Book : Recent East - Grattan, Thomas

-Titulo Original : Recent East

-Fabricante :

Picador Paper

-Descripcion Original:

About the Author Thomas Grattan is the author of the novel The Recent East, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors Choice. His writing has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times Book Review, One Story, Slice, and The Colorado Review, and was listed as a notable story in Best American Short Stories. He has an MFA in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College and has taught middle school English for more than a decade. He lives in upstate New York. Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction * Longlisted for the PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel *A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice * A Most Anticipated Book of 2021 atO, The Oprah Magazine, Refinery29, and The Millions * One of Goodreads’ 75 Debut Novels to Discover in 2021 * One of The Advocate’s 22 LGBTQ Books You Absolutely Need to Read This Year“A wonderful, immersive debut novel . . . In Grattan’s hands, life’s joys are magnetic.” Patrick Nathan, The New York Times Book ReviewAn extraordinary family saga following a mother and two teens as they navigate a new life in East Germany.Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, is notified that her parents’ abandoned mansion is available for her to reclaim. Newly divorced and eager to escape her bleak life in upstate New York, where she has lived as an adult, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. The move fractures the siblings’ close relationship, as Michael, free to be gay, takes to looting empty houses and partying with wannabe anarchists, while Adela, fascinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, buries herself in books and finds companionship in a previously unknown cousin. Over time, the town itself changes, too from dismantled city to refugee haven and neo-Nazi hotbed, and eventually to a desirable seaside resort town. In the midst of that change, two episodes of devastating, fateful violence come to define the family forever. Moving seamlessly through decades and between the thoughts and lives of several unforgettable characters, Thomas Grattan’s spellbinding novel The Recent East is a multigenerational epic that illuminates what it means to leave home, and what it means to return. Masterfully crafted with humor, gorgeous prose, and a powerful understanding of history and heritage, The Recent East is the profoundly affecting story of a family upended by displacement and loss, and the extraordinary debut of an empathetic and ambitious storyteller. Review A wonderful, immersive debut novel . . . Our lives are time spent, and it’s a deep, expansive pleasure to spend a little of ours as these characters spend their own. Most extraordinarily, Grattan gives us not only life, but a good life, the rarity of which in fiction (and increasingly, reality) is a shame. --Patrick Nathan, The New York Times Book ReviewA sharply accomplished first novel . . . Grattan’s rarer achievement is to have written a historical novel whose when and where, however well established, are not really determinative, and whose people remain individual riddles instead of political integers . . . Fiction, as always, will have to play catch-up, which is what Thomas Grattan’s career now seems splendidly to be doing. --Thomas Mallon, The New YorkerA narrative description alone fails to convey the dazzling, deeply loving, obscenely clever prose at the heart of Grattan’s novel. The Recent East is filled with many little landmines of sentences buried in each paragraph that nearly makes you stop and gasp. It’s all the small details tossing around this continent-tossed family that makes this novel such a joy. --Christopher Bollen, InterviewThomas Grattans debut novel is an epic