VERA MAGPIE explores the gap between childhood fantasies of adult life and the stark reality of life in a women's prison. The eponymous narrator, Vera Magpie herself, is serving time for the murder of her three husbands, including Larry, a good man whom she loved, but doomed to die at Vera's hands because she has acquired a taste for murder. In prison, Vera experiences the reality that here are politics and a pecking order, just as in society at large, but here also she finds redemption through literature. Like many women who kill, Vera is a product of her own flawed past. But aspects of this past also count towards her early release from prison, as her new female lawyer successfully argues Battered Women’s Syndrome as a defence.-------------------------------------------------“Vera Magpie depicts pure life, nothing has been included or excluded, only human attitudes, psychology and behaviours have been condensed.”—Muhammad Shanazar “A knockout. This book is a little gem.”—J
South of the Yangtze starts with the protagonist, Qian Yinan, taking the high-speed train through the landscape of Jiangnan (“South of the Yangtze River”) with her American husband. Now in her mid-thirties, Yinan recalls her first trip along the same route in the late 1980s, as well as her Shanghai childhood with her “historical counter-revolutionary” grandfather, semi-literate grandmother, philosophy professor father and former “red guard” mother. Later in school, while receiving a nationalist education and witnessing the booming market economy, she becomes close to Jie, a classmate who aspires to join the Communist Party. And a few months before the new millennium, Yinan finds herself trapped in a secret love affair with her Mandarin-speaking high school teacher, who was once an activist during the political turmoil of 1989. In the midst of these formative relationships, Yinan contemplates the impact of the nation’s ideology, tradition and even it
Mountain Songs embodies the intersecting narratives of migration and how it shapes one’s identity.Mountain songs (山歌) are integral to Hakka culture – Tegan Smyth’s maternal heritage – and have been a way to keep stories by unknown authors alive in an oral tradition. As Hakka’s prominence as a spoken language gives way to other more widely spoken dialects of Chinese, it is in careful records that the cultural practices and stories are captured so they can be seen by future generations. This is true of the poems contained in Mountain Songs, which focuses on the accounts of different women in the writer’s family, whose existence and memories have been passed down only orally and never in writing. The movement of mountain songs sung across different terrains and milieus mirrors the movement of Hakka people themselves, a widely dispersed people, where migration is tied to the community’s experiences both within and outside China. The writer draws parallels to the migration of her grandparen
Battle of the Artisans tells the story of Tangtun, a conflicted, artistic twelve-year-old in 5th-century BCE China, who sets out to save his father from a killer. He crosses wits with his macho father and a vengeful king, armed thieves, and disgruntled villagers, and in the process, discovers new powers that rock his Bronze-Age world. In the end, what matters most is not Tangtun’s artistic abilities or his father’s muscles and might but that they realize the strength of acting together.This novel portrays the making of the very real Bells of Marquis Yi, a 2500-year-old National Treasure of China. No one knows exactly why these bells were made, but Bennett provides a well-researched and persuasive solution to the mystery through her story of Tangtun and his village on the Yangtze River.Every historical novel is an imagined introduction to a topic and a time. Battle of the Artisans invites readers to explore further the world and the science of the bells of Marquis Yi, to learn more abou
Entanglements: Physics, Love, and Wilderness Dreams, Jack Mayer’s second poetry collection, is a poetic mélange about relationships, from sub-atomic particles to our human family; the ties that bind. Mayer, a pediatrician, poet, and hiker, explores the metaphysics of cosmology and that particularly intense entanglement, love. At the macroscopic level, Mayer’s doctor poems, inspired by his pediatric practice in rural Northern Vermont, take the reader into the heart and soul of a healer inspired to find meaning in his patients’ often difficult lives. Unique connections are unearthed. As a wilderness hiker and canoeist, Mayer has experienced the healing power of wilderness; the mystery of belonging to wilderness, of independence and interdependence. His wilderness poems carry us into his beloved Green Mountains on Vermont’s Long Trail. On solo hikes he composes poems, then copies his first draft into the nearest shelter’s logbook under his trail name, “Mountain Poet.” A durable thread con
