Literary Fiction Political

A powerful allegorical tale about humanity and dignity and the ease with which we can justify brutality. Two mysterious strangers appear at a hotel in a small country town. Where have they come from? Who are they? What catastrophe are they fleeing? The townspeople want answers, but the strangers are unable to speak of their trauma. And before long, wary hospitality shifts to suspicion and fear, and the care of the men slides into appalling cruelty.

When God descends to earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise.

In the 1980s, a man is pulled up out of the Indian Ocean in Port Pallid, South Africa, claiming to have been kidnapped as a baby. So begins the odyssey of Jimfish, who defies the usual classification of race that defines the rainbow nation. His journey through the last years of Apartheid will extend beyond South Africa to the wider world, where he will be an unlikely witness to the dying days of the 20th century.

Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America's most provocative literary anti-hero. The first section of the audiobook, War Stories, offers six stories enmeshed in the vola-tile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, Tales of the Out & the Gone, reveals Amiri Baraka's increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration.

When Palmer Stoat notices the black pickup truck following him on the highway, he fears his precious Range Rover is about to be carjacked. But Twilly Spree, the man tailing Stoat, has vengeance, not sport-utility vehicles, on his mind. Idealistic, independently wealthy and pathologically short-tempered, Twilly has dedicated himself to saving Florida's wilderness from runaway destruction. He favors unambiguous political statements -- such as torching Jet-Skis or blowing up banks -- that leave his human targets shaken but re-educated.

When Tiro, the confidential secretary of a Roman senator, opens the door to a terrified stranger on a cold November morning, he sets in motion a chain of events which will eventually propel his master into one of the most famous courtroom dramas in history.

Ten long years have passed since war first broke out, and one couple still does not know the whereabouts of their children, or what their country is even fighting for. They follow orders and their lives go by simply, routinely, until one day, mute boy walks onto their property. When the authorities announce that the area needs to be evacuated and that everyone must relocate to the transparent city, the three leave together.

Set against the rise and fall of the radical antiwar group the Weather Underground, The Company You Keep is a sweeping American saga about sacrifice, the ecstatic righteousness of youth, and the tension between political ideals and family loyalties. When Jason Sinai, one of the last Vietnam-era fugitives still wanted on murder charges for a robbery gone wrong in 1974, encounters a young newspaper reporter in search of a story, he must abandon years of safe underground life for the dangerous life of the road.

Somewhere in the United Kingdom, an eight year old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He is a victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each group representing a different personality type.

In the early 1970s, Corey Sifter, the son of working-class parents, becomes a yard boy on the grand estate of the powerful Metarey family. Soon, through the family's generosity, he is a student at a private boarding school and an aide to the great New York senator Henry Bonwiller, who is running for president of the United States.

It's early one morning on a hot day in August, and millennial congressman Alexander Paine Wilson (R), planning his first reelection campaign and in deep denial about his sexuality, receives a mysterious, over-sized FedEx delivery on his front stoop. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark. This outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between contemporary Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England - where we meet Titus Downing, the taxidermist who stuffed the aardvark....

The Awakening is an 1899 novel by Kate Chopin set in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast at the end of the 19th century. It is widely seen as a seminal work of early feminism which put the spotlight on women's issues. The story is about Edna Pontellier, the wife of a New Orleans businessman, who falls in love with Robert Lebrun, a man she meets at a resort on the Gulf of Mexico. When the family returns to New Orleans, Edna isolates herself from society and withdraws from some of the duties customarily associated with motherhood.

In a place where political posturing, bloody war, journalistic witness, and even patient negotiation have yielded so little understanding, we enter the cemetery of the orange trees, where urchins kite dead birds, goats utter wisdom, camels and donkeys huddle together, and merchandise magically passes underground through the tunnels of Gaza. But this is no fairy tale or bestiary. In the Cemetery of the Orange Trees is a waking, attentive dream-journal, leading us back to a place where hatred, strife, and even human language itself might sing.

"Je rêve de chats qui tombent des rambardes, d'adolescents aux yeux brillants qui surgissent au coin de la rue et tirent en pleine tête, de glissements de terrain emportant tout Cihangir dans le Bosphore, de ballerines funambules aux pieds cisaillés, je rêve que je marche sur les tuiles des toits d'Istanbul et qu'elles glissent et se décrochent. Mais toujours ta main me rattrape, juste au moment où je me réveille en plein vertige, les poings fermés, agrippée aux draps ; même si de plus en plus souvent au réveil tu n'es plus là."

When Ferron Morgan's father dies in suspicious circumstances, his trauma is exacerbated by the conflict within his family and among his father's friends over whether the death was the result of medical negligence or if it was a political assassination. Ferron grew up in awe of his father's radical political endeavors, but in later years he watched as the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s robbed the man of his faith.

La esperada nueva novela de la autora de Diez mujeres es la historia de una traición. Producto de un accidente absurdo, Miguel Flores, un estudiante univesitario, es detenido en una protesta contra la dictadura de Pinochet. Tras unos días en el calabozo del cuartel policial es enviado a una zona agrícola cercana a la capital, pero aislada de toda actividad política. Sin recursos y obligado a firmar a diario en el retén de Carabineros, sus días transcurren en soledad y con lo mínimo para subsistir.

El humor se convierte en el arma que se defiende de la opresión, la injusticia, y la violencia. El gran solitario de Palacio es una obra sobre México, y sin embargo tiene algo del efecto globalizador que caracterizó al Boom latinoamericano: escrita en México, París, y Madrid, se publicó por primera vez en 1971 en Argentina; y de alguna manera representa una realidad que se ha repetido una y otra vez en la historia de Latinoamérica.

New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by the Chinese diaspora around the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers - and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom.

Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel is a stunning literary achievement and an acute character study of three men held captive after a military coup. All linked closely with the deposed president, the portraitist longs for his pregnant wife, the chef takes solace in preparing meals for the new regime, and the barber lives with the knowledge that he'd often held a razor to the throat of the man responsible for his brother's death.

As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There...where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose."