Catapult (Over 16,000 results)

Paperback. Condition: Good. One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Matyas, has gone missing, fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Matyas's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. A stirring exploration of male intimacy, memory and grief, and the cost of freedom - the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labour.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. Like The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Beyond the High Blue Air is a spare, sharp memoir about the speed with which a comfortable existence can be blighted by grief. --Bee Wilson, The Sunday Times Lu Spinney's memoir Beyond the High Blue Air is at once a portrait of the fearlessness of familial love and the profound dilemma posed by modern medicine. When Spinney's twenty-nine-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp, writes his mother, skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead . . . He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss-- Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness--that unravels over the next five years. Spinney, her husband, and three other children put their lives on hold to tend to Miles at various hospitals and finally in a care home. They hold out hope that he will be returned to them. With blunt precision, Spinney chronicles her family's intimate experience. And yet, as personal a book as this is, it offers universal meaning, presenting an eloquent and piercing description of what it feels to witness an intimate become unfamiliar. This is a story about ambiguous loss: the disappearance of someone who is still there. Three quarters of the way through, however, Spinney's story takes a turn. The family and, to the degree that he can communicate, Miles himself come to view ending his life as the only possible release from the prison of his body and mind. Spinney, cutting her last thread of hope, wishes for her son to die. And yet, even as she allows this difficult revelation to settle, she learns that this is not her decision to make. Because Miles is diagnosed as being in a minimally conscious state rather than a persistent vegetative state, there is no legal way to bring about his death, a bewildering paradox that Spinney navigates with compassion and wisdom. This profound book encompasses the lyrical revelations of a memoir like Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as well as the crucial medical and moral insights of a book such as Atul Gawande's Being Mortal.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families "leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story" (Hilary Mantel).   "McGregor's depiction of speechlessness, both metaphorical and physical, makes the novel much more interesting than if he had provided a page-turner about a botched expedition in Antarctica . . . McGregor's carefully composed dialogue, filled with the repetition of so few words, had an eerie effect on me: for several days my own inner dialogue was often composed of the same words, as though I, too, was discovering how they could express drastically different emotions yet remain unreadable to the world." --Yiyun Li, New York Review of Books Remember the training: find shelter or make shelter, remain in place, establish contact with other members of the party, keep moving, keep calm.   Robert 'Doc' Wright, a veteran of Antarctic surveying, was there on the ice when the worst happened. He holds within him the complete story of that night--but depleted by the disaster, Wright is no longer able to communicate the truth. Instead, in the wake of the catastrophic expedition, he faces the most daunting adventure of his life: learning a whole new way to be in the world. Meanwhile Anna, his wife, must suddenly scramble to navigate the sharp and unexpected contours of life as a caregiver. From the Booker Prize-longlisted, American Academy of Arts & Letters Award-winning author of Reservoir 13, this is a novel every bit as mesmerizing as its setting. Tenderly unraveling different notions of heroism through the rippling effects of one extraordinary expedition on an ordinary family, Lean Fall Stand explores the indomitable human impulse to turn our experiences into stories--even when the words may fail us.…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. From an award-winning journalist, literary travel where observation of places is incorporated with elements of the personal, the poetic and the philosophical Australian award-winning journalist Mark Mordue invites you on his world trip that ranges from a Rolling Stones concert in Istanbul to talking with mullahs and junkies in Tehran, and from a cricket match in Calcutta to an S&M bar in New York, in addition to many points in between. Mordue chronicles his year-long global journey with his girlfriend, Lisa Nicol, exploring countries most Americans never see as well as issues of world citizenship in the 21st century. Written in the tradition of literary journalism, Dastgah will take you to all kinds of places, across the world . . . and inside yourself.…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Matyas, has gone missing, fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Matyas's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. A stirring exploration of male intimacy, memory and grief, and the cost of freedom - the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labour.…

Hardback. Condition: Good. Returning us to the extraordinary territory of Jon McGregor's Man Booker Prize long-listed novel Reservoir 13, The Reservoir Tapes take us deep into the heart of an English village that is trying to come to terms with what has happened on its watch.A teenage girl has gone missing. The whole community has been called upon to join the search. And now an interviewer arrives, intent on capturing the community's unstable stories about life in the weeks and months before Becky Shaw vanished. Each villager has a memory to share or a secret to conceal, a connection to Becky that they are trying to make or break. A young wife pushes against the boundaries of her marriage, and another seeks a means of surviving within hers. A group of teenagers dare one another to jump into a flooded quarry, the one weak swimmer still awaiting his turn. A laborer lies trapped under rocks and dry limestone dust as his fellow workers attempt a risky rescue. And meanwhile a fractured portrait of Becky emerges at the edges of our vision-a girl swimming, climbing, and smearing dirt onto a scared boy's face, images to be cherished and challenged as the search for her goes on.…

Paperback. Condition: Very Good. The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing - including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability - Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing - including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability - Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces. …

Paperback. Condition: Good. "In this delightful autofiction―the first book by Gainza, an Argentine art critic, to appear in English―a woman delivers pithy assessments of world-class painters along with glimpses of her life, braiding the two into an illuminating whole." ―The New York Times Book Review, Notable Book of the Year and Editors' Choice The narrator of Optic Nerve is an Argentinian woman whose obsession is art. The story of her life is the story of the paintings, and painters, who matter to her. Her intimate, digressive voice guides us through a gallery of moments that have touched her. In these pages, El Greco visits the Sistine Chapel and is appalled by Michelangelo's bodies. The mystery of Rothko's refusal to finish murals for the Seagram Building in New York is blended with the story of a hospital in which a prostitute walks the halls while the narrator's husband receives chemotherapy. Alfred de Dreux visits Géricault's workshop; Gustave Courbet's devilish seascapes incite viewers "to have sex, or to eat an apple"; Picasso organizes a cruel banquet in Rousseau's honor . . . All of these fascinating episodes in art history interact with the narrator's life in Buenos Aires―her family and work; her loves and losses; her infatuations and disappointments. The effect is of a character refracted by environment, composed by the canvases she studies. Seductive and capricious, Optic Nerve marks the English-language debut of a major Argentinian writer. It is a book that captures, like no other, the mysterious connections between a work of art and the person who perceives it.…

Paperback. Condition: Fair. The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing - including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability - Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, and the teaching of it, to better reach writers with diverse backgrounds? How can we invite diverse storytelling traditions into literary spaces. …

Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Hardback. Condition: Good. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Speculative Fiction Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime--and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections. Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can't forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope. With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.…

Hardback. Condition: Good. Finalist for the Vermont Book Award Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay A new collection of pieces on literature and life by the author of Am I Alone Here?, a finalist for the NBCC Award for Criticism Stationed in the South Pacific during World War II, Seymour Orner wrote a letter every day to his wife, Lorraine. She seldom responded, leading him to plead in 1945, "Another day and still no word from you." Seventy years later, Peter Orner writes in response to his grandfather's plea: "Maybe we read because we seek that word from someone, from anyone." From the acclaimed fiction writer about whom Dwight Garner of The New York Times wrote, "You know from the second you pick him up that he's the real deal," comes Still No Word from You, a unique chain of essays and intimate stories that meld the lived life and the reading life. For Orner, there is no separation. Covering such well-known writers as Lorraine Hansberry, Primo Levi, and Marilynne Robinson, as well as other greats like Maeve Brennan and James Alan McPherson, Orner's highly personal take on literature alternates with his own true stories of loss and love, hope and despair. In his mother's copy of A Coney Island of the Mind, he's stopped short by a single word in the margin, "YES!"--which leads him to conjure his mother at twenty-three. He stops reading Penelope Fitzgerald's The Beginning of Spring three quarters of the way through because he knows that finishing the novel will leave him bereft. Orner's solution is to start again from the beginning to slow the inevitable heartache. Still No Word from You is a book for anyone for whom reading is as essential as breathing.…

Condition: good. Gently used with minimal wear on the corners and cover. A few pages may contain light highlighting or writing, but the text remains fully legible. Dust jacket may be missing, and supplemental materials like CDs or codes may not be included. May be ex-library with library markings. Ships promptly. …

Hardback. Condition: Good. Five months pregnant and struggling with a creative block, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Abstract Expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to the contradictions in Martin's life as well as art - the soft and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions that are both rigid and dreamy. But what most calls to JoAnna is Martin's dedication to her art in the face of paranoid schizophrenia. Uneasy with the changes her pregnant body is undergoing, JoAnna relapses into damaging old habits and thought patterns. When she confides in her doctor that she's struggling with depression and suicidal ideation, he tells her she must stop being so selfish, given she has a baby on the way, and start taking antidepressants. Appalled by his patronising tone and disregard of her mental health history, JoAnna instead makes a deal with herself: she'll surrender to her obsession with Agnes Martin and adopt the painter's doctrine of joyful solitude and isolation; if she fails, she'll comply and go on antidepressants. JoAnna rents a house in Taos and gives herself three weeks to dedicate herself to Martin's work and model her hermetic existence: phone off, email off, no talking to her husband, no touching the dog. Out of a deep, solitary engagement with a remarkable artist's body of work emerges an entirely new way for her to relate to the contradictions of her own body and face up to the joys and challenges of impending motherhood.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. 'Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.' When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief. Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our minds - love and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.…

Hardback. Condition: Good. The son of working-class Mexican immigrants flees a life of labor in fruit-packing plants to run in a Native American marathon from Canada to Guatemala in this stunning memoir that moves to the rhythm of feet, labor, and the many landscapes of the Americas (Catriona Menzies-Pike, author of The Long Run).Growing up in Yakima, Washington, No lvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives. A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, lvarez struggled to fit in.At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group of Den , Secw pemc, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Apache, Tohono O'odham, Seri, Pur pecha, and Maya runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories alongside his own, lvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala that pushed him to his limits. He writes not only of overcoming hunger, thirst, and fear--dangers included stone-throwing motorists and a mountain lion--but also of asserting Indigenous and working-class humanity in a capitalist society where oil extraction, deforestation, and substance abuse wreck communities. Running through mountains, deserts, and cities, and through the Mexican territory his parents left behind, lvarez forges a new relationship with the land, and with the act of running, carrying with him the knowledge of his parents' migration, and--against all odds in a society that exploits his body and rejects his spirit--the dream of a liberated future.This book is not like any other out there. You will see this country in a fresh way, and you might see aspects of your own soul. A beautiful run. --Lu s Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken AngelsWhen the son of two Mexican immigrants hears about the Peace and Dignity Journeys--'epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America'--he's compelled enough to drop out of college and sign up for one. Spirit Run is No lvarez's account of the four months he spends trekking from Canada to Guatemala alongside Native Americans representing nine tribes, all of whom are seeking brighter futures through running, self-exploration, and renewed relationships with the land they've traversed. --Runner's World, Best New Running Books of 2020An anthem to the landscape that holds our identities and traumas, and its profound power to heal them. --Francisco Cant , author of The Line Becomes a River.…

Hardback. Condition: Fair. The son of working-class Mexican immigrants flees a life of labor in fruit-packing plants to run in a Native American marathon from Canada to Guatemala in this stunning memoir that moves to the rhythm of feet, labor, and the many landscapes of the Americas (Catriona Menzies-Pike, author of The Long Run).Growing up in Yakima, Washington, No lvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives. A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, lvarez struggled to fit in.At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the Peace and Dignity Journeys, epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America. He dropped out of school and joined a group of Den , Secw pemc, Gitxsan, Dakelh, Apache, Tohono O'odham, Seri, Pur pecha, and Maya runners, all fleeing difficult beginnings. Telling their stories alongside his own, lvarez writes about a four-month-long journey from Canada to Guatemala that pushed him to his limits. He writes not only of overcoming hunger, thirst, and fear--dangers included stone-throwing motorists and a mountain lion--but also of asserting Indigenous and working-class humanity in a capitalist society where oil extraction, deforestation, and substance abuse wreck communities. Running through mountains, deserts, and cities, and through the Mexican territory his parents left behind, lvarez forges a new relationship with the land, and with the act of running, carrying with him the knowledge of his parents' migration, and--against all odds in a society that exploits his body and rejects his spirit--the dream of a liberated future.This book is not like any other out there. You will see this country in a fresh way, and you might see aspects of your own soul. A beautiful run. --Lu s Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken AngelsWhen the son of two Mexican immigrants hears about the Peace and Dignity Journeys--'epic marathons meant to renew cultural connections across North America'--he's compelled enough to drop out of college and sign up for one. Spirit Run is No lvarez's account of the four months he spends trekking from Canada to Guatemala alongside Native Americans representing nine tribes, all of whom are seeking brighter futures through running, self-exploration, and renewed relationships with the land they've traversed. --Runner's World, Best New Running Books of 2020An anthem to the landscape that holds our identities and traumas, and its profound power to heal them. --Francisco Cant , author of The Line Becomes a River.…

Condition: very_good. Cover may have light wear, pages in very good condition and binding is sturdy; may have other light shelf wear or creases. May have notes or highlighting.

Condition: very_good. Cover may have light wear, pages in very good condition and binding is sturdy; may have other light shelf wear or creases. May have notes or highlighting.

Condition: very_good. Cover may have light wear, pages in very good condition and binding is sturdy; may have other light shelf wear or creases. May have notes or highlighting.

Hardback. Condition: Good. An American writer of Argentine, Syrian, and Iraqi Jewish descent, Jordan Salama tells the story of the Rio Magdalena, nearly one thousand miles long, the heart of Colombia. Following the river from its source high in the Andes to its mouth on the Caribbean coast, journeying by boat, bus, and improvised motobalinera, Salama writes against stereotype and toward the rich lives of those he meets. Joy, mourning, and humour come together in this debut travel writing about a country too often seen as only a site of war, and a tale of lively adventure following a legendary river. …

Paperback. Condition: Good. "Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women . . . Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed." --T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern's shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O'Connor's Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own. "[A] haunting debut . . . This is a harrowing tale, which Bieker smartly writes through the lens of a teenager on the cusp of understanding the often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality . . . It's a timely and disturbing portrait of how easily men can take advantage of vulnerable women--and the consequences sink in more deeply with each page."--Annabel Gutterman, Time "Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail--baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels--Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A-."--Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly.…

Condition: good. Former library copy. Books may contain some notes and highlighting. Supplements such as Access Codes, Cd's Dust Jackets, etc. are not guaranteed with used book purchases.

paperback. Condition: Good.

paperback. Condition: Fair.

Paperback. Condition: Fair. "Imagine if Annie Proulx wrote something like White Oleander crossed with Geek Love or Cruddy, and then add cults, God, motherhood, girlhood, class, deserts, witches, the divinity of women . . . Terrifying, resplendent, and profoundly moving, this book will leave you changed." --T Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it's an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret "assignments," to bring the rain everybody is praying for. Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mouse collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern's shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances. Possessed of an unstoppable plot and a brilliantly soulful voice, Godshot is a book of grit and humor and heart, a debut novel about female friendship and resilience, mother-loss and motherhood, and seeking salvation in unexpected places. It introduces a writer who gives Flannery O'Connor's Gothic parables a Californian twist and who emerges with a miracle that is all her own. "[A] haunting debut . . . This is a harrowing tale, which Bieker smartly writes through the lens of a teenager on the cusp of understanding the often fraught relationship between religion and sexuality . . . It's a timely and disturbing portrait of how easily men can take advantage of vulnerable women--and the consequences sink in more deeply with each page."--Annabel Gutterman, Time "Drawn in brilliant, bizarre detail--baptism in warm soda, wisdom from romance novels--Lacey's twin crises of faith and femininity tangle powerfully. Fiercely written and endlessly readable, a novel like this is a godsend. A-."--Mary Sollosi, Entertainment Weekly.…

Paperback. Condition: Good. Finalist for the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize Longlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize (UK) A profoundly original exploration of racism, misogyny, and ageism--three monsters that plague the world--this novel from a beloved and prize-winning author is made up of two narratives, each told by a South Asian migrant to Australia "When my family emigrated it felt as if we'd been stood on our heads." Michelle de Kretser's electrifying take on scary monsters turns the novel upside down, just as migration has upended her characters' lives. Lili's family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she's teaching in the south of France. She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North African immigrants, and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbor. All the while, Lili is striving to be A Bold, Intelligent Woman like Simone de Beauvoir.  Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation and embraces "Australian values." He's also preoccupied by his ambitious wife, his wayward children, and his strong-minded elderly mother. Islam has been banned in the country, the air is smoky from a Permanent Fire Zone, and one pandemic has already run its course. Three scary monsters--racism, misogyny, and ageism--roam through this mesmerizing novel. Its reversible format enacts the disorientation that migrants experience when changing countries changes the stories of their lives. With this suspenseful, funny, and profound book, Michelle de Kretser has made something thrilling and new. "Which comes first, the future or the past?".…

paperback. Condition: Fair.

hardcover. Condition: Very Good.