Staircase of a Thousand Steps

In a remote desert village of storytellers and seers, the accidental revelation of long-held secrets, including a forbidden love affair, unravels a young girl's world. Staircase of a Thousand Steps lifts the veil from a mystical land, where jasmine and dung mix and the inconceivable is embraced as commonplace. In a Middle Eastern village that traces its history back to Abraham, the men gather nightly beneath a tree named Moses' Finger, and the women meet at a place where "the earth breathes." But the midwife Faridah possesses transcendent wisdom and a dangerous scorn for tradition. And the shepherd Harif, seer and village outsider, weaves stories in an effort to protect his fragile status. While Harif's granddaughter, Jammana, struggles between the allure of the ancient world and the tensions of a modern age. Through an ancestral gift, Jammana experiences the memories of those closest to her-Faridah, Harif, and her mother, Rafa. But as she unwittingly uncovers the village's secrets, old grudges move like a slow burn across the fields and ignite. Set in Transjordan just before the 1967 war with Israel, Staircase of a Thousand Steps braids a chorus of voices into a poetic, haunting tale of loyalty, longing, and accidental betrayal.

Literature & Fiction

Hamilton, Masha

United States

Blue Hen

In fourteenth-century France, Bonne Mirabilis, a woman born "God's bastard" and the wet nurse to the wealthiest woman in town, discovers that she alone holds the key to saving the desperate, starving inhabitants of a village under siege. 15,000 first printing.

Mirabilis

Cokal, Susann

A young American couple travels to Africa where their cultural expectations are shattered by the reality of the continent, and they are forced to reshape themselves in a new image. A first novel. 30,000 first printing.

The Road Builder

Hershenow, Nicholas

Young Weston Hingler becomes cuaght in the middle of his parents' culinary diversity, secrets, histories, infidelities, and needs as he grows up in a cross-cultural extended family that exists between two kitchens--one new World, the other traditional. 25,000 first printing.

Secrets of the Tsil Cafe

Averill, Thomas Fox

Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa

A hilarious novel filled with cultural history, musical theory, nuclear physics, and a world of ideas follows Gregor Samsa, who, having metamorphosed into a cockroach, is sold into a Viennese sideshow by his chambermaid, where he lectures carnival crowds on the implications of Rilke and Herr Spengler, and over the course of thirty years and two continents, discovers the true meaning of his existence. 15,000 first printing.

Estrin, Marc

Literary

When Grayson Guillory stumbles upon evidence that her father, the power-hungry governor of Louisiana, and her own new husband may have collaborated in the murder of her mother, her suspicions threaten to destroy her relationship with her father and to undermine her struggling new marriage. 25,000 first printing.

Sacrament of Lies

Dewberry, Elizabeth

Unable to forgive her sister, Amanda, for her unmerciful manipulations or for the role she once played in their father's mentally damaging games, Molly finds herself powerfully attracted to Amanda's lover, and uses her own skills of manipulation, deceit, and betrayal to steal him away from her sister, which ultimately forces her to confront her own loneliness. 17,500 first printing.

In My Sister's Country

Haines, Lise

Genre Fiction

Seeking to hold her California logging family together despite unemployment, her father's growing stubbornness and violence, and her mother's blind faith, seven-year-old Justy considers the stark realities of her world and dreams of a safer life. A first novel.

By Way of Water

Gullick, Charlotte

Dreaming of both escape and belonging on the Flathead Indian Reservation in the 1940s, Louise White Elk, a determined and beautiful young woman, comes of age as she is pursued by three dangerous men who will do anything to possess her--police officer Charlie Kicking Woman, the charismatic Baptiste, and Harvey Stoner, who owns nearly everything around him. A first novel.

Perma Red

Earling, Debra Magpie

In Timothy Schaffert's seriocomic debut, two sisters on the cusp of womanhood struggle to understand their father's suicide as well as their mother's abandonment of them many years earlier. Lily and Mabel live on their own in their grandmother's antique shop in rural Nebraska. They are bonded by their loyalty to each other and their haunting urgency to reconcile their own versions of the past so that they might build their futures together. In a rebellious act, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest to an Arizona vineyard to confront her mother. Mabel stays behind, seeking to commune somehow with her father's ghost. In a story that rises out of the spare Nebraska landscape, Schaffert delivers a textured, eccentric, and redemptive tale about two young women searching for wholeness and love.

The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

Schaffert, Timothy

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Books by Blue Hen