UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · ENGLISH
Chaz Brenchley
Time's up, she thought.
— from Paradise
Most acclaimed
Paradise
"Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed . . . The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing that connected all these catastrophes was in the Convent. And in the Convent were those women."In Paradise--her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature--Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain," assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery.From the Hardcover edition.
Bitter Waters
The average adult male is approximately 60% water. Blood tastes salty as more than two thirds of the sodium circulating throughout your body is carried in arteries and veins. Which means that your heart is like a miniature ocean within your chest. Chaz Brenchley has not only been awarded the British Fantasy Society's August Derleth Award but knows all too well the storms and dangers of the heart: the lofty desires, the grieving nadirs, the tempest of love. In Bitter Watters, his first short story collection devoted to gay readers, Brenchley offers men fantastical instances to effleurer, to break for taller timber, to drown in emotions. And while not every tale in this breathtaking collection involves the sea, tears and bloodshed still need to be navigated.
Shelter
In a West Virginia girls' camp in July 1963, a group of children experience an unexpected rite of passage. Shelter is an astonishing portrayal of an American loss of innocence as witnessed by a drifter named Parson, two young sisters, Lenny and Alma, and a feral boy. Like Buddy, the wide-eyed boy so at home in the natural bower of the forest, Lenny and Alma are forever transformed by violence, by family secrets, by surprising turns of love. What they choose to remember, what they meet within and around the boundaries of the camp, will determine the rest of their lives. In a leafy wilderness undiminished by societal rules and dilemmas, Lenny and Alma confront a terrible darkness and find in themselves a knowledge never lent them by the adult world. . Visceral, filled with suspense and surprise, Shelter is an extraordinary achievement. Jayne Anne Phillips continues to explore family ties and generational complexities. She questions the idea of the existence of evil and brings to startling immediacy the primal divinity of the isolated, mountainous landscape of rural Appalachia. Shelter is a novel of transcendent beauty by one of the finest writers of our time.