Hunger: A Novel - Softcover

Turnipseed, Erica Simone

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060797312 ISBN 13: 9780060797317

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

In Erica Simone Turnipseed's captivating follow-up to A Love Noire, heartache fans the flames of lust when freethinking Noire and Innocent, her urbane African ex, reunite.

Noire and Innocent are both having a thirtysomething crisis. His former identity as a successful investment banker and eligible bachelor has disappeared. A beleaguered graduate student, she's got no money, no man, and no Ph.D., yet. A year of predoctoral research in Haiti leaves Noire drained. And a trip home to Côte d'Ivoire offers Innocent little more than intermittent sexual gratification. In the aftermath of 9/11, Innocent and Noire are back in New York City and find solace in each other's bed. But even that arrangement collapses under the weight of Innocent's revelation that he has unfinished business in Africa. For Innocent and Noire, patching together their unraveling lives becomes an exercise in hope and humility. With Hunger, Turnipseed lives up to the promise of A Love Noire and has matured into a writer who fearlessly explores the intersection of sex, love, identity, and loss in a cross-cultural context.

About this title

About the Author

Erica Simone Turnipseed's debut, A Love Noire, won the Atlanta Choice Author of the Year Award from the Atlanta Daily World. A philanthropist, Turnipseed founded the Five Years for the House Initiative, a fund-raising drive for the Afro American Cultural Center at Yale. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York.

From Publishers Weekly

Turnipseed's well-received 2003 debut, A Love Noire, traced the unlikely relationship between Noire, a socially conscious doctoral candidate, and Innocent, a wealthy investment banker from Côte d'Ivoire. The author's sophomore effort revisits the same characters post-breakup and post-9/11. Back in New York after a predoctoral year in Haiti, Noire—broke, alone and still sans Ph.D. in comparative lit—grieves over the recent terrorist attack, only to be plunged further into despair by the death of her mentor, Bonita. Innocent, who has given up the hectic world of finance, is plagued by survivor's guilt and learns that a woman he slept with back in Côte d'Ivoire is pregnant, setting off a host of questions about where he belongs. Though Noire and Innocent find themselves back in each other's beds, it's a temporary fix; Noire heads for the therapist's couch, and Innocent travels to Côte d'Ivoire to care for his dangerously prematurely born daughter. Turnipseed is strong on sexual politics, but her boldness backfires with her use of 9/11, as the magnitude of that event makes Noire's angst come across as shallow self-pity. Despite that, Turnipseed writes with genuine and contagious affection for both Noire and Innocent, and she mostly succeeds in dramatizing their respective crises. (Sept.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0060797312
• ISBN 13: 9780060797317
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256