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A Feather on the Breath of God
From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of The Friend, comes this mesmerising story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.
‘A pleasure from the first page to the last’ JONATHAN FRANZEN
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet-these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality.
‘A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
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‘A pleasure from the first page to the last’ JONATHAN FRANZEN
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents’ stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet-these are the elements that shape the young woman’s imagination and her sexuality.
‘A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent’ NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Reviews
This strange, lucid story of the unwished-for child of unassimilated immigrants takes us well beyond the particulars of 'mixed ethnicity'--beyond even the experience of 'America'--into deep paradoxes of identity and love. Both old-fashioned and subversive, stringent and redemptive, it's a pleasure from the first page to the last
A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent
A remarkable, often disturbing portrait . . . Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality
An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement, and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth
A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity ... A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness
