Tag Archives: grief

Crying in H Mart: a Memoir  by Michelle Zauner

01 Wednesday Jun 2022

Posted by in 20th century, Biography, memoir

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“Michelle Zauner has written a book you experience with all of your senses: sentences you can taste, paragraphs that sound like music. She seamlessly blends stories of food and memory, sumptuousness and grief, to weave a complex narrative of loyalty and loss.” —Rachel Syme

“I read Crying in H Mart with my heart in my throat. In this beautifully written memoir, Michelle Zauner has created a gripping, sensuous portrait of an indelible mother-daughter bond that hits all the notes: love, friction, loyalty, grief. All mothers and daughters will recognize themselves—and each other—in these pages.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance

“Crying in H Mart is a wonder: A beautiful, deeply moving coming-of-age story about mothers and daughters, love and grief, food and identity. It blew me away, even as it broke my heart.” –Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

“Poignant . . . A tender, well-rendered, heart-wrenching account of the way food ties us to those who have passed. The author delivers mouthwatering descriptions of dishes like pajeon, jatjuk, and gimbap, and her storytelling is fluid, honest, and intimate. When a loved one dies, we search all of our senses for signs of their presence. Zauner’s ability to let us in through taste makes her book stand out—she makes us feel like we are in her mother’s kitchen, singing her praises.”  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

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Beneficence by Meredith Hall

17 Saturday Jul 2021

Posted by in 20th century, Fiction, United States

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“A quiet gem of a first novel. The author’s lyrical prose and stark portrayal of grief and guilt…is conveyed so movingly this story is hard to put down. With language poetic in its cadence and capable of seamlessly transporting our minds and emotions to another place and time, this accomplished debut will be welcomed by readers of authors such as Willa Cather, Alice Munro, Amy Tan, or Lisa See.”―Library Journal

“Beneficence is amazing in its vision. Luminous. With wisdom and compassion, Meredith Hall writes about the capacity for atonement. Beneficence, then. Goodness. Generosity to see deeply, to live through fear and pain on your journey toward the awareness of splendor.”―Ursula Hegi

“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings….Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”―Washington Post

“Spare but decked with moments of crystalline beauty…. A family flounders in grief, but finds their way home through forgiveness and acceptance, in Beneficence, Meredith Hall’s gorgeous and moving new novel.”―Foreword, starred review

Readers of Kent Haruf would like this book.

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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

04 Monday Jan 2021

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Gifty is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at Stanford. She studies addiction and depression in mice, but both exist in her family as well. Gifty is very much a contemporary, forward-looking character—a Ghanaian-American woman who is excelling in science at one of the best schools in the world—but she is also drawn by memories of faith and family in Alabama where she grew up.  Quite different from her first book, Homegoing.  A compelling read.

“Unforgettable… Transcendent Kingdom has an expansive scope that ranges into fresh, relevant territories—much like the title, which suggests a better world beyond the life we inhabit.”—BookPage [starred review]

“Gyasi’s wise second novel pivots toward intimacy… In precise prose, Gyasi creates an ache of recognition, especially for readers knowledgeable about the wreckage of addiction. Still, she leavens this nonlinear novel with sly humor… The author is astute about childhood grandiosity and a pious girl’s deep desire to be good; she conveys in brief strokes the notched, nodding hook of heroin’s oblivion…final chapter that gives readers a taste of hard-won deliverance.”—Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“Yaa Gyasi’s profoundly moving second novel takes place in the vast, fragile landscape where the mysteries of God and the certainties of science collide. Through deliberate and precise prose, the book becomes an expansive meditation on grief, religion, and family.”—The Boston Globe

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Apeirogon: a novel by Colum McCann

24 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by in 20th century, Fiction

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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • From the National Book Award–winning and bestselling author of Let the Great World Spin comes an epic novel rooted in the unlikely real-life friendship between two fathers.  (Amazon)

To become a member of the Parent’s Circle, you have to lose a child and be willing to speak.  The author, in real life, met these 2 fathers and was so inspired to write about their stories and their determination to turn their grief into a weapon for peace. This is more than a story about Palestine and Israel. This is 1001 fragments that come together to form a whole – a tour de force unlike anything you’ve read to date.

“Brilliant . . . powerful and prismatic . . . Apeirogon is an empathy engine, utterly collapsing the gulf between teller and listener. . . . It achieves its aim by merging acts of imagination and extrapolation with historical fact. But it’s undisputably a novel, and, to my mind, an exceedingly important one. It does far more than make an argument for peace; it is, itself, an agent of change.”—The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

 “McCann performs his own epic balancing act between life and art, writing with stunning lyricism and fluent empathy as he traces the ripple effects of violence and grief, beauty, and the miraculous power of friendship and love, valor and truth.”—Booklist (starred review)

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The Lost Family by Jenna Blum

12 Wednesday Sep 2018

Posted by in Fiction, Historical Fiction

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The New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us creates a vivid portrait of a husband devastated by a grief he cannot name, a frustrated wife struggling to compete with a ghost she cannot banish, and a daughter sensitive to the pain of both her own family and another lost before she was born. This book tugged at so many emotions for me. I couldn’t wait to read the next chapter.

“This exquisitely crafted and compassionate novel offers a lesson in honesty, regardless of how difficult the truth may be. It will offer plenty of discussion for book groups.” (Library Journal (starred review))

“(Blum) takes on the difficult task of rendering generational trauma visible, and does it with such humor and empathy, you can’t help but be swept along for the ride.” (Village Voice)

“Blum avoids the sap of happy endings and easy resolutions in this perfect encapsulation of the changing times and turbulence of mid- and late-20th-century America.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

23 Monday Nov 2015

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If you are willing to be transported to the jungle-fringed tea plantations of the Cameron Highlands to discover the only Japanese garden in Malaysia, this most gifted writer will unveil another time, a place, two characters who wrestle with unspeakable brutal pasts, and seek the healing solace in the art of gardening.  I guarantee this story and this garden will linger in your mind long after you’ve read the last page.

“Beautifully written…Eng is quite simply one of the best novelists writing today.”–Philadelphia Inquirer
“Like his debut, The Gift of Rain (2007), Tan’s second novel is exquisite…Tan triumphs again, entwining the redemptive power of storytelling with the elusive search for truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan’s inhumane war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. All readers in search of spectacular writing will not be disappointed.”–Library Journal, Starred Review
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Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

04 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Fiction, mystery

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After reading the first three words, the first sentence and the first paragraph, the reader will know what happened to the central character in this book.  But then the question is Why? and then How? and then For What?

Celeste Ng, in her first novel, has gracefully written a poignant and heartbreaking story of family, ethnicity, communication and grief that the reader will be compelled to read in one sitting.

“If we know this story, we haven’t seen it yet in American fiction, not until now… Ng has set two tasks in this novel’s doubled heart—to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime. She does both by turning the nest of familial resentments into at least four smaller, prickly mysteries full of secrets the family members won’t share… What emerges is a deep, heartfelt portrait of a family struggling with its place in history, and a young woman hoping to be the fulfillment of that struggle. This is, in the end, a novel about the burden of being the first of your kind—a burden you do not always survive.” – Alexander Chee, The New York Times Book Review

“Wonderfully moving…Emotionally precise…A beautifully crafted study of dysfunction and grief…[This book] will resonate with anyone who has ever had a family drama.” – Boston Globe

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H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by in Biography, Non-fiction

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Suddenly Helen’s world caves. She is numb with grief.  Not a stranger to the world of falconry, Helen has raised small birds of prey.  But to honor her deep loss, she raises the stakes.  She decides to immerse herself in the training of a goshawk  – one of the fiercest and largest birds of prey.  Enter a world most of us know little about.  An extraordinary execution of nature writing and memoir that will have you sitting on the edge of your chair and holding your breath!

“To read Helen Macdonald’s new memoir is to have every cell of your body awake and alive.” —Robin Young, Here and Now

“In this profoundly inquiring and wholly enrapturing memoir, Macdonald exquisitely and unforgettably entwines misery and astonishment, elegy and natural history, human and hawk.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“Breathtaking . . . Helen Macdonald renders an indelible impression of a raptor’s fierce essence—and her own—with words that mimic feathers, so impossibly pretty we don’t notice their astonishing engineering.” —Vicki Constantine Croke, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

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