Build Your House Around My Body

Author: Violet Kupersmith
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812993322
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
Part puzzle, part revenge tale, part ghost story, this ingenious novel spins half a century of Vietnamese history and folklore into “a thrilling read, acrobatic and filled with verve” (The New York Times Editors’ Choice). FINALIST FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION’S FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews “Fiction as daring and accomplished as Violet Kupersmith’s first novel reignites my love of the form and its kaleidoscopic possibilities.”—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas Two young women go missing decades apart. Both are fearless, both are lost. And both will have their revenge. 1986: The teenage daughter of a wealthy Vietnamese family loses her way in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed. 2011: A young, unhappy Vietnamese American woman disappears from her new home in Saigon without a trace. The fates of these two women are inescapably linked, bound together by past generations, by ghosts and ancestors, by the history of possessed bodies and possessed lands. Alongside them, we meet a young boy who is sent to a boarding school for the métis children of French expatriates, just before Vietnam declares its independence from colonial rule; two Frenchmen who are trying to start a business with the Vietnam War on the horizon; and the employees of the Saigon Spirit Eradication Co., who find themselves investigating strange occurrences in a farmhouse on the edge of a forest. Each new character and timeline brings us one step closer to understanding what binds them all. Build Your House Around My Body takes us from colonial mansions to ramshackle zoos, from sweaty nightclubs to the jostling seats of motorbikes, from ex-pat flats to sizzling back-alley street carts. Spanning more than fifty years of Vietnamese history and barreling toward an unforgettable conclusion, this is a time-traveling, heart-pounding, border-crossing fever dream of a novel that will haunt you long after the last page.

Silence Is My Mother Tongue

Author: Sulaiman Addonia
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1644451298
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
A sensuous, textured novel of life in a refugee camp, long-listed for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba, and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations by seeking to redefine love, sex, and gender roles in their lives, and when a businessman opens a shop and befriends Hagos, they cast off those pressures and make an unconventional choice. With this cast of complex, beautifully drawn characters, Sulaiman Addonia details the textures and rhythms of everyday life in a refugee camp, and questions what it means to be an individual when one has lost all that makes a home or a future. Intimate and subversive, Silence Is My Mother Tongue dissects the ways society wages war on women and explores the stories we must tell to survive in a broken, inhospitable environment.

What Can a Body Do?

Author: Sara Hendren
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735220026
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

Trouble

Author: Gary D. Schmidt
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547487738
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
“Henry Smith’s father told him that if you build your house far enough away from Trouble, then Trouble will never find you.” But Trouble comes careening down the road one night in the form of a pickup truck that strikes Henry’s older brother, Franklin. In the truck is Chay Chouan, a young Cambodian from Franklin’s preparatory school, and the accident sparks racial tensions in the school—and in the well-established town where Henry’s family has lived for generations. Caught between anger and grief, Henry sets out to do the only thing he can think of: climb Mt. Katahdin, the highest mountain in Maine, which he and Franklin were going to climb together. Along with Black Dog, whom Henry has rescued from drowning, and a friend, Henry leaves without his parents’ knowledge. The journey, both exhilarating and dangerous, turns into an odyssey of discovery about himself, his older sister, Louisa, his ancestry, and why one can never escape from Trouble.

The Dutch House

Author: Ann Patchett
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062963694
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Pulitzer Prize Finalist | New York Times Bestseller | A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick | A New York Times Book Review Notable Book | TIME Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, The Washington Post; O: The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Good Housekeeping, Vogue, Refinery29, and Buzzfeed From Ann Patchett, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth, comes a powerful, richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go. The Dutch House is the story of a paradise lost, a tour de force that digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are. At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakeable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

How to Build a House

Author: Dana Reinhardt
Publisher: Ember
ISBN: 0375844546
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Harper's dad is divorcing her beloved stepmother, Jane. Even worse, Harper has lost her stepsister, Tess. The divorce divides them, just when her best friend Gabriel betrays her. Harper decides to get away for the summer and joins a volunteer program to build a house for a family in Tennesee who lost their home in a tornado. (Not that she knows a thing about building a house.) Soon she's living in a funky motel and laboring long days in blazing heat with a quirky, terrific group of kids. Working alongside Teddy, the son of the family for whom they are building the house, Harper and Teddy's partnership turns into a summer romance. Learning to trust and love Teddy isn't easy for Harper, but it's the first step toward finding her way back home.

If He Had Been with Me

Author: Laura Nowlin
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
ISBN: 1402277849
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...

Strikingly Different Selling

Author: Dale Merrill
Publisher: Mango Media Inc.
ISBN: 1642504874
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 157

Book Description
Superior Sales Success #1 New Release in Global, Direct, and Industrial Marketing You are competing with the top salespeople in your industry for the same customers. For each sales opportunity there is only one winner. What separates a “winner” from the rest of the very best and makes them “strikingly different”? Six years of focused research involving more than 2,800 sales professionals from 135 countries reveals the 6 vital skills that separate top sales performers from the herd. Learn what it takes to be that one winner! What really works to stand out and sell more? In their book Strikingly Different Selling, Dale Merrill, Scott Savage, Jennifer Colosimo, and Randy Illig (the sales performance experts at FranklinCovey) reveal the secrets to consistent, predictable sales success. The 6 Vital Skills. The author team found that most consultants and sales professionals believed they were doing a great job in their client interactions. Yet 70 percent of the time client executives felt their meetings with sales professionals were a waste of time. To the authors, this was a major surprise. But, for the “Strikingly Different” sales professionals, there were six things they did to consistently outperform their competitors and radically change their client interactions and results. Go from being just one of the sales crowd to the superior choice. Read Strikingly Different Selling: 6 Vital Skills to Stand Out and Sell More and learn the details behind the 6 skills. The 6 vital skills to stand out and sell more: Capture Attention with Verbal Billboards Create Excitement with Movie Trailers Build Confidence with Flashbacks and Flashforwards Become Essential with “Why Us!” Differentiators Get Curious and Find the Gaps Navigate Traffic Lights and Close the Gaps If you have found books such as SPIN Selling, The Challenger Sale, To Sell is Human, The Secrets of Closing the Sale, or Start with Why to be useful; then your next read should be Strikingly Different Selling.

Claire of the Sea Light

Author: Edwidge Danticat
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385349688
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
From the national bestselling author of Brother, I’m Dying and The Dew Breaker: a “fiercely beautiful” novel (Los Angeles Times) that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing. Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed. In this stunning novel about intertwined lives, Edwidge Danticat crafts a tightly woven, breathtaking tapestry that explores the mysterious bonds we share—with the natural world and with one another.

Before We Were Strangers

Author: Renée Carlino
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501105787
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M