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From Nancy Huston - the Orange Prize shortlisted author of Fault Lines - comes Infrared: a smart and provocative novel of sexual intimacy and desire. After a childhood marked by pain, Rena Greenblatt has found the strength to build a successful career as a photographer. Like the ultrasensitive infrared film she uses, Rena sees what others don't see, and finds a form of love. By photographing men's bodies, she hopes to glimpse their souls. Away from her lover, Aziz, stuck in Florence with her infuriating stepmother and her ageing, unwell father, Rena confronts the masterpieces of the Renaissance alongside the banal inconveniences of a family holiday. At the same time, she finds herself travelling into dark and passionate memories of desire that lead her into a series of disturbing revelations.
A brilliantly written family epic that won France’s Prix Femina and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. “An immaculate novel” (The Guardian). In a profound and poetic story, internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Nancy Huston traces four generations of a single family from present-day California to WWII-era Germany. Fault Lines begins with Sol, a gifted, terrifying child whose mother believes he is destined for greatness partly because he has a birthmark like his dad, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. When Sol’s family makes an unexpected trip to Germany, secrets begin to emerge about their history during World War II. It seems birthmarks are not all that’s be...
Set in Paris in the 1960s, this story recounts the passionate love affair between a married German woman and a Hungarian Jewish instrument maker, shows how their lives intersect with the historical events of the time, and describes the different ways in which they remember World War II and the Algerian war for independence.
A brilliant series of essays examining the life and language of cultural exile.
A baby is born prematurely, and her mother sits at the beside willing her to live. Prodigyis an utterly unforgettable novella which traces the course of young Maya's life as a brilliant child--loved and loving--and musical progidy. Nancy Huston, whose The Mark of the Angelwas superbly reviewed and shortlisted for the Giller Prize, once again presents us with a flawlessly executed and moving tale, which explores the boundaries between dream and madness, love and pain, art and reality.
Nancy Huston describes GOLDBERG VARIATIONS:"Suppose you invite thirty people to your home, people whom you love or have loved, to listen to you perform Bach's Goldberg Variations. And say that this concert unfolds like a midsummer night's dream, that is, you, Liliane, succeed in vibrating thirty people like so many variations, each at a different tune -- you must oscillate between memory and speculation; you must, above all, master your fears -- maybe then, all these fragments of music would dance into the same stream, and that you would call GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, a novel."
To be human is to have a story and to tell stories – an ‘I’ only comes into being thanks to the ‘we’s’ which, through stories, we are taught to identify with and relate to.Each and every detail of our precious identities, from our names to our birthdates to our family histories to our national identities to our religions, is part of a story that was invented at a particular place and time, constructed in the same way as all stories are constructed. As opposed to the simplistic, involuntary fictions, which we absorb unwittingly from the day we are born until the day we die, novels are rich and voluntary fictions. Because they encourage us to identify and empathize with people unlike ourselves and give us access to their inner lives, novels can play an important ethical role in the world of today.
Take a drop of existential angst, mix with a group of old friends, stir in the sweet agony of midlife nostalgia, and you have the recipe for the Thanksgiving dinner from hell - especially when it's narrated in part by a mischievous God who pulls their strings and show us the workings. A group of cosmopolitan friends in midlife gather in New England for a Thanksgiving dinner - and are trapped there when it snows. Sean, the Irish hard-drinking poet is their host, but hasn't told them he's dying of cancer. In fact none of them would be there if they didn't have the kind of dysfunctional lives and problems which prevent them being with their own families. With the exception of the enigmatic outsider, a new young trophy wife, they all know too much about each other, their weak points and failures. Relationships and histories criss-cross; they have little in common except a mutual past and a search for meaning in the present. And meanwhile they're all at the mercy of fate - both inevitable and surprising, funny and tragic.
A pioneering, interdisciplinary study of how transnational novelists and critics use music as a critical device to structure narrative and to model ethical relations.