When
I read this for the second time- I again fell into the story, completely
absorbed in the language and the main character, fourteen-year-old Esch.
I
loved how she loved her brothers and how they loved her back in such real and
relatable ways. I believed in her pregnancy and in her poverty. I felt the
suspense and drama of Hurricane Katrina getting stronger and coming closer,
even as the family struggled with their more everyday problems and needs. I
loved the lush and vivid descriptions of nature.
I felt I was there,
experiencing this with these people. This is what literature can do: cross
boundaries of class and race and age and gender, helping us transcend the
narrowness of our particular life.
_______________
'A brilliantly pacy adventure story ... Ward writes like a dream' - The Times
'Fresh and urgent' - New York Times
'There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction' - Guardian
_______________
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
Hurricane Katrina is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. He's a hard drinker, largely absent, and it isn't often he worries about the family.
Esch and her three brothers are stockpiling food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets;…
I don’t often read historical
fiction, but Matrix had a sensibility that resonated strongly with my own
modern confidence and spirit and yet also felt accurate, in so many ways, for
that woman in that twelfth-century nunnery.
The plot was deeply satisfying. We marched along with
this young nun on her surprisingly quick path to achievement and success. If
the victories were not easily won, I still had a constant sense of winning.
That was exhilarating!
And then the ending took a turn that I found both
profound and radical—something that connected strongly to environmental issues today
and the world we live in, but that also reflected on the long arc of
human history.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS AN OBAMA'S BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Gorgeous, sensual, addictive' SARA COLLINS 'Brightly lit' NAOMI ALDERMAN
Born from a long line of female warriors and crusaders, yet too coarse for courtly life, Marie de France is cast from the royal court and sent to Angleterre to take up her new duty as the prioress of an impoverished abbey.
Lauren Groff's modern masterpiece is about the establishment of a female utopia.
'A propulsive, captivating read' BRIT BENNETT 'Fascinating, beguiling, vivid' MARIAN KEYES 'A dazzlingly clever tale' THE TIMES 'A thrillingly vivid,…
Like most of my friends and family, I live in the sturm
and drang of climate change and social injustice. In many ways, I feel
the painful moral complexity of my time.
In particular, as an
environmentalist, I very much enjoyed the quietness of this novel about modern
American life, a sense of the efforts we must make to build community, with the
underlying belief that this is possible. I liked the book’s heart of decency,
the main character’s particularly befuddled decency, and the swells of the plot
that never overwhelmed me.
I liked all the birds! I felt I was always inside
this relatively unassuming story, letting it simply unfold.
Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist, writing vividly about the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction. Her exquisite new novel, the first since A Children's Bible (ISBN 978 0 393 86738 1) ("a blistering little classic"-Ron Charles, Washington Post), tells the story of an Arizona man's relationship with the family next door, whose house has one wall made entirely out of glass.
The story delivers attraction and love, friendship and grief. But Millet also evokes the uncanny. Through close observation of human and animal life in…
Revolution, renaissance, transformation. This is how I describe the
exploding world of citizen science.
Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for
Distinguished Natural History Writing and WILLA Literary Award for Best
Creative Nonfiction, Diary of a Citizen Scientist begins with me in
pursuit of the Western red-bellied tiger beetle.
As an entomologist once told
me, “Study any obscure insect for a week and you will then know more than
anyone else on the planet.” I chased the red-bellied tiger beetle for two summers
across New Mexico, where I live, and have explored a dozen other citizen science
programs. What I found is a renewed optimism in the mysteries of this world and
a renewed faith in how ordinary people can contribute to science and environmental
activism.
