When Paula inherits the fragments of her grandfather Paddon's journal, she embarks on an imaginative and obsessive journey to recreate the troubled history of her ancestors. From the hardships of the early frontier, through the Great War and Depression, and into the boom times of the fifties, Plainsong brilliantly captures the story of four generations of a family and a prairie town shaped by the sweeping forces of change.

Plainsong

Literature & Fiction

Huston, Nancy

United States

Perennial

The Mark of the Angel

The year is 1957 and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal. Saffie, a young German woman, becomes maid, then wife, to Raphael, a privileged French musician who finds her remoteness provocative and irresistable. One day in the old Jewish quarter of the city, where she has taken Raphael's flute to be repaired, Saffie meets a Hungarian instrument maker - and all their lives are unexpectedly, dramatically altered. Driven by passion but damaged in different ways by war, these two people find themselves crossing dangerous boundaries. Told against the rising tide of violence unleashed by the Algerian conflict, The Mark of the Angel builds to a shocking climax conveying the loss of innocence and the tragic irony of these lives twisted out of shape by the weight of history.

Contemporary

Vintage Books

Dolce Agonia

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.

McArthur & Company

Slow Emergencies

World Literature

Little,Brown & Co

Instruments of darkness

Little, Brown, and Co.

Lin has a husband, two daughters, and close friends. But dance is her passion. Inescapably, it imposes itself upon her, until the inevitable moment when she must choose between her family life and the all-consuming world of dance to which she aches to return. Slow Emergenciesconveys an irresistible impulse to create, and illustrates the emotional turmoil that ensues for Lin and her family. Nancy Huston, award-winning author of The Mark of the Angel, writes brilliantly here about the passage of time, the body’s vulnerability, and the solitude of creative endeavor. What results is a deeply felt novel that offers a disquieting but profoundly moving meditation on just what it means to be an artist.

Slow Emergencies: A Novel

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

This novel marks the stuning American debut of an internationally acclaimed writer. Combining the narrative drive of Birdsong with the emotional resonance of The Reader, The Mark of the Angel is a haunting and unforgettable tale of three lives woven together by longing, fate, and the weight of history. The year is 1957, and the place is Paris, where the psychic wounds of World War II have barely begun to heal and the Algerian war is about to escalate. Saffie, an emotionally damaged young German woman, arrives on the doorstep of Raphael, a privileged musician who finds her reserve irresistible. He hires her, and over the next few days seduces her and convinces her to marry him. But when Raphael sends Saffie on an errand to the Jewish ghetto, where she meets Andr&amp;aacutes, a Hungarian instrument maker, each of their lives will be altered in startling and unexpected ways. As Saffie learns to feel again, her long buried memories coupled with the inexorable flow of historical forces beyond anyone's control, create a tableau of epic tragedy. The Mark of the Angel is a mesmerizing novel of love, betrayal, and the ironies of history.

The Mark of the Angel: A Novel

Vintage

On a snowy New England evening in a small college town, Sean Farrell–a hard-drinking, libidinous poet and professor–hosts a Thanksgiving dinner. The eleven guests include two fellow professors (one a novelist, the other also a poet), two of Sean’s former lovers, his lawyer, his housepainter, and his baker. What none of them knows is that Sean is dying. This dinner could be his grand finale. As food and drink flow, secrets are exposed, tragedies bared, and truths uncovered. “Never could we have dreamed how rough adult life would be,” one character thinks. Yet there is wit and laughter too, in a novel about mortality that is also a celebration of life. With each new book, it becomes increasingly clear that Nancy Huston is a writer of exceptional gifts. Sweet Agony is another impressive performance from a writer whose eye is as sharp as her insight into the human condition is wise.

Sweet Agony: A Novel

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Black Dance

Screenwriter Milo Noirlac is dying. He lies in the dark of his hospital room, voices from Milo’s past and present—real and imagined—swirl about his head, each taking on the rhythm of his favourite Brazilian fight-dance, the capoiera. Seated next to him, Milo’s partner, bumptious director Paul Schwartz, coaxes Milo through his life story, from the abuse he suffered as a foster child to his lost heritage—his great-grandfather’s ostentatious wealth. As Milo narrates, his story becomes the couple’s final screenplay, the movie that will be their masterpiece. With Milo’s imagination in full flight, several generations of Noirlac ancestors— voices in French and English, German and Dutch, Cree and Gaelic—come to life. There’s ignominious Irish rebel poet Neil Kerrigan, classmate of “Jimmy” Joyce and aspiring activist in the fight against British occupation; Neil’s son’s lover, Indian teen prostitute and Milo’s biological mother, Awinita; abandoned Brazilian baby Eugénio, a street child whom Milo finds and fosters; and Marie-Thérèse, Milo’s tough-as-nails aunt. As each voice cascades through Milo’s memory, an important piece of family, and world history is formed. Packed with humour and pathos, and written with Huston’s signature vivacity, Black Dance is a rich portrait of one man’s life and death—a swirling, sensual dance of a novel from an exceptional and rare literary voice.

Literary

VIKING

The Mark Of The Angel

Chatto&Windus

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