egarofoli
Boston Public Library
egarofoli's Completed Shelf
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Added Aug 25, 2012
Summary:
Publishers Weekly
Reading Geraldine Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as does the other main relationship in Hanna's life: her fraught connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl's passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother's lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reservedPublishers Weekly
Reading Geraldine Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new…
Added Aug 25, 2012
11/22/6311/22/63, BookA Novel
by King, StephenBook - 2011 | 1st Scribner hardcover edBook, 2011. 1st Scribner hardcover ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
The Art of Racing in the RainThe Art of Racing in the Rain, BookA Novel
by Stein, GarthBook - 2008 | 1st edBook, 2008. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Half-blood BluesHalf-blood Blues, BookA Novel
by Edugyan, EsiBook - 2012 | 1st U.S. edBook, 2012. 1st U.S. ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Summary:
"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet-player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a café by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German citizen. And he is black. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now a jazz legend, is the subject of a celebratory documentary. Two of the original Hot-Time Swingers American band members, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, are invited to attend the film's premier in Berlin. As they return to the landscape of their past friendships, rivalries, loves and betrayals, Sid, the only witness to Falk's disappearance who has always refused to speak about what happened, is forced to break his silence. Sid recreates the lost world of Berlin's pre-war smoky bars, and the salons of Paris, telling his vibrant and suspenseful story in German American slang. Half-Blood Blues is a novel about music and race, love and loyalty, and marks the arrival of an extraordinarily 'gifted storyteller' (The Toronto Star)"-"Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their 'degenerate music.' After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young…
Added Aug 25, 2012
Added Aug 25, 2012
ZeitounZeitoun, Book
by Eggers, DaveBook - 2010 | 1st Vintage Books edBook, 2010. 1st Vintage Books ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
The Buddha in the AtticThe Buddha in the Attic, Book
by Otsuka, JulieBook - 2011 | 1st edBook, 2011. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Added Aug 25, 2012
Added Aug 25, 2012
Elegy for EddieElegy for Eddie, BookA Maisie Dobbs Novel
by Winspear, JacquelineBook - 2012 | 1st edBook, 2012. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Dark FireDark Fire, BookA Matthew Shardlake Novel
by Sansom, C. J.Book - 2005 | 1st American edBook, 2005. 1st American ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Ten Thousand SaintsTen Thousand Saints, Book
by Henderson, EleanorBook - 2011 | 1st edBook, 2011. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
WildWild, BookFrom Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Strayed, CherylBook - 2012 | 1st edBook, 2012. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Added Aug 25, 2012
The Art of FieldingThe Art of Fielding, BookA Novel
by Harbach, ChadBook - 2011 | 1st edBook, 2011. 1st ed
Added Aug 25, 2012
Added Aug 25, 2012