Mother Land: A Novel

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They examine how women carved out space within movements such as temperance and track the fluctuating fortunes of women's employment and domestic life from the Great War to the eve of the Second World War. Franqui handles these conflicts deftly, keeping the mood of the book light, without undermining the seriousness of her topic.

But the ex-pat Americans sense of adventure is sorely tested when her mother-in-law, Swati, suddenly arrives from Kolkataa thousand miles awayalone, with an even more shocking announcement: shes left her husband of more than forty years and is moving in with them. Upon meeting her now-husband Dhruv in a Manhattan bar, Rachel instantly fell in love with his boyish charm and assertiveness. It’s a tender tale of two women who are lost and alone, but who eventually become allies and each other’s biggest champions. It reveals with chilling clarity how violence begets violence, in even the most unexpected of people and how, despite anger and exile, reconciliation is possible. She is a playwright and the recipient of the 2013 Goldberg Playwriting Award, and also wrote a web series for which she received the Alfred Sloan Foundation Screenwriting award (aftereverafterwebseries.

Flora had made a large sign that said Motherland, with an image of a woman opening her arms to cultivated land. BookPage is a recommendation guide for readers, highlighting the best new books across all genres as chosen by our editors. Told in dual POVs of both Rachel and her mother in law, Swati, we are present when Swati shows up one day to live with Rachel and her husband Dhruv.

Franqui has written a beautiful novel featuring nuanced characters struggling to find their way through the landmines of the inevitable culture clashes with surprising, didn’t-see-that-coming moments that carry through to the last page.

Heartfelt, charming, deeply insightful and wise, Mother Land introduces us to two ver It tangles with the knotted roots of sea grasses, and gently rolls across the seabed forgotten amphorae, coins, bejewelled crowns, the empty shells of crabs and limpets and the skulls of soldiers. Thanks to Netgalley and HarperCollinsPublishers for an advanced ecopy in exchange for an honest, fair review. Franqi poignantly highlights the cultural differences of America/India and unique stresses of the MIL relationship while still honoring both. Then he too falls into the obscurity that devours all, and Tenedos melts into darkness as if it had never existed.

And if that’s not bad enough, Dhruv leaves almost immediately on a last minute business trip to Kolkata that’s supposed to last a month. The women’s credible learning from each other makes this a worthy tale of bridging a cultural divide. Mother Land is as much a treatise on what it means to belong to oneself as it is a story of two women from opposing cultures. Enter Swati, Rachel’s mother-in-law, who shows up on Rachel’s doorstep to announce that she has left her husband of 41 years and will be moving in with Rachel and Dhruv.Throughout the book, Rachel (protagonist) was portrayed as “an independent and loving spirit with a curious mind. Piercing and poignant, Lima’s voice and music stay with you, “undisturbed / by wind or water, there will always remain/ a footprint” guiding your way home. Anyone picking up this novel expecting an easy read should be warned it is painful, sometimes harrowing reading, and will trip up a reader coming to it with conventional expectations. Given that Theroux has so far sustained a very successful 50-year career on the strength of his own predatory eye and nose, the only real question is: what’s next? Instead he has produced a book which benighted knee-jerk nationalists on both sides of the Aegean will detest but which will with any luck be remembered as remarkable literature long after time has swept such people away.

It's an ambitious coming-of-age novel from debut author Jo McMillan, which is wonderfully written and filled with quirky details and descriptions . Maybe her most damaging characteristic is her ability to foster division among her six children (the seventh, Angela, died in infancy and is therefore venerated), whose squabbles, estrangements and reconciliations are constantly being reconfigured in new patterns. If some Turkish readers find his family’s experiences hard to take, some Greek ones may accuse him of having a low “Hellenism count”. A Greek boy born on a Turkish island tries to make sense of the escalating tensions between Greek and Turk and Muslim and Christian, between his cosmopolitan mother and his homeboy, fisherman of a father.Still, it was a bit incongruous to think that a closeted woman like Swati would suddenly lust madly for her best friend’s son - she just touching 60 and the son being in his early 30s, I assume. The summation of my life: ‘Some good parts, lots of boring parts, wasted time – on the whole, a mediocre life. Rachel, an American, marries Dhruv, an Indian expat, because he provides the decisiveness that she's always lacked in her life. Rachel and Swati’s] credible learning from each other make this a worthy tale of bridging a cultural divide. Suddenly these two strong-willed women from such very different backgrounds are alone together in a home that each is determined to run in her own waya situation that ultimately brings into question the very things in their lives that had seemed perfect and permanent .