Operation Wandering Soul
Richard Powers
Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.

by Bob Shacochis (1993)
Winner of the American Book Award for his collection of stories Easy in the Islands and the Prix de Rome for The Next New World, Bob Shacochis returns to the islands with a first novel possessed of the same beauty as the places and people of the Caribbean. The volcano at the heart of the island of St. Catherine has smoldered as ominously and impotently as its politics for years, but lately things seem to be heating up. Mitchell Wilson, an American expatriate and economist for the Ministry of Agriculture, becomes unwittingly embroiled in an internecine war between rival factions of the government. Into this potentially eruptive scene enters a woman, Johanna, whom Mitchell once loved and lost but who remains an enchanting and powerful temptation - one he will not resist. At once a beguiling love story and a superbly sophisticated political novel about the fruits of imperialism in the twentieth century, Swimming in the Volcano is as brutally seductive a novel as the world it evokes. Triumphantly compassionate, and imbued with Shacochis's insight into human affairs that "ranks with the best of Conrad and Hemingway," here is a commanding performance by "one of the most talented young writers working in America today."
Richard Powers
Operation Wandering Soul by Richard Powers is an acclaimed literary masterpiece celebrating major critical honors and timeless storytelling.
Patricia Henley
An American midwife on holiday in Mexico decides to stay on to help the local people and a priest falls in love with her. Kate Banner is a woman in her forties from Indiana and the culmination of her work is a clinic and school in Guatemala.
Thom Jones
14 stories grouped into four parts: the horrors of Vietnam; men at war with women; the difficulties of divorce, mental defects, and the ravages of cancer; and battling epilepsy and alcoholism.
Anthony Doerr
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work