This beautifully written book would have captivated me even if it hadn’t spoken to my own experience grieving the loss of a family member.
I usually enjoy audiobooks only on car trips, but with this one, I kept listening until the story was over. And then I wanted to stay with the characters. Thematically, it represents a time in recent history that I don’t find addressed much in fiction, the 2007/8 financial crisis, which had a significant fallout for so many people.
When David Herron-overwhelmed and despairing, his family's business and
finances in ruin due to the bursting lending bubble of 2008-takes his
own life one chilly spring morning, he has no idea the ripple effect his
decision will set into motion.
Two years later, his widow, Jules, is now an employee of the bakery she
and David used to own-and still full of bitterness over David's lies,
perceived cowardice, and ultimate abandonment of her and their
now-teenage daughter, Rennie. Rennie, meanwhile, struggles socially at
school, resents her work-obsessed mother, and is convinced she's to
blame for her father's death.
Wilkinson writes so sparely and lyrically, and yet with a bluntness that’s palpable.
It reads almost as magic realism, but the flights of fancy are really manifestations of mental illness, so skillfully put to the page. This is a tale of women and childbearing, of oppression and poverty. A haunting, painful tale, to be sure, but hope finds its way through it.
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness.
The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight against both the moral judgment of the community and her…
All readers who love The Grapes of Wrath (as I do), owe it to themselves and this author to read this stunning novel.
Sanora Babb wrote it in the 1930s from her own experiences with displacement and poverty during the Dust Bowl, and it was set to be published at that time but was suddenly shelved because Steinbeck’s book appeared on the horizon. He had worked from her journals to create his masterpiece.
Babb’s manuscript was finally published in 2004, a striking, poignantly written story of a family determined to survive in the face of an absolute cataclysm.
Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience.
This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the…
In this contemporary novel set in Southern Appalachia, the lives of two young women are knit together when one is left alone on a farm after the sudden loss of her partner and the other is displaced by mountaintop removal coal mining.
It “recalls the work of authors such as Annie Dillard and Barbara Kingsolver,” according to Kirkus, and “explores the healing potential of domestic rituals, queer love, and communities formed through music and activism.” In Circling Flight is as much a story of love and loss of the humankind as it is a treatise to the elemental relationship between people and their land.
