NEW BOOKS | July–December 2014 HIGHLIGHTS
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NEW BOOKS | July–December 2014 HIGHLIGHTS FICTION | 10 FICTION | 14 FICTION | 17 HISTORY | 24 HISTORY/MATHS | 26 PSYCHOLOGY | 30 POPULAR SCIENCE | 34 POPULAR SCIENCE | 36 BIOGRAPHY | 38 CONTENTS CONTENTS FICTION New Titles 2 New in Paperback 14 Recent Releases 19 Key Backlist 22 NON-FICTION New Titles 24 New in Paperback 49 Recent Releases 55 Beginner’s Guides 56 Key Backlist 60 DISTRIBUTORS & REPRESENTATIVES 64 CONNECTICUT: 1913–1920 HE ARRIVED IN THE UNITED STATES IN 1913 ON A BOAT NAMED TRIESTE. His face open, the brow smooth, eyes with the at once earnest, at once insecure gaze of hopeful, wanting youth. He began work fast. First at the Remington Arms Company, making ammunition for the Russian Imperial Army, rising up the ranks to become an inspector of the Mosin – Nagant rifle and later working for the Hitchcock Gas Engine Company. In Bridgeport, Connecticut. His early mornings spent among the others. The hordes of men shuttling to and from factories in lines and masses of gray or black through the dim light of winter mornings and in the spring when the morning sun was like a secret, coy and sparkling, the water flashing on the sound. They found each other though. Through all of that, they, the Russians, found each other. They learned to spot each other through mannerisms, glances. This was later. In 1919. Then, the restrictions came at work and in the boarding house. ‘English! You must speak English! That, or go back home,’ the foreman always said. The warehouses loomed up around the men like capes. Their windowpanes caked with dirt, small rectangles of frosted, beveled glass. Sometimes, the broken panes were replaced by colored lozenges – sea green, slate blue, dark ruby red. Austin liked to connect them, making up constellations, innumerable designs and geometries. ‘English!’ The foreman’s voice would resound off the tin walls, echoing off the glass, the workers all seated in rows solemn and silent, some standing. Once he made the mistake of speaking Russian to a worker. ‘Bolshevik! Go back to Russia and bring your revolution with you!’ the foreman yelled. In those early years he sometimes spoke Russian in his sleep and woke in a sweat, the others around him, snoring or stirring as he peeled back his covers to step out of bed, springs creaking. ‘The bastard is up again.’ ‘Hey, Polak – can’t you sleep like a normal person?’ The inaccuracy, or the intent, of the slander – he was not sure which had been the more injurious. Cautiously, he’d slip out of the room and with overcoat on, make his way through the narrow hallways and down to the first floor, feeling for the latch underneath the stairs – its wrought iron handle cool and coarse. He’d made a deal with the proprietor. For one more dollar a month he agreed to keep Austin’s books safe – notebooks mostly. The owner wouldn’t touch them, he’d promised. And in the milky white of those winter mornings, Austin would sit at the large kitchen table working. His drafting paper spread across the table. A compass. A slide rule. Then he was obsessed with the scientist Faraday, examining his notebooks, reading his reports on electromagnetic wave theory for radio. He was fascinated with Maxwell’s question: What is light? He’d read Maxwell’s Matter and Motion, Theory of Heat. NEW FICTION 3 THE INVENTION OF EXILE Vanessa Manko The devastating story of one man’s desperate attempts to be reunited with his family Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor and an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee. Retreating with his new bride to his home in Russia, he and his American family become embroiled in the Civil War and must flee once again, to Mexico. While his wife Julia and their children are eventually able to return to America, the black mark on Austin’s record leaves him indefinitely stranded in Mexico City. As they struggle to remain a family across a distance of two countries, Austin ‘A brilliant debut.’ Salman Rushdie becomes convinced that an FBI agent is monitoring his every move and blocking his return to the United States. ‘Vanessa Manko is a voice for the years to come.’ Colum McCann In this dazzling, sweeping debut, Vanessa Manko uses her own family history as the starting point for a novel which ‘A beautiful, bewitching and profound deals with themes of exile and invention, and explores how novel.’ Francisco Goldman loss reshapes and transforms lives. ‘Vanessa Manko’s fantastically ambitious and rewarding novel, The Invention of Exile, lovingly and carefully details the terrible but wondrous twinning of one man’s fate with Russian, Mexican and American history.’ Rivka Galchen FICTION VANESSA MANKO earned her MFA in Creative UK/ROW 3 JULY 2014 Writing from Hunter College, where she received a Demy Hardback Hertog Fellowship, and has taught creative writing (216×135mm) at NYU and SUNY Purchase. An excerpt of this £14.99 novel was originally published in Granta. She lives 304 pages in Brooklyn, New York. ISBN: 978-1-78074-553-4 eISBN: 978-1-78074-554-1 Credit: Beowulf Sheehan 4 FICTION NEW ISHMAEL’S ORANGES Claire Hajaj A provocative debut novel about the marriage between a Jewish woman and an Arab man and the legacy of hatred their children inevitably inherit It’s April 1948 and war hangs over Jaffa. One minute seven- year-old Salim is dreaming of claiming his first harvest from the family orange tree with his father; the next he is swept away by the ‘Great Catastrophe’ into a life of exile. Meanwhile Jude is growing up in the north of England, a girl from a Jewish family which has survived the Holocaust. When their paths collide in swinging-sixties London and they fall in love, they think they are aware of the many challenges ahead of them, but before long they both face unexpected choices. Can they defy the lessons of their childhoods and build a life together? Or can nothing stop old seeds ripening to bitter fruits? Revisiting its characters as the decades pass, Ishmael’s Oranges tells the story of two cultures clashing through the lives of Salim and Jude as the relentless tides of history wash over the many crossroads of the Middle East. Spanning three generations, it follows the journeys of those cast adrift by war – as well as by their own impulses – and asks what is the birthright of the generations that follow? Through Salim, Jude and their twins, we explore the longest conflict of our era in universally human terms: the families we build, the loyalties we owe and the stories we pass on to our children. CLAIRE HAJAJ has spent her life building bridges FICTION between two worlds, sharing both Palestinian and UK/ROW 17 JUL 2014 Jewish heritage, and a childhood split between the USA & CAN 12 AUG 2014 Middle East and rural England. She has lived on four Demy Hardback continents and worked for the UN in war zones from (216×135mm) Burma to Baghdad. A former contributor to the BBC £16.99/$24.99 World Service, Claire’s writing has also appeared in 336 pages Time Out and Literary Review. She has an MA in Classical ISBN: 978-1-78074-494-0 and English Literature from Oxford University. eISBN: 978-1-78074-495-7 There were two ways to get from Al-Ajami to the souks of Jaffa’s Clock Tower Square. The route from Salim’s house led straight through the silent inland. It passed the sun- bleached whiteness of the seaside villas, their walled gardens spilling glorious streams of red bougainvillea and the dusty tang of oranges. It turned left onto old Al-Ajami Street, where new motorcars whined past donkeys trundling loads of pomegranates and lemons. The door of Abulafia’s bakery was always open, even in in the bracing winter months. Salim had waited there a hundred times, his senses scorched by the smell of pastries rising in clouds of cinnamon and allspice. His mother liked manquish, a flatbread sprinkled with thyme and sesame. He used to eat it from her hands, a little piece at a time, as they walked out into Jaffa’s old city, with its coffee shops and yellow plumes of nargile smoke. The other way to the Square belonged to Jaffa’s boys; it was a rite of passage. As soon as a boy was old enough to walk, another would dare him to try it - crossing down across the wild beaches, braving the slippery rocks and then inching out step by step under the ancient port wall. Today, the sun beat down on the great crescent of the Mediterranean; the water shone gold against the black land like a ring in an African ear. Salim and Mazen jumped across the tide pools, splashing the bare-armed boys fishing for crabs. They picked their way across the jagged rocks until the port of Jaffa emerged in white, sea-stained stone. ‘Jaffa’s harbour is as old as the sea,’ Brother Phillipe had taught them. ‘It was here before the Arabs or the Jews. God himself led Japhet here, Noah’s son, in the times before time. The bones of twenty-two armies rest here. The pagans of Thebes chained their maiden sacrifice just there,’ his wrinkled hand pointed and a dozen pairs of eyes followed it, ‘There, out on the rocks that we call Andromeda, waiting for the sea monster to devour them.