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<![CDATA[ABC: A Novel]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/750888.ABC_A_Novel
1.9225 In ABC’s unforgettable opening scene, Gerard, Peggy, and their 6-year-old son Harry are canoeing in a New Hampshire cove and come upon an abandoned wreck of a house they have observed for years but never entered. When Harry presses his parents to let him go and explore, Gerard follows him in and watches in horror as a freak accident he is powerless to stop unfolds before him, and a summer family idyll becomes, in an incalculable instant, the beginning of unbearable anguish.
Moments before Harry died, Gerard had picked up a crumpled piece of paper with letters of an unknown alphabet, which he later learns is Sanskrit. In the weeks following the accident he becomes obsessed with the origins of Indo-European alphabets, his fascination growing as boundless as his grief--and soon taking its place. Now, in pursuit of the story of the alphabet, he leaves his home, Peggy, his teaching job, and bands together with other grief-stricken “abecedarians” who believe that the alphabet as we know it had in its origins a meaning they are intent on uncovering. Their quest takes them to England, Greece, and finally, to an ancient site in the Syrian desert where the alphabet was incised on clay tablets some 4000 years ago. Yet what Gerard seeks is something beyond historical knowledge, and his journey itself has a meaning only revealed to him at its end.
A signally original and radiant novel, ABC illuminates the mysteries human life is full of, both in its horror and its joy.]]>
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<![CDATA[Difficult Women]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841735.Difficult_Women
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<![CDATA[The Catholic]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841740.The_Catholic
3.8671794153.1368221986841734031219824897803121982440
<![CDATA[The Age of Terror: A Novel]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841734.The_Age_of_Terror_A_Novel
3.254
M would choose the disintegrating Soviet Union as his hunting ground, but grasp one must if David Plante's The Age of Terror is to make any sense. The protagonist of this dark novel is a 23-year-old American named Joe who, inspired by a photograph of a slain World War II Russian patriot named Zoya, travels to Moscow in the waning days of Communist power. Once there, he soon meets another Zoya--this one a very much alive woman "with a broad, smooth, blond face, made taut, it seemed, by her high cheekbones". Whereas the Zoya that brought Joe to Russia in the first place was a martyr for her country, her namesake is doing everything she can to get out--including recruiting women for a sex-slave ring run by the degenerate Gerald. It isn't long before Joe is drawn into an unholy alliance with both. This is a dark novel and one that can, at times, become somewhat overwrought--Joe, for example, "stopped having religion when [he] stopped being able to f---." Nevertheless, Plante touches on themes that preoccupied the great Russian novelists before him: faith, free will, the riddle of God and the existence of evil. Think of The Age of Terror as Dostoevsky Lite: all the flavor in a quarter of the pages. --Alix Wilber]]>
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<![CDATA[The Woods]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1781515.The_Woods
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<![CDATA[The Family]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841733.The_Family
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<![CDATA[The Country: A Novel]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1167105.The_Country_A_Novel
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<![CDATA[American Ghosts: A Memoir]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841738.American_Ghosts_A_Memoir
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<![CDATA[Annunciation]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1554002.Annunciation
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<![CDATA[The Accident]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1934596.The_Accident
3.0021794153.13682219916845762080707298297808070729811
<![CDATA[The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6845762-the-pure-lover
5.001
Our first night together, we could have been the inspiration of a poem by Cavafy. But you would not make love. You wanted to lie with me and talk. I, who only really knew promiscuity, didn’t understand, but you said you must first know a person before making love. You believed lovemaking was a long and intimate conversation. That conversation with you was filled with delicacy of your sensuality, for sensuality and sensitivity were in you one, eros and agape. <DIV> <DIV>David Plante first met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. He was a young American—raw, an aspiring writer, in love with a fantasy of Greece half classical and half inspired with the eroticism of Cavafy. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and intellectual, a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his country: a man of great sophistication and few pretensions. Nikos was pure. They spent the next forty years together. And then Nikos died of brain cancer. <DIV>In The Pure Lover Plante tells us, in vivid fragments that like the pieces of a mosaic come together into a glimmering whole, the story of his beloved, of their life together, and of its end. And in this telling he shows us the nature of grief: its passion, its centrality, its vanity, its willfulness, the threat and the lure of its overwhelming force. And the griever’s fear that when it fades, the lost lover will finally, really, be lost.
The Pure Lover is a book of unusual intimacy, a lament that will speak to all who have known deep love and deep grief.
]]>
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<![CDATA[Francouer Novels]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/841739.Francouer_Novels
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<![CDATA[Penguin Modern Stories 1]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5531440.Penguin_Modern_Stories_1
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<![CDATA[Foreigner]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/389819.Foreigner
3.0011794153.13682219846005419070113247797807011324771
<![CDATA[The Native]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6005419.The_Native
2.0011794153.13682219875018653068911189497806891118910
<![CDATA[Country]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5018653.Country
0.00 Foreword by Mary Gordon
Praise for The Country:
"Mr. Plante's understanding of the complicated, often perverse configurations that familial relationships can form remains unerring. By mapping out the ways in which beliefs, resentments and hopes are handed down, generation to generation, the ways in which love can mutate into hatred, neediness into rebellion, he creates a portrait of a family that is as uncompromising as it is moving." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times Book Review
"Plante has created one of the most harrowing of contemporary novels." —Philip Roth
"[A] haunting lament, a controlled cry of loss and knowledge won through language, sorrow, memory, impossible and comprehending love, love learned through childhood in the body of the family, the country." —Mary Gordon, New York Times Book Review
"[A] book that belies its slenderness. A great reckoning in a little room." —Sunday Times (London)]]>
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<![CDATA[Figures in bright air]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3664799.Figures_in_bright_air
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<![CDATA[Prayer (Special signed edition 1/26)]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6005422.Prayer
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<![CDATA[Relatives]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6005425.Relatives
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<![CDATA[Slides]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4021271.Slides
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<![CDATA[Ghost of Henry James]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2448820.Ghost_of_Henry_James
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<![CDATA[The ghost of Henry James]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4176659.The_ghost_of_Henry_James
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<![CDATA[The Foreigner]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6475562-the-foreigner
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<![CDATA[Francoeur Family the Family the Woods Th]]>
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http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1934595.Francoeur_Family_the_Family_the_Woods_Th
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