a tattered shawl. Today she lives in New York, pursuing an extraordinary dual career as an international supermodel and a United Nations special ambassador who travels the world as an articulate and passionate advocate of human rights. Now, in this insightful and important book, she offers an irresistible first-person account of her dramatic and inspiring odyssey. Read our review About the author Rate this book in book forum Buy this book
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