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June 14, 2013
Gift Ideas for Dad
In search of a last-minute Father’s Day gift? We’re here to help—with critically acclaimed, award winning, and bestselling novels that examine the many complexities of fatherhood.
Set among Manhattan’s high-powered liberal elite and told through an ensemble of endearing voices, These Things Happen is a not-quite-coming-of-age story about a modern family. Fifteen year old Wesley, a tenth grader, has moved from his mother and stepfather’s home to live with his father and his father’s male partner for a school term so that father and son might have a chance to bond again. But when Wesley finds himself unexpectedly at the center of an act of violence, everyone around him must reexamine themselves, their assumptions and their attitudes.
“The man behind ThirtySomething and My So-Called Life has taken his trademark qualities—the grownup’s shrewdness about the way the world works and the adolescent’s disarming emotional nakedness—and fashioned from them a very affecting work of fiction.” —Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Buy These Things Happen from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Until the dot.com bubble burst, George Bailey never gave much thought to why his grandfather seemed so happy. But then George’s wealth vanished, rocking his self-confidence, threatening his family’s security and making his adolescent son’s difficult life even more painful. Returning to the little Central Illinois farm town of Abbeville, where his grandfather had prospered and then fallen into ruin, flattened during the Depression, George seeks out the details of this remarkable man’s rise, fall, and spiritual rebirth, hoping he might find a way to recover himself.
“Robert Frost once noted that he could sum up all he had learned in life in three words: ‘It goes on.’ This rich novel unfolds in a way that exemplifies this insight, while gathering the sounds and texture of the Midwestern heartland, serving up a swath of Americana along the way; a scene involving boyhood mischief with a pellet rifle might have made Huck Finn smile.” —New York Sun
Buy Abbeville from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo
Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since.
Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and adventure of Great Lakes shipping in a setting that simply casts a spell over the characters as well as the reader. “Safe from the Sea is small in scope but substantial, on all levels, in its impact. It is a thing of beauty; a lesson in the ineffable power of story to take us out of ourselves and bring us to a place we never knew but recognize all the same.”— Bookslut.com
Buy Safe from the Sea from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo
From the heartlands of the 1880s Upper Midwest comes a morality tale of survival and destiny told in the convincing language of a patriarch’s journal, evoking a real sense of the time and place.
“To read Lloyd Zimpel’s superb new novel (his first in 40 years and well worth the wait), A Season of Fire and Ice, is to be reminded, in gripping detail, of the pride we can all take in immigrant American grit….Zimpel tells his tale with masterful economy, and yet with a rich linguistic vein that brings the 1880s alive as swiftly as his compendious knowledge of the detail of farming a century and more ago. As a novelist, not just as a historian, he isthe master of his craft…a true page-turner. . . . This is a splendid book, and it belongs on every reader’s bookshelf as a reminder of the forging of America.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
Buy A Season of Fire and Ice from: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Kobo.
Posted in: Events, New Features, Our Catalog, News/Press, | Keywords: a season of fire and ice, abbeville, amazon, barnes and noble, father's day, kobo, safe from the sea, these things happen
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