If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It's 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. The Gold children--four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness--sneak out to hear their fortunes.
The prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in '80s San Francisco; dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
(15 copies)
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In post-war Montreal, a young enigmatic woman arrives to meet her betrothed only to be turned down by him. She marries his brother instead and their quiet life together is shattered when it becomes apparent she has stolen another's identity.
(14 copies)
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For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood--the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival.
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This is a richly textured and moving story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers whose lives are profoundly affected by a series of passenger airplane crashes in Elizabeth, NJ, within a three-month period in 1951-1952.
(15 copies)
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An East Indian and his sister living in Kenya spend their lives caught between the English rulers and the African locals who seek independence
(15 copies)
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A critical and personal meditation on what it means to be a Native American in North America.
(15 copies)
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This is an account of the life of the Somali-born Ali and her struggle with her Muslim faith. In it she discusses how her experiences in the poitical chaos of Somalia shaped her views. She was born into a family of desert nomads, subjected to circumcision and educated by radical imams. Later she was forced into marriage in Canada. On her way there, in the transit hall of Schiphol, she decided to ask for asylum in the Netherlands.
(14 copies)
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The settings are the sugar plantations of Saint-Domingue to the lavish parlors of New Orleans. This novel tells the story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny.
(20 copies)
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Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s is the setting for this novel, told through the vivid, intense reminiscences of three children of an immigrant family.
(15 copies)
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A dark secret threatens to expose the best and worst in everyone tied to the estate at a thriving plantation in Virginia in the decades before the Civil War.
(14 copies) (1 large prints)
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