New People - Danzy Senna

Staff Pick

New People is excellent! It follows Maria, a few months away from her wedding and a comfortable, if not happy, life, but irresistibly drawn to another man. This new man is unequivocally black, unlike her light-skinned, “racially nebulous” fiancée, and Maria herself. This is a telling detail, shedding light on Maria’s troubled relationship with her multi-racial identity— “black and looking white”—and the question at the heart of the book: who’s black and how? The question is not new, sure, but New People mines it both for dark comedy and drama, delivering biting commentary on race and plenty of surprises for readers. Be prepared to sit in astonishment by the end—Maria is a character to be reckoned with.

New People By Danzy Senna Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9781594487095
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Riverhead Books - August 1st, 2017

Private Life of Mrs. Sharma - Ratika Kapur

Staff Pick

Brimming with pathos and hard-edged humor, a few lines of description is not enough to do justice to Ratika Kapur's The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma nor to the wily and mesmerizing character at the center of her story. Adept at self-deception, the titular Mrs. Sharma invites us in: into an occasionally tense relationship with a teenage son; into a loving partnership with a husband away, working, in Dubai; into a hidden, indeterminate friendship with a younger man that surely and slowly transforms; into her private feelings on motherhood, on the pressures of being a (good) wife, daughter, and woman in India, and her dreams for more, for better, for herself and family, revealing a woman who is more than she seems, and remarkably adept at manipulating and subverting expectations, even as she examines and bemoans them. It is a singular portrait of a slice of modern India.
 

The Private Life of Mrs Sharma By Ratika Kapur Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9781408873649
Availability: Special Order—Subject to Availability
Published: Bloomsbury Publishing - December 13th, 2016

Home Fire - Kamila Shamsie

Staff Pick
Living under the legacy of their Jihadist father, the Pasha children know to keep their head down and mind their business, all the better to avoid scrutiny and suspicion. That is, until one of them commits a devastating and irreparable act of betrayal. Here is a luminous, charged account of an unshakeable familial bond; of the courage to stand, alone, for loved ones; to insist on the truth in the face of rampant rumors and orchestrated fallacies. Here, too, is an incisive and gut-wrenching reminder of the human lives caught in the politics of immigration and nationalism, of who belongs and who doesn’t, and of those who fall prey to the idea that there is an us and a them, or an us vs. them.
Home Fire: A Novel By Kamila Shamsie Cover Image
$26.00
ISBN: 9780735217683
Availability: Backordered
Published: Riverhead Books - August 15th, 2017

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