Showing results for "In Memory Of" in Literary Fiction

With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a poetic voice.

In Summerlin, North Carolina, it is - quite literally - a race to the finish. Glenn and Laura Bales lie dying in the same house, and although Laura is more interested in her Whitman’s Sampler chocolates, and Glenn in whatever happened to his first wife, Evelyn, their children have their eyes unswervingly fixed on the inheritance. Who will get the money, and what it will mean for this unusual little Southern community is a richly comic novel about endings.

Poverty and depravity wreak havoc on Hassan Omar’s family. Amid great hardship he decides to escape. The arrival of independence brings new upheavals as well as the betrayal of the promise of freedom. The new government, fearful of an exodus of its most able men, discourages young people from travelling abroad and refuses to release examination results. Deprived of a scholarship, Hassan travels to Nairobi to stay with a wealthy uncle, in the hope that he will release his mother’s rightful share of the family inheritance.