About this item
Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist. A richly imagined novel -- set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America -- about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.In the book's opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company's planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother.
About the Author
Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction--her most recent is Improvement, fall 2017. Her previous book, Fools, was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Other works include The Size of the World, finalist for the LA Times Fiction Prize, Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and Household Words, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her short stories have appeared in O. Henry Prize, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections, and in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. She's known for stories that leap over long blocks of time, and this led her to write The Art of Time in Fiction. She lives in Manhattan and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program. Her website is joansilber.net.
