front cover of Keeping Time
Keeping Time
A Novel
Thomas Legendre
Acre Books, 2020
A crumbling marriage. An ancient mystery. And a way to change the past . . . 

When archaeologist Aaron Keeler finds himself transported eighteen years backward in time, he becomes swept up in a strangely illicit liaison with his younger wife. A brilliant musician, Violet is captivated by the attentive, “weathered” version of her husband. The Aaron she recently married—an American expat—has become distant, absorbed by his excavation of a prehistoric site at Kilmartin Glen on Scotland’s west coast, where he will soon make the discovery that launches his career. As Aaron travels back and forth across the span of nearly two decades, with time passing in both worlds, he faces a threat to his revelatory dig, a crisis with the older Violet—mother of his two young children—and a sudden deterioration of his health. Meanwhile, Violet’s musical performances take on a resonance related to the secrets the two are uncovering in both time frames. With their children and Aaron’s lives at risk, he and Violet try to repair the damage before it’s too late.
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The Kentucky Trace
A Novel of the American Revolution
Harriette Simpson Arnow
Michigan State University Press, 2012

A gripping portrait of life in the hard-bitten wilderness of Revolutionary Kentucky, Harriette Simpson Arnow’s The Kentucky Trace follows surveyor William David Leslie Collins as he struggles to survive. Collins finds his fellow settlers to be almost as inscrutable as the weather—at times, they are allies, and at others, they are adversaries. Collins battles nature, bad luck, and the quickly shifting political tides to make his way in a changing world. Showcasing Arnow’s ear for dialogue and offering a wealth of historical detail, The Kentucky Trace is a masterful work of fiction by a preeminent Appalachian writer.

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Koan Khmer
A Novel
Bunkong Tuon
Northwestern University Press, 2024
A powerful debut novel about war, immigration, and home

Celebrating the power of literature to rescue a life from despair, Koan Khmer is the story of Samnang Sok, an orphaned child survivor of the Cambodian genocide who sets out to make a new life in America alongside his extended family. Struggling to cope with the traumas of his past, Samnang feels alienated from his American peers at school and disconnected from his aunts, uncles, and cousins at home. Inspired by the books he discovers along the way, Samnang begins piecing together information about the past through stories told by elders, family photographs, and his own memories and dreams. Based loosely on Tuon’s life, the novel traces Samnang’s difficult journey toward an answer to the question, How does one rebuild a life after genocide and displacement and create a home?

Koan Khmer gives an unflinching voice to a distinctly Cambodian American sensibility. Tuon creates a refugee space that all Americans can visit in this bildungsroman that breathes life into cultural knowledge disrupted by loss and grief.

 
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front cover of The Kukotsky Enigma
The Kukotsky Enigma
A Novel
Ludmila Ulitskaya; Translated from the Russian by Diane Nemec Ignashev
Northwestern University Press, 2016

Translated from the Russian by Diane Nemec Ignashev

The central character in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s celebrated novel The Kukotsky Enigma is a gynecologist contending with Stalin’s prohibition of abortions in 1936. But, in the tradition of Russia’s great family novels, the story encompasses the history of two families and unfolds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the ruins of ancient civilizations on the Black Sea. Their lives raise profound questions about family heritage and genetics, nurture and nature, and life and death. In his struggle to maintain his professional integrity and to keep his work from dividing his family, Kukotsky confronts the moral complexity of reproductive science. Winner of the 2001 Russian Booker Prize and the basis for a blockbuster television miniseries, The Kukotsky Enigma is an engrossing, searching novel by one of contemporary literature’s most brilliant writers.

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