A debut novel about cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures follows Gaby Stanton, an ex-university professor in Japan, as she takes a job with a firm selling fantasy funerals to the Japanese, as she escorts fellow American Alex Thorn, in Japan to investigate the mysterious death of his exchange-student son, through the manners, mores, and prejudices of the Japanese. Reprint.

American Fuji

Literature & Fiction

Backer, Sara

United States

Berkley Trade

Japan itself is the comic hero of this sweet and funny, sad and inspiring novel. Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, has lost her job teaching English at Shizuyama University. (No one will tell her exactly why.) Alex Thorn, an American psychologist, is mourning his son, a Shizuyama exchange student who was killed in an accident. (No one will tell him exactly how.) Alex has come to this utterly foreign place to find the truth, and now Gaby is serving as his translator and guide. The key to mastering Japanese, she keeps telling him, is understanding what's not being said. And in this "deft and delightful" (Karen Joy Fowler) novel, the unsaid truths about everything from work and love to illness and death cast a deafening silence-and tower in the background like Mount Fuji itself.

BERKLEY

In Sara Backer's first full-length collection of poetry, Such Luck, you will find yourself on an unexpected journey, charged with visionary and psychological intensities. Her poems are well crafted and highly original. They are sometimes haunting, sometimes playful, and always introspective and intriguing. She explores what it is to be fully alive and aware in a diverse, contemporary, and sometimes surreal world. This is the kind of book you will return to for its ability to stimulate equally your intellect and imagination. A masterful and magical first book of poems.

Such Luck

Poetry

Flowstone Press

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Books by Backer, Sara

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Backer, Sara. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

American Fuji

American Fuji

Such Luck