Archipelago of Souls

Archipelago of Souls
Author :
Publisher : Picador Australia
Total Pages : 381
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781743538524
ISBN-13 : 1743538529
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Synopsis Archipelago of Souls by : Gregory Day

WINNER OF THE PATRICK WHITE LITERARY AWARD "Day is one of a small, bold band of Australian novelists...whose imaginative compass is as spacious as is their appetite for risk." The Weekend Australian "Day has chiselled artfully away at his creation, and the result is lovely." The Saturday Paper In the aftermath of the Second World War, an Australian soldier, Wesley Cress, a hero of the underground resistance on German-occupied Crete, seeks solace and comfort on King Island, in the mouth of Bass Strait, in the Roaring Forties latitude of the Southern Ocean. Wesley carries in his heart the infernal story of the Battle of Crete, the disappearance of his brother in the ensuing evacuation, and the hellish journey he was forced to take after he was left behind on the ancient island. When he meets Leonie Fermoy, the granddaughter of an American whaler with her own nightmares, the private and the public battles of their post-war worlds begin to fuse. Through the agency of John Lascelles - the unassuming postmaster on the island and a crusader for the rights of returned soldiers - Wes and Leonie attempt to negotiate a future in which love can prevail in a morally devastated world. Archipelago of Souls is a novel exploring the difficult realities of nationhood, war, morality and love. Compelling and beautifully realised, it is about the creation of identity, the enigmas of memory and the power of the written word to heal the deepest wounds. "Richly layered and skilfully controlled, Day is one of a small, bold band of Australian novelists whose imaginative compass is as spacious as is their appetite for risk. For each renewal of his career we can be thankful." The Australian "A mature and searching book. It is consummately crafted." Michael McGirr, SMH "Archipelago of Souls is a novel that I read as slowly as I could, not only to savour Day's eloquence and skill in evoking his main characters, the villagers on Crete and King Island, and landscape, plants, and animals; not only to marvel at the moving, universal story he tells; not only to listen to the musicality and rhythm he creates with language, but also because I didn't want it to end. Gregory Day is a master storyteller." Newtown Review of Books "It's a beautifully written book with a poetic ring to many descriptions that evoke strong imagery, complementing the strong storyline, which will be remembered long after the last page is turned."The Weekly Times "Day's account of Cress' grinding struggle on Crete is remarkable in every way." The Age

Salt Water

Salt Water
Author :
Publisher : Archipelago
Total Pages : 466
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781939810724
ISBN-13 : 1939810728
Rating : 4/5 (24 Downloads)

Synopsis Salt Water by : Josep Pla

Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers. Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.

Dog Island

Dog Island
Author :
Publisher : Little, Brown
Total Pages : 288
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780316705257
ISBN-13 : 031670525X
Rating : 4/5 (57 Downloads)

Synopsis Dog Island by : Philippe Claudel

When three bodies wash up on the beach of a remote island, the locals must decide whether they should uncover the truth or let the mystery die with the victims. Nestled in an overlooked part of the Mediterranean, Dog Island is home to a quiet and untouched community that has long lived off its fishing, its vines, and its olive trees, far away from the turmoil its neighbors. But when the bodies of three unidentified men wash up on the beach, the witnesses are faced with an impossible decision: report the discovery and open up the island to grisly inquiries, or conceal the terrible truth? Resolving to preserve their way of life, the mayor and a small group of conspirators resolve on a cover-up. But after they dispose of the evidence, their act of deception continues to haunt them, bringing waves of suspicion and misfortune to the island. A detective arrives from the mainland, making their secret even harder to keep and threatening to destroy the very community they tried so hard to protect. With the blend of suspense, keep observation, and wit that has made Philippe Claudel’s books international bestsellers, Dog Island challenges our deepest assumptions about ourselves and offers a fierce and tragic fable for our times.

Good Will Come From the Sea

Good Will Come From the Sea
Author :
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781939810212
ISBN-13 : 1939810213
Rating : 4/5 (12 Downloads)

Synopsis Good Will Come From the Sea by : Christos Ikonomou

A collection of blistering, darkly humorous stories that upend the idyllic image of the Greek holiday island. Seeking to escape the paralyzing effects of the Greek economic crisis, a group of Athenian friends move to an Aegean island in the hopes of starting over. Viewed with suspicion and disdain by the locals, they soon find themselves enmeshed in the same vicious cycle of money, power, and violence they thought they had left behind.

The Scent of Buenos Aires

The Scent of Buenos Aires
Author :
Publisher : Archipelago
Total Pages : 489
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781939810359
ISBN-13 : 1939810353
Rating : 4/5 (59 Downloads)

Synopsis The Scent of Buenos Aires by : Hebe Uhart

Longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize From one of Argentina’s greatest contemporary storytellers, this collection gathers twenty-five of her most remarkable and incandescent short stories in English for the first time The Scent of Buenos Aires offers the first book-length English translation of Uhart’s work, drawing together her best vignettes of quotidian life: moments at the zoo, the hair salon, or a cacophonous homeowners association meeting. She writes in unconventional, understated syntax, constructing a delightfully specific perspective on life in South America. These stories are marked by sharp humor and wit: discreet and subtle—yet filled with eccentric and insightful characters. Uhart’s narrators pose endearing questions about their lives and environments—one asks “Bees—do you know how industrious they are?” while another inquires, “Are we perhaps going to hell in a hand basket?” “Uhart’s stories are concise and filled with both dry and conversational wit and flashes of poignant insight . . . slice-of-life writer . . . ” —Thrillist

Archipelago

Archipelago
Author :
Publisher : Penguin Group
Total Pages : 385
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780143122562
ISBN-13 : 0143122568
Rating : 4/5 (62 Downloads)

Synopsis Archipelago by : Monique Roffey

By the author of The Mermaid of Black Conch, a mesmerizing tale of a father and daughter’s sailing adventure from Trinidad to the Galapagos Islands, winner of the 2013 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and finalist for the 2014 Orion Book Award Monique Roffey, vibrant new voice in Caribbean fiction and author of the Costa Book of Year Award-winning The Mermaid of Black Conch and Orange Prize finalist The White Woman on the Green Bicycle, returns with Archipelago, a new novel that is a journey of redemption, healing, and hope in the wake of devastating loss. When a flood destroys Gavin Weald’s home in Trinidad and rips his family apart, life as he knows it will never be the same. A year later he returns to his house and tries to start over, but when the rainy season arrives, his daughter’s nightmares about the torrents make life there unbearable. So father and daughter—and their dog—embark upon a voyage to make peace with the waters. Their journey takes them far from their Caribbean island home, as they sail through archipelagos, encounter the grandeur of the sea, and meet with the challenges and surprises of the natural world.

The Barefoot Woman

The Barefoot Woman
Author :
Publisher : Archipelago
Total Pages : 153
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781939810052
ISBN-13 : 1939810051
Rating : 4/5 (52 Downloads)

Synopsis The Barefoot Woman by : Scholastique Mukasonga

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgotten. The story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother's voice in a haunting work of art.

Igifu

Igifu
Author :
Publisher : Archipelago
Total Pages : 122
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781939810793
ISBN-13 : 1939810795
Rating : 4/5 (93 Downloads)

Synopsis Igifu by : Scholastique Mukasonga

The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide." Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

A Sand Archive

A Sand Archive
Author :
Publisher : Picador Australia
Total Pages : 245
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781760780067
ISBN-13 : 1760780065
Rating : 4/5 (67 Downloads)

Synopsis A Sand Archive by : Gregory Day

WINNER OF THE PATRICK WHITE LITERARY AWARD Long before I ever met him I knew his name from the leaky desiccated type of a grey-brown slim volume, cheaply printed but essential to my research... Seeking stories of Australia's Great Ocean Road, a young writer stumbles across a manual from a minor player in the road's history, FB Herschell. It is a volume unremarkable in every way, save for the surprising portrait of its author that can be read between its lines: a vision of a man who writes with uncanny poetry about sand. And as he continues to mine the archive of FB Herschell - engineer, historian, philosopher - it is not the subject, but the man who begins to fascinate. A man whose private revolution among the streets of Paris in May 1968 begins to change the way he views life, love, and the coastal landscape into which he was born... SHORTLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2019 PRAISE FOR A SAND ARCHIVE "So beautiful, so subtle...a story told with rare tenderness and restraint. FB Herschell is one of the great characters of Australian literature." Carrie Tiffany "A bravura work" Michelle de Kretser "Day has written a ripper of a novel here" Readings "effortlessly combines the erudition of two rarely yoked disciplines: engineering and literature [and] harnesses technical language to convincingly lyrical ends." Sydney Morning Herald "The novel is an elegiac meditation on worlds changed by natural processes and human forces. Ultimately, through Herschell's character, it provides a model for the kind of rigorous and poetic attentiveness that might best honour the profundities of our landscapes and the lives we experience alongside them." The Saturday Paper

Kibogo

Kibogo
Author :
Publisher : Archipelago
Total Pages : 162
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781953861368
ISBN-13 : 1953861369
Rating : 4/5 (68 Downloads)

Synopsis Kibogo by : Scholastique Mukasonga

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD A new masterwork of satire, lore, and living memory from the leading voice of French-Rwandan literature “Mukasonga breathes upon a vanished world and brings it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness” --J.M. Coetzee In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth. Kibogo’s story is reserved for the evening’s end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. To some, Kibogo’s tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor’s hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder – can Kibogo really summon the rain?