While
the titles highlighted in this newsletter fit naturally into these four
categories, many of their topics lend themselves nicely to other themes as well:
in The Shadow Man, father/daughter relationships; in Push and Breath, Eyes,
Memory, mother/daughter relationships as portrayed in fiction; in Birdsong,
extramarital affairs; and so on. We hope our suggestions will provide you with
new ideas for shaping your discussions as well as inspire you to be creative in
forming your own lists of themed books.
Memoir
Currently known as the "novel of the nineties," memoirs are perhaps the most
commonly read works of nonfiction. The following are works by women whose stories
are sometimes harrowing and heartbreaking but always honest and enlightening.
The Shadow Man
by Mary Gordon
"A rich and painful memoir of a daughter's loss. . . wrenching. . . courageous." --Boston Globe
More than thirty years after his death, bestselling
author Mary Gordon sought to learn the truth about her father. For a long time
she remembered him simply as the man who loved her "more than God." What she
discovered in libraries, archives, and even her own memory tested her credulity
and even her powers of forgiveness. For her father was an immigrant who lied
about his origins; a Jew who became a virulent anti-Semite, and a devout
converted Catholic who was also a pornographer. In The Shadow Man, she assembles
these facts into a testament of a daughter's conflicted love for her lost father.
First Comes Love
by Marion Winik
From the NPR commentator comes a memoir of breathtaking candor, about the
extraordinary passion between a straight woman and a gay man.
Marion Winik shocked her friends and family when she fell in love with Tony. But
Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a
marriage and two beautiful sons and to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal,
and AIDS, which would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven. A miraculous account
of love, loss, and survival, First Comes Love redefines what it means to be in
love.
Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen
"Poignant, honest, and triumphantly funnyÉ[a] compelling and heartbreaking story." --Susan Cheever, The New York Times Book Review
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen
was sent to McLean Hospital, where she spent the next two years on the ward for
teenage girls. Her memoir provides vivid portraits of her fellow patients and
their keepers and is an unflinching document that gives dimension to our
definitions of sane, insane, mental illness, and recovery.
An Unquiet Mind
by Kay Redfield Jamison
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Dr. Kay Jamison is an international authority on manic-depressive illness. She is
also one of its survivors.
While she was pursuing a career in psychiatry, Jamison found herself experiencing
the exhilarating highs and catastrophic lows that afflicted many of her patients.
In An Unquiet Mind, Jamison explores manic-depression from the perspective of
both the healer and the healed, making her memoir lucid, learned, and profoundly
affecting.
"Jamison's [strength] is in the gutsy way she has made her disease her
life's work and in her brilliant ability to convey its joys and its anguish."
--Washington Post Book World
OTHER SUGGESTED TITLES:
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp (Dell), The Duke of
Deception by Geoffrey Wolff (Vintage Books), The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison
(Random House), The Liar's Club by Mary Karr (Penguin), This Boy's Life by Tobias
Wolff (Harper Perennial).
COMING-OF-AGE
How different was the world of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Charles
Dickens's Great Expectations from the world as we know it today? Precious from
Push, Sophie from Breath, Eyes, Memory, and Ellen from Ellen Foster are three
young heroines of contemporary literature who are coming of age in a time and
place where children are forced to make decisions that are too difficult even for
adults.
Push
by Sapphire
Winner of the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award
"A horrific, hope-filled story [that is] brilliant, blunt, merciless." --Newsday
Precious Jones, a sixteen-year-old black girl, has up until now been invisible;
invisible to the father who raped her, to the mother who batters her, and to the
authorities who dismiss her as just one more of society's casualties. When the
illiterate Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a
determined and highly radical teacher, her life begins to change, for she learns
how to write about her life and how to make it her own for the first time. This
electrifying novel, by a writer of prophetic power, is relentless, remorseless,
and truly inspirational.
Breath, Eyes, Memory
by Edwidge Danticat
"Vibrant, magic. . . wraps readers into the haunting life of a young Haitian girl." --Boston Globe
Evocative, passionate, and deeply moving, Breath, Eyes, Memory is an
unforgettable novel about mothers and daughters, exile and return, that shimmers
with the wonder and terror of the author's native Haiti. As a girl in an
impoverished Haitian village, Sophie Caco is abandoned by her mother and raised
by a loving aunt until the age of twelve, when she is summoned by her mother to
join her in America.
Ellen Foster
by Kaye Gibbons
"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy," says eleven-year old Ellen
Thus the young narrator begins her life story, in the process painting an
extraordinary self-portrait. Ellen's first eleven years are a long fight for
survival. Her invalid, abused mother commits suicide, leaving Ellen to the
mercies of her daddy, a drunken brute, and after his death to the mercies of her
grandmother, a bitter and vengeful woman. Against all odds, Ellen never gives up
her belief that there is a place for her in the world home which will satisfy her
longing for love, acceptance, and order.
OTHER SUGGESTED TITLES:
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (Penguin), The Catcher in the Rye by
J. D. Salinger (Little, Brown), The Color Purple by Alice Walker (Pocket Books).
LOVE AND WAR
The hope and fervor of love and the fear and destruction of war are timeless
themes, as compelling in the novels of today as they were in the classics of the
past. In the tradition of A Farewell to Arms and Gone With the Wind, the love
stories that unfold amid the atrocities of battle in the following novels are
sure to haunt the memory and capture the imagination.
Birdsong
by Sebastian Faulks
"Overpowering and beautifulÉA great novel." --Simon Schama, The New Yorker
Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman devastated by his tragic love affair with a
married Frenchwoman, joins the army when World War I breaks out. As he commands a
brigade of young soldiers in a bizarre campaign waged behind German lines, he
becomes both death's agent and its dispassionate witness. Ultimately, Stephen is
reunited with the woman whose memory he tried so desperately to erase. At once a
magnificently erotic love story and a savagely powerful evocation of the carnage
of World War I, Birdsongis filled with heroism and heartache and is as exalting
as it is harrowing.
The English Patient
by Michael Ondaatje
Winner of the Booker Prize
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"Sensuous, mysterious, rhapsodic. . . It transports the reader to another world." --San Francisco Chronicle
In an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II, Hana, a young nurse;
Caravaggio, a maimed thief turned spy; and Hana's lover, the Sikh sapper Kip; are
brought together and held in place by the riddle of the man they call "the
English patient"--a man who lies in an upstairs room, nameless and hideously
burned. As the story of his life slowly unravels, The English Patient both
disturbs and mesmerizes us with its images of loss, anger, and redemption--images
that illuminate not only war, but life itself.
OTHER SUGGESTED TITLES:
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (Fawcett), A
Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner), Gone With the Wind by
Margaret Mitchell (Warner), War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (Penguin), The
Winds of War by Herman Wouk (Little, Brown).
Vintage Books is proud to announce the publication of the Lymond Chronicles by
Dorothy Dunnett, the bestselling novels by the world's "finest living writer of
historical fiction,"(Washington Post book World) for the first time in trade paperback.
Set in
sixteenth-century Scotland, following its disastrous war with England, the Lymond
novels have as their hero Francis Crawford of Lymond, a nobleman and soldier of
fortune possessed of a scholar's erudition, an elastic sense of morals, and the
tongue of a poet. The six novels take this compellingly charismatic figure on a
perilous and colorful tour through the glittering courts and power centers of
sixteenth-century Europe.
To these novels, Dorothy Dunnett brings an effortless
narrative mastery, in-depth human portraiture, and an uncanny ability to
reanimate the past. The Lymond novels are works of marvelous intelligence and
pure enchantment, adventures for both the heart and mind.
