The Pirate's Daughter

Literature & Fiction

Margaret Cezair-Thompson

Contemporary

Unbridled Books

Two men: One discovers the cost of keeping secrets, of building a career within a government agency where secrets are the operational basis. Noel Leonard works for the Defense Intelligence Agency, mapping coordinates for military actions halfway around the world. One morning he learns that an error in his office is responsible for the bombing of a school in Pakistan. And he knows suddenly that he is as alone as he is wrong. From his windowless office in DC to an intelligence conference in Switzerland, and back to his daughter’s college in Virginia, Noel claws his way toward a more personally honest life in which he can tell his family everything every day. Another man learns that family secrets have kept him from who he is and from the ineluctable ways he is attached to a world he has always disdained. This unnamed narrator, a cartographer, is the son of a career diplomat whose activities in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and then in Europe during the Cold War may not have been what they were said to be. He, too, travels to Switzerland, but his quest is not to release himself from secrecyit is to learn how deep the secrets in his own life go. With a voice like John le Carré’s and the international sensibility of Graham Greene, Frederick Reuss examines the unavoidably covert nature of lives that make their circles through Washington, DC. A Geography of Secrets is a novel of the time from an acclaimed author who knows the lay of the land.

A Geography of Secrets

Frederick Reuss

United States

As the California borderland newspaper where they work prepares to close, three reporters are oddly given assignments to return to stories they’ve covered beforeeach one surprisingly personal. The first assignment takes reporter Aaron Klinsman and photographer Rita Valdez to an abandoned motel room where the mirrors are draped with towels, bits of black tape cover the doorknobs, and the perfect trace of a woman’s body is imprinted on the bed sheets. From this sexually charged beginningon land his family used to ownKlinsman, Rita, and their colleague, Oscar Medem understand that they are supposed to uncover something. They just don’t know what. Following the moonlit paths their assignments reveal through the bars, factories and complex streets of Tijuana and Otay, haunted by the femicides that have spread westward from Juarez, the reporters become more intimately entwined. Tracing the images they uncover, and those they cause and leave behind, they soon realize that every move they make is under surveillance. Beyond this, it seems their private lives and even their memories are being reconstructed by others. Panopticon is a novel of dreamlike appearances and almost supernatural memories, a world of hidden watchers that evokes the dark recognition of just how little we can protect even our most private moments. It is a shadowy, erotic novel only slightly speculative that opens into the world we all now occupy.

Panopticon

Bajo, David

In 1961, when Amazing Grace Jansen, a firecracker from Appalachia, meets Mary Elizabeth Cox, the daughter of a Black southern preacher, at Kentucky’s Berea College, they already carry the scars and traces of their mothers’ troubles. Poor and single, Maze’s mother has had to raise her daughter alone and fight to keep a roof over their heads. Mary Elizabeth’s mother has carried a shattering grief throughout her life, a loss so great that it has disabled her and isolated her stern husband and her brilliant, talented daughter. The caution this has scored into Mary Elizabeth has made her defensive and too private and limited her ambitions, despite her gifts as a musician. But Maze’s earthy fearlessness might be enough to carry them both forward toward lives lived bravely in an angry world that changes by the day. Both of them are drawn to the enigmatic Georginea Ward, an aging idealist who taught at Berea sixty years ago, fell in love with a black man, and suddenly found herself renamed as a sister in a tiny Shaker community. Sister Georgia believes in discipline and simplicity, yes. But, more important, her faith is rooted in fairness and the long reach of unconditional love. This is a novel about three generations of women and the love that makes families where none can be expected.

Stranger Here Below

Hinnefeld, Joyce

Tears of the Mountain chronicles a single dayin one man's lifeJuly 4, 1876along with aseries of flashbacks that all lead up to an eventfulCentennial Independence Day celebration inSonoma, California. Over the course of thissurprisingly pivotal moment in his life, JeremiahMcKinley prepares for the celebration and for areunion with old friends and family.However, as he reflects on past love, thehazardous pioneer journey of his youth acrossthe continent from Missouri, and the many violentconflicts of the West, voices of the long deadcome to him, while old wounds and enmitiesresurface, threatening everything he holds dear.Furthermore, a series of mysterious notes andmessages follow him throughout the day. Whena visiting senator is found dead, suspicion leadsto his old mentor, Professor Applewood, whosesudden disappearance from the festivities makesMcKinley a suspected accessory to a fugitive.John Addiego fills this tale of America’s coming ofage with wit and lively prose, seamlessly movingback and forth through time in a novel thatrecognizes both our darker side and our promise.

Tears of the Mountain

Addiego, John

Set against the powerful lakeshore landscape of northern Minnesota, Safe from the Sea is a heartfelt novel in which a son returns home to reconnect with his estranged and dying father thirty-five years after the tragic wreck of a Great Lakes ore boat that the father only partially survived and that has divided them emotionally ever since. When his father for the first time finally tells the story of the horrific disaster he has carried with him so long, it leads the two men to reconsider each other. Meanwhile, Noah’s own struggle to make a life with an absent father has found its real reward in his relationship with his sagacious wife, Natalie, whose complications with infertility issues have marked her husband’s life in ways he only fully realizes as the reconciliation with his father takes shape. Peter Geye has delivered an archetypal story of a father and son, of the tug and pull of family bonds, of Norwegian immigrant culture, of dramatic shipwrecks and the business and adventure of Great Lakes shipping in a setting that simply casts a spell over the characters as well as the reader.

Safe from the Sea

Geye, Peter

The after-death stories of Franz Joseph Haydn, Ludwig Beethoven, Swedenborg, Sir Thomas Browne and many others have never before been told in such detail and vividness. Fully illustrated with some surprising images, this is a fascinating and authoritative history of ideas carried along on the guilty pleasures of an anthology of real-after-life gothic tales. Beginning dramatically with the opening of Haydn’s grave in October 1820, cranioklepty takes us on an extraordinary history of a peculiar kind of obsession. The desire to own the skulls of the famous, for study, for sale, for public (and private) display, seems to be instinctual and irresistible in some people. The rise of phrenology at the beginning of the 19th century only fed that fascination with the belief that genius leaves its mark on the very shape of the head.

Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius

History

Dickey, Colin

Historical Study & Educational Resources

A woman in New York awakens knowing, as deeply as a mother’s blood can know, that her grown son is in danger. She has not heard from him in weeks. His name is Jonas. His girlfriend, Vic, doesn’t know what she has done wrong, but Jonas won’t answer his cell phone. We soon learn that Jonas is isolated in a safe-house apartment in New York City, pondering his conversion to Islam and his experiences training in Pakistan, preparing for the violent action he has been instructed to take in 31 hours. Jonas’s absence from the lives of those who love him causes a cascade of events, and as the novel moves through the streets and subways of New York we come to know intimately the lives of its characters. We also learn to feel deeply the connections and disconnections that occur between young people and their parents not only in this country but in the Middle East as well. Carried by Hamilton’s highly-lauded prose, this story about the helplessness of those who cannot contact a beloved young man who is on a devastatingly confused path is compelling on the most human level. In our world, when a family loses track of an idealistic son an entire city could be in danger. From the author of The Distance Between Us.

31 Hours

Hamilton, Masha

Madewell Brown walked into the village on a hot, dry day in 1946. A solitary black man with one arm longer than the other, he had never found a place for himself. Never, that is, until he had painted his own history on the interior walls of his adobe house in Guadalupe. Fifty years later, Will Sawyer’s truck runs out of gas, and as he walks that same long road back into town he knows it’s best to keep his eyes on the ground. But he doesn’t understand the town’s long history of displacement or the difficulty of truly fitting in there, until he hears the story of the dead girl found hanging from Las Manos Bridge. In Perdido, Rick Collignon returns to the same magical village he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya. In Perdido, Collignon returns to the same magical town he first introduced in The Journal of Antonio Montoya. Once again mixing present and past, living and dead, he delivers a forthright and unflinching examination of race, belonging, and identity. With this novel, Collignon shows that a powerful new voice in American fiction has arrived.

Perdido

Collignon, Rick

Literary

No other obsession strikes as hard as the love that hits a teenaged boy  especially if he’s the sort of kid who is no saner than he wants to be. From the moment Adam Webb sees Francine Haggardin the van that is supposed to return them to the Institute Loiseauxthe two young mental patients are inextricably connected. Adam will never let this girl go.From hiding her in his bedroom to spiriting her away to Minnesota’s north woods, Miss Entropia” becomes the focus of Adam’s every thought and of everything he does. He believes her to be a goddess, his own goddess.But the pyromaniacal Miss Entropia will be neither worshiped nor owned. And so Adam’s possessiveness is destined to push her to the breaking point.Theirs is an incendiary love story, an unbalanced Romeo and Juliet, that spins and arcs its way strangely toward tragedy.

Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb

Rabasa, George

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