Russell Banks

Having fled to West Africa in the late 1970s for her work as a political radical, Hannah Musgrave befriends notorious former Liberian president Charles Taylor, who years later leads a rebellion that threatens Hannah's family.

The Relation of My Imprisonment a work of fiction utilizing a form invented in the seventeenth century by imprisoned Puritan divines. Designed to be exemplary, works of this type were aimed at brethren outside the prison walls and functioned primarily as figurative dramatization of the test of fait all true believers must endure. These "relation," framed by scripture and by a sermon explicating the text, were usually read aloud in weekly or monthly installments during religious services. Utterly sincere and detailed recounting of suffering, they were nonetheless highly artificial. To use the form self-consciously, as Russell Banks has done, is not to parody it so much as to argue good-humoredly with the mind it embodies, to explore and, if possible, to map the limits of that mind, the more intelligently to love it.

Hamilton Stark is a New Hampshire pipe fitter and the sole inhabitant of the house from which he evicted his own mother. He is the villain of five marriages and the father of a daughter so obsessed that she has been writing a book about him for years. Hamilton Stark is a boor, a misanthrope, a handsome man: funny, passionately honest, and a good dancer. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides to write about Stark as a hero whose anger and solitude represent passion and wisdom. At the same time that he tells Hamilton Stark's story, he describes the process of writing the novel and the complicated connections between truth and fiction. As Stark slips in and out of focus, maddeningly elusive and fascinatingly complex, this beguiling novel becomes at once a compelling meditation on identity and a thoroughly engaging story of life on the cold edge of New England.

Fourteen-year-old Miriam agrees to test a new computer game in utmost secrecy but finds that it is more than she bargained for.

A 59 ans, Hannah Musgrave, anti-héroïne américaine, revient sur sa vie de bourgeoise aisée. Dans les années 1960-1970, elle avait renoncé à ses études pour rejoindre un mouvement révolutionnaire visant à renverser le gouvernement américain. Son statut de terroriste la conduit à se réfugier au Libéria mais elle doit fuir le pays et la guerre civile des années plus tard en abandonnant ses enfants ...

Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Cloudsplitter vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s and traces it through the brutal guerrilla warfare of Bloody Kansas, culminating in a powerful re-creation of Brown's insurrectionary raid on Harpers Ferry. Cloudsplitter is a moving account of one principled man's tragic passage from antislavery agitator and activist to guerrilla fighter to terrorist to martyr. It is the story of how a political cause deemed holy controlled and ultimately destroyed the life of an entire family, and how in the process it became the catalyst for the greatest conflagration in our nation's history. John Brown, as portrayed by his ambivalent, reflective, guilt-ridden son Owen, begins as a conventional middle-class Christian family man of his time, a Yankee tanner, a failed wholesaler of wool, a small farmer and inept land speculator. Yet by middle age he exists at the precise locus where the exalted sentiments of his fellow abolitionists, the New England Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, cross over into revolutionary action. He has become the trusted cohort of African-Americans like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, the leader of a zealous band of antislavery terrorists, and the creator of the most daring, radical plan to free the slaves ever imagined. Historians have long argued whether Brown was a religious fanatic or merely a horse-stealing charlatan or the only important white martyr in the history of racial conflict in America - or all three. What cannot be argued is that the course of the Civil War and all subsequent American history would have been radically altered if not for John Brown's 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, a young man must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and reoffending sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts.Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.