by Julia Franck (2010)
Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha's childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, sent to the eastern front, comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion.Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more. In the early 1920s, after their father's death, she and Martha move to Berlin. Helene falls in love with Carl, but when he dies just before their engagement, life becomes meaningless for her and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party she meets Wilhelm, an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and to make Helene his wife. Their marriage, which soon proves disastrous, takes Helene to Stettin, where her son is born. She finds the love and closeness demanded by the little boy more than she can provide, and soon she cannot shake off the idea of simply disappearing. Finally she comes to a shocking decision.The Blind Side of the Heart tells of two World Wars, of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.
Lionel Shriver
When her massively overweight brother, a once slim, hip New York Jazz pianist, comes for a visit, Pandora is forced to choose between her exercise fanatic husband and her brother, who desperately needs her support in losing weight.
Elizabeth Spencer
A collection of nine short stories explores the emotional fault lines that lie just beneath the surface of happy family life.
Téa Obreht
Remembering childhood stories her grandfather once told her, young physician Natalia becomes convinced that he spent his last days searching for "the deathless man," a vagabond who claimed to be immortal. As Natalia struggles to understand why her grandfather, a deeply rational man would go on such a farfetched journey, she stumbles across a clue that leads her to the extraordinary story of the tiger's wife.
Frances Itani
The new novel from the award-winning author of Deafening is a poignant exploration of one eighty-year-old life, as its heroine lies at the bottom of a ravine where she has crashed en route to visit the queen. Born the same day as Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Canadian Georgina Danforth Witley is one of ninety-nine privileged Commonwealth subjects invited to an eightieth birthday lunch at Buckingham Palace. All she has to do is drive to the airport and board the plane for London. Except that Georgie drives off the road, her car plunging into a thickly wooded ravine. Thrown from the car and unable to move, she must rely on her no-nonsense wit, her full store of family memories, and a recitation of the bones in her body -- a childhood exercise that reminds her she is still alive. As Georgina lies helpless, she reflects on her role as a daughter, mother, sister, wife, and widow -- on lost loves and painful secrets -- offering a whimsical and profound insight into the life of one ordinary woman who, while drawing on her instincts to survive, asks herself: what has it all amounted to?