A complex and unusual love story set in contemporary Japan, highly evocative of life there, and sensitively portraying relationships between westerners and Japanese. I find Joiner's style reminiscent of the classic Japanese authors, particularly Kawabata, Soseki, and Tanizaki. A somewhat hidden gem of a book.
2024 International Rubery Book Awards Winner | 2023 American Writing Awards Finalist | 2023 Foreword Indies Awards Finalist | 2023 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist
Joiner's second novel set in the fabled Kanazawa area is an intimate yet understated look at an American who seeks recovery after his marriage to a Japanese woman has failed.
After Nozomi abandons Sedge and their marriage, taking all their money and leaving him with a ceramics shop he can't manage alone, her brother and his wife offer him a lifeline at their Japanese hot spring inn until he can get back on his…
You've seen the film, or one of the film versions. The book is even more darkly tragi-comical, and the psychological penetration is astounding for an author writing well over 200 years ago. Witty, sophisticated, and despite all the wickedness, surprisingly moral.
One of the most `modern' of eighteenth-century novels, Les Liasons Dangereuses is the brilliantly observed and vividly rendered story of two libertines and the innocent characters they plot to destroy.
I can't think of anyone else like Ms. Ifland writing today. This novel is astonishingly original, witty, cerebral--and yet not so abstract that it can't evoke genuine emotions too. The fiancé of an elusive and enigmatic woman is trying to track down his love, who has disappeared--and does so by interviewing her previous three husbands. The search takes us to a French monastery, a Japanese temple, and other mysterious places.
From America to France and Eastern Europe to Japan, this quest for a woman who has disappeared is a psychological mystery and an architectural odyssey in one.
Where is Alma? A future husband—No. 4—is desperately seeking his fiancée, who has disappeared. To locate her, he is interviewing her three former husbands, her sister, and ex sister-in-law. Could she be hiding in a French monastery? A Japanese shukubo (temple lodging)? Or maybe she is the victim of a belief in a Balkan creation myth?
Written in six voices that come together in a seamless and often comical narrative, Speaking to No.…
Welshman Huw Lloyd-Jones teaches Creative Writing at a charming college in the American South, and is in love with his beautiful wife, Miranda. But his idyllic life is about to change. His despotic Chair, Frida Shamburger, turns against him, and Miranda reveals that he can no longer count on her love. Huw must fight to save his job and his marriage. Yet can a middle-aged white man survive in the jungle of contemporary academia? And with a sinister psychiatrist and a women's guru encouraging Miranda to be independent, can the couple's love prevail?
Social and political satire. '...the anti-woke campus novel of our times' (David Joiner). 'Pure comical genius' (Gary Buslik). 'I laughed so loud I scared myself' (Kirsten Koza).
