Book cover of Flesh and Blood

Book description

From the bestselling author of The Hours and Specimen Days comes a generous, masterfully crafted novel with all the power of a Greek tragedy.

The epic tale of an American family, Flesh and Blood follows three generations of the Stassos clan as it is transformed by ambition, love, and history.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Flesh and Blood as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Michael Cunningham is an author empathically attuned to the travails of individual souls trapped by the external circumstances of their lives.

Flesh and Blood is his masterpiece about the hidden desperation seething within families and the crushing transgenerational legacy of class and the immigrant experience. 

Constantine Stassos, a Greek-American and family patriarch, is determined to live out the American Dream. The novel unfolds over his lifetime and explores the emotional and physical costs on his children and wife to simultaneously embrace and reject the entrapment of rigid family values. 

Cunningham explores societal issues of gay rights, the AIDS epidemic, suicide,…

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Book cover of Night Terminus

Night Terminus by Ellis Scott,

Beginning with a chance encounter in 1985, an unnamed narrator embarks on a physical and spiritual sojourn over four decades.

From a one-night stand in Paris with the troubled and enigmatic Louis, to Montreal, through a divided Europe, and into the Iranian desert with the sick yet determined Yuri, and…

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