What Changes Everything - Hardcover

Hamilton, Masha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1609530918 ISBN 13: 9781609530914

Publisher: Unbridled Books, 2013

Synopsis

What Changes Everything is truly an American story on an international stage, told through an ensemble of heartening characters. In a gamble to save her kidnapped husband’s life, Clarissa Barbery makes the best decisions she can in the dark nights of Brooklyn. Stela Sidorova, who owns a used bookstore in Ohio, writes letter after letter hoping to comprehend the loss of a son on an Afghan battlefield and to reconnect with the son who abandoned her when his brother died. And Mandy Wilkens, the mother of a gravely wounded soldier from Texas, travels to Kabul to heal wounds of several kinds. At the same time, What Changes Everything is the story of two Afghans who reveal the complexity of their culture, the emotions that hold it together and those that threaten to fracture it. These lives are braided into an extraordinary novel about the grace of family.

About this title

About the Author:

Masha Hamilton is the author of four acclaimed novels, most recently 31 Hours, which The Washington Post called one of the best novels of 2009, and independent bookstores named an Indie Next choice. She also founded two world literacy projects, the Camel Book Drive and the Afghan Women's Writing Project.

She is the winner of the 2010 Women's National Book Association award, presented "to a living American woman who derives part or all of her income from books and allied arts, and who has done meritorious work in the world of books beyond the duties or responsibilities of her profession or occupation."

She began her career as a full-time journalist, working in Maine, Indiana, and New York City before being sent by the Associated Press to the Middle East where she was news editor for five years, including the period of the first intefadeh. She then moved to Moscow where she worked for five years during the collapse of Communism, reporting for the Los Angeles Times and NBC-Mutual Radio and writing a monthly column, "Postcards from Moscow." She also reported from Kenya in 2006, and from Afghanistan in 2004 and 2008.

A Brown University graduate, Hamilton has been awarded fiction fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has taught for Gotham Writers Workshop and the 92nd Street Y in New York City and at a number of writers' workshops around the country. She has also taught in Afghanistan at Kabul University.

Masha Hamilton is the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy for the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the narrow strand of space between the first piece of information and all the rest, thoughts rushed through Clarissa that could not be said aloud, not then, probably not ever. They came like the violent Nor’easters she’d known as a child in Maine, appearing without warning as she’d disconnected the phone for the third time in quick succession.
How could he have let this happen?
The initial call came from a reporter, and Clarissa hung up mid-sentence, telling herself there’d been a mistake.
He’d tricked her, Todd had. Tricked her into trusting him, even though she knew life was delicate beyond belief, and humans were flimsy, including those who seemed invincible.
The second call came from Bill Snyder, who opened by barely speaking at all, as if to prolong her last moments of unknowing, and then began carefully, each word padded by pauses, each phrase couched in ambiguity. She hung up on him also, but with less confidence.
Everything one counted on could vanish in a second; she’d understood that since childhood. A new narration wiping out personal history without a whisper of remorse. That’s why, at base, she’d never married before. Been too smart for marriage.
The final call came from a baldly definitive FBI agent, speaking in a clipped but almost tender tone as she thought in stunned amazement, The FBI, how odd is this?” She had no memory of hanging up on him, only of noticing at one point that she no longer pressed the receiver to her ear.
Why had she let herself willfully block out this transiency, fall in love, remake the boundaries of her life, and then redefine what it meant to trust the world? Because even as she’d worried aloud, she’d secretly relied on the conviction that he would stay safe. He’d had a plan and she’d become a late believer in the power of planning. She’d trusted their future as much as the fact that ice was cold and fires were hot and letters arranged on a page would remain readable.
And she’d known better. That much trust was too much.
The mind is a labyrinth capable of holding at once the ocean, the sky and everything in between, of carrying on four simultaneous conversations, most of them internal, of dismissing one memory even as it accesses another in detail and creates a third.
Didn’t people in situations like this say, at least he was doing what he loved”? Wasn’t that a ridiculous thing to say?
These thoughts pushed their way up from the floor of her mind, edging aside other, more critical judgments and understandings and misunderstandings.
humans are delicate so keep it safe humans are impermanent so take the risks humans are transient so soak in the details humans are temporary so think big humans are breakable so be diligent humans are ephemeral so be carefree humans are fragile so
Thoughts came that she would register unconsciously and quickly forget, but would recall some of them, at least much later, in her revised world, as pieces of her future settled into new patterns of fleetingness.
What do we do now? What do I do now?

About this edition

• Publisher: Unbridled Books
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1609530918
• ISBN 13: 9781609530914
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288