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January 24, 2013
A Sense of Place, Continued
by Greg Michalson
Three fascinating women novelists make up our forthcoming spring list, each of them bringing us books that have decidedly international flavors. Two, incidentally, are debuts.
River of Dust by Virginia Pye, set in 1910 northwestern China shortly after the Boxer Rebellion, is about an American missionary couple whose lives and beliefs are forever altered when their toddler son is kidnapped by Mongol bandits. Elizabeth Huergo’s clever, energetic satirical debut The Death of Fidel Perez, is set in contemporary Havana. And Masha Hamilton’s newest novel What Changes Everything, moves from Texas, Cleveland and Brooklyn to the streets of Afghanistan, where Masha currently works as Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the US Embassy in Kabul.
Nothing regional about any of these titles (unless China, Havana and Afghanistan seem regional). But a sense of place and geographic location is nonetheless central to them in many ways.
Add in Emily Mandel’s paperback edition of The Lola Quartet and we have a novel that travels primarily through New York to Florida. But then Ms. Mandel’s characters always seem to be leaving New York for one place or another, for Montreal or the Arctic Circle, or an island off the coast of Italy. Though don’t be deceived into thinking that geographic location isn’t central and significant to her fiction, too.
The lone male writer on the list this spring is Peter Geye, with the paperback edition of The Lighthouse Road, a novel about the meaning of family, the immigrant experience and how we reinvent ourselves, a novel dominated by its landscape, full of local color and universal appeal. And so we’ve come full circle.
Posted in: New Books, Publishers Blog, Our Catalog, News/Press, | Keywords: elizabeth huergo, emily st. john mandel, masha hamilton, new books 2013, peter geye, river of dust, the death of fidel perez, the lighthouse road, the lola quartet, virginia pye, what changes everything
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