Editorial Content for All Our Worldly Goods
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS is the posthumous publication of a great European writer who died at Auschwitz in 1942. Most of Irene Nέmirovsky’s publications are in French, though several have garnered enough attention to be translated into other languages. She was originally a Russian native, fleeing that country in the early 1900s during the Revolution. She and her family settled in Paris, where she spent most of her life, though was denied citizenship by the French government. Read More
Teaser
Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud that cascades down the generations.
Promo
Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud that cascades down the generations.
About the Book
In haunting ways, this compelling novel prefigures SUITE FRANCAISE and some of the themes of Némirovsky’s great unfinished sequence of novels. ALL OUR WORLDLY GOODS, though, is complete, and exquisitely so --- a perfect novel in its own right. First published in France in 1947, after the author’s death, it is a gripping story of family life and star-crossed lovers, set in France between 1910 and 1940.
Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and the family patriarch, the tyrannical industrialist Julien Hardelot, provoking a family feud which cascades down the generations. This is Balzac or The Forsyte Saga on a smaller, more intimate scale, the bourgeoisie observed close-up, with Némirovsky’s characteristically sly humour and clear-eyed compassion. Full of drama and heartbreak, and telling observations of the devastating effects of two wars on a small town and an industrial family, Némirovsky is at the height of her powers.
Taut, evocative and beautifully paced, the novel points out with heartbreaking detail and clarity how close those two wars were, how history repeated itself, tragically and shockingly. The story opens in the Edwardian era, on a fashionable Normandy beach and ends with a changed world under Nazi occupation.
Editorial Content for The Great Leader
Book
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
After nearly 40 years, Simon Sunderson retires from the Michigan State Police. In the days leading up to his retirement, he had been working to solve an impossible case. It’s impossible because the victims refuse to file a complaint. They are followers of a man calling himself Dwight, or Daryl, or King David, the self-appointed leader of a religious cult living in the woods around Marquette. Maybe because he wasn’t quite ready to retire or whatever, Sunderson decides to pursue the Great Leader, as he refers to him, like a dog pursuing the scent of a bone. Read More
Teaser
On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his 16-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized.
Promo
On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his 16-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized.
About the Book
Author Jim Harrison has won international acclaim for his masterful body of work, including RETURNING TO EARTH, LEGENDS OF THE FALL and over 30 books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. In his most original work to date, Harrison delivers an enthralling, witty and expertly-crafted novel following one man’s hunt for an elusive cult leader, dubbed “The Great Leader.”
On the verge of retirement, Detective Sunderson begins to investigate a hedonistic cult, which has set up camp near his home in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. At first, the self-declared Great Leader seems merely a harmless oddball, but as Sunderson and his 16-year-old sidekick dig deeper, they find him more intelligent and sinister than they realized. Recently divorced and frequently pickled in alcohol, Sunderson tracks his quarry from the woods of Michigan to a town in Arizona, filled with criminal border-crossers, and on to Nebraska, where the Great Leader’s most recent recruits have gathered to glorify his questionable religion. But Sunderson’s demons are also in pursuit of him.
Rich with character and humor, THE GREAT LEADER is at once a gripping excursion through America’s landscapes and the poignant story of a man grappling with age, lost love and his own darker nature.
