Latest news with #LittleWorld
The Age
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Inconvenient women', mortality and a controversial work by Joan Didion: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
The Guardian
01-05-2025
- The Guardian
Little World by Josephine Rowe review – a beautiful novella that lacks heft
The road to sainthood is littered with the bodies of dead girls. Saint Maria Goretti was stabbed more than a dozen times while resisting a rape. Saint Dymphna of Ireland refused to share her father's bed and was beheaded for her filial disobedience. Saint Agnes of Rome, the patron saint of Girl Scouts, was set alight after rejecting an offer of marriage. When the flames did not claim her – she was too pure-hearted to burn – Agnes's throat was cut. Her sister was stoned to death for good measure – punished for her grief. These are inspirational stories, we are told. Tales of triumphant innocence. They are also acts of obliteration. Snuffed lights. Maria was 11 years old when she was murdered. Dymphna was 15; Agnes 12. What would happen if these brutalised children were mourned? What if their lives were worth more than their miracles? How might we dare to tell those stories? What kind of prayers might we offer to the dark? These are the questions Josephine Rowe asks in her new book. Or seems to ask. Little World is the tale of a fledgling saint – 'a kid in a box' – whose corpse is dispatched to a remote mining outpost in Western Australia as part of a cryptic bequest. The saint was once a daughter, a sister. She once had a name. Now she is a good luck charm – 'a child-sized rabbit's foot' – trussed-up in frills. And she knows it. The saint's mind has retained a hazy kind of consciousness like 'a lamp swung in the dark'. There are memories too, which rattle around in her incorruptible skull. She's unfairly dead, oceans away from home, and trapped in a box. And she's bloody annoyed. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning What will Rowe do with all this stifled fury? Not much. The saint fumes away in her canoe-wood reliquary waiting for something nameless and unattainable; answers to questions she will never know how to ask. The years tick on. One custodian replaces another. The people who care for the saint are exactly the kind of folk who drift in and out of bush towns in lyrical Aussie novels. Reticent, resilient and heartsore. Beloved by stray dogs. They are bound to the dead child by solidarity, not faith – a kindred loneliness. Rowe traces this misfit bond for the better part of a century: from the postwar boom to the pandemic. But Little World is not a sweeping sociocultural epic; history seeps into this book like music from a distant radio. Little World is true to its title: it's intricate, intimate and short (132 generously spaced pages). Arguably, a long short story. But that's a tiresome argument to have. We all know that short fiction can pack a wallop, who cares what we call it. (In releasing Little World as a stand-alone volume, Rowe is being positioned as Australia's answer to Claire Keegan.) The problem here isn't size, it's heft. This book feels hollow, as though the desert termites have been at it. There's no question that Little World is beautiful. Rowe's fiction has always been uncommonly gorgeous – the kind of gentle, contemplative prose-work that feels akin to prayer (see her 2021 short story collection, Here Until August). Here she writes of the 'alluvial silt' of half-forgotten dreams; the 'animal sentience' of warm rain; the 'red earth acropolis' of termite mounds. And the 'inner reliquary' of the soul, a description that holds for the book itself. Little World is a tiny treasure box. But if you're going to stuff a kid into a box – even a treasure box – that kid deserves to be more than a gauzy metaphor. More than beatific cosplay. More than a cultural shorthand for male rage. More than a weary inevitability – a girl who's hurt to prove that girls are hurt. Sadly, that's precisely who Rowe's saint becomes. Rowe only needs to hint at what has happened to the girl for us to fill in the rest. 'Every woman who dies like that,' she writes, 'has already dreamt her death.' How I long for a novel that dreams new dreams. I am also tired – so very tired – of tales of lost girls in the bush. Dreamy, beautiful ruin. There's so much more to regional Australia than white lace and red dirt (not that you would know it from outback noir). The miracles in Little World are moments of grace in a savage world. Another cultural shorthand. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion There's a churchy streak in fiction at the moment, in Ozlit and beyond. Consider the papal machinations of Emily Maguire's Rapture (2024); the rural nunnery in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional (2023); the cloistered powerbroking of Lauren Groff's Matrix (2021); the volatile congregation in Catherine Lacey's Pew (2020). What are our authors searching for in these sanctified spaces? What are they finding? I have plenty of theories: the power of ritual in a time of fracture; a patriarchal petri dish; a language equipped for awe and cataclysm; miracle hunger. The renewed resonance of old ideas: solace, forgiveness, mercy. But I can't work out what has brought Rowe here. Which is another way of saying that I don't know why she has brought us here. As her little saint grumbles: 'Death has brought very little in the way of answers.' Little World by Josephine Rowe is out through Black Inc (RRP A$27.99)
Sydney Morning Herald
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Family secrets laid bare, ‘inconvenient women' and a croc attack: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
The Age
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Family secrets laid bare, ‘inconvenient women' and a croc attack: 13 new books to delve into
So here we are, going into the last month of autumn and if you're one of those people getting ready to hunker down in the impending cooler weather then there are plenty of new books for you to stock up on. Memoirs, fiction, science, even a controversial posthumous publication − so much to feast on. No wonder May is named after Maia, the Roman goddess for fertility and growth. Always Home, Always Homesick Hannah Kent Picador, $36.99 April 29 Burial Rites, about the last woman executed in Iceland, was one of those books that captured the imagination of readers when it was published in 2013. Now Hannah Kent has written a lovely memoir about the curious path she took to becoming a writer − an exchange program took her as a 17-year-old to Iceland, a country she chose because she had never seen snow. She had the luck, she writes, to be born into a story-loving family and with that legacy has written three novels and now this tender account of how Iceland captivated her and forged her literary career. Desire Paths Megan Clement Ultimo, $36.99 April 29 In her introduction, Megan Clement, who has lived in Australia, France, England and Zimbabwe, writes that 2020 was the year when 'grief' and 'trauma' were dropped into the cultural mainstream. In the course of this touching and carefully constructed memoir of dealing with the stringencies of the Melbourne lockdowns and the impending death of her terminally ill father, she also considers the nature of home, belonging and the meaning and realities of borders. Little World Josephine Rowe Black Inc., $27.99 April 29 Orrin Bird has been left an unusual bequest − the incorruptible body of a saint in a box made of canoe wood. (Remember the saint in Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional?) The saint was young when thought to have died brutally, but her mind is still active, 'time breaking contract with her body' and 'death has brought very little in the way of answers'. In clear prose, this short, idiosyncratic novel brings us the people with whom the little saint 'travels' through time and landscape, her response to their predicaments and her reflections on her own existence. A remarkable concoction. Everything Lost, Everything Found Matthew Hooton HarperCollins, $34.99 April 30 What was it Faulkner said? 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.' The revisiting of earlier events occurs in many novels, and does so again in Matthew Hooton's much-admired third. Jack is 12 years old when his mother is mauled by a croc in the Tapajos River in Brazil. Many years later, Jack, by now a grandfather, recognises he doesn't 'have infinite time to curate my own past' as his wife Gracie 'slips into ever longer states of forgetting'. But how can he come to terms with the past and his present? Lonely Mouth Jacqueline Maley Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 The first novel by Jacqueline Maley, columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, became a bestseller. Her second opens with a paragraph that leaps off the page and plunges you into the story of Matilda, a fry chef at posh Sydney restaurant Bocca, her younger half-sister Lara, a model who lives in Paris, and their flighty mum, Barbara. When Lara's father, the decidedly dodgy actor Angus, reappears in their lives, any sort of equilibrium goes up in smoke. It's hard to put down. Notes to John Joan Didion Fourth Estate, $34.99 April 30 This book is slightly problematic. You wonder whether its author − were she still alive − would have approved of its publication. Joan Didion wrote the adored Year of Magical Thinking, about the 2003 death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. This posthumous book consists of notes addressed to him reporting on sessions with her psychiatrist, and reveals frank comments about their adopted daughter Quintana, alcoholism, depression and much more. If you love Didion, you'll probably want to read this. I Want Everything Dominic Amerena Summit Books, $34.99 April 30 'I acted immorally, but what did literature have to do with morality?' asks the would-be literary star − 'a style machine with no substance' − early in this absorbing novel about truth and ambition. The unnamed narrator stumbles on a controversial, reclusive author − 'sharply chiselled cheekbones, like the bust of a deposed dictator' − and proceeds to try to find out why she disappeared from the public eye. But to woo Brenda's trust, he tells a porky or three, and she might just be leading him on for her own purposes. All will be revealed in Dominic Amerena's delicious debut. The Opposite of Lonely Hilde Hinton Hachette, $32.99 April 30 The world takes its toll and Rose is well aware of that. Somehow, she seems to have shaken off friends, her father has died, her husband is no longer her husband and even her young son Max is trying her patience more than usual. After a near disaster while out shopping, a knight in shining armour comes to the rescue; Ellie, who becomes her new bestie. Loneliness is a curse at the best of times, so a friend indeed for a friend in need is a good thing … usually. Hilde Hinton has written another gentle and perceptive look at the travails of life. Vaccine Nation Raina MacIntyre NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre's latest book is a lament at the rise since 2020 of health disinformation and a plea to understand the value of vaccinations given the sad inevitability of a new pandemic. She points out that flu vaccinations in Australia in the over 65s are at 60 per cent, whereas only a few years ago, 70 per cent was the norm. To improve public perception of vaccines and public health, according to MacIntyre, we need 'political will, global cooperation and an integrated approach'. Inconvenient Women Jacqueline Kent NewSouth, $34.99 May 1 Jacqueline Kent's titular women are the 'daughters of the suffragists, the mothers of … 1970s feminists'. These are the writers, ranging from Jean Devanny, author of the controversial The Butcher Shop, to Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), Katharine Susannah Prichard and Nettie Palmer, who 'used their power with words in support of their beliefs, and to question and change elements of the world'. There are plenty of familiar names, but many not so well known, and Kent brings her cast of writers effortlessly to life. The Power of Choice Julian Kingma NewSouth, $49.99 May 1 Julian Kingma is a wonderful photographer. In this book, he has chosen to photograph terminally ill people who have decided to make use of Voluntary Assisted Dying legislation to ease their anxiety about death and regain dignity through their control of it. His stark black and white images are confronting, tender, beautiful, and terribly revealing. As 82-year-old former yoga teacher Liberty Pack says, 'I have no anxiety. I have a very peaceful feeling about the way my end will be.' The Power of Choice also has short introductions by Andrew Denton and Richard Flanagan. The Emperor of Gladness Ocean Vuong Jonathan Cape, $34.99 May 13 The American poet and novelist won acclaim for his first novel, the brilliantly titled On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and follows it up with a story that begins with 19-year-old Haia about to jump from a bridge. He is stopped by an old Latvian woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia, who invites the troubled youth to stay with her. Both are struggling, but the connection they form through their friendship − their love − from their particular edges of American society brings meaning to them both. Loading The Names Florence Knapp Phoenix, $32.99 May 13 Does it matter what name you have? In Florence Knapp's first novel, Cora gives birth to a boy and wants to call him Julian. Her domineering husband reckons he should be named Gordon, as he is, while her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, reckons the moniker should be Bear. And so Knapp gives us three versions of the boy's life when the family circumstances are at times grim, and his life takes differing paths depending on his name. There's big word of mouth in the publishing world about this sliding doors novel.
