It was enough to just sit there without words
List by Pakuranga Library
Quote by Louise Erdrich
To draw readers into the challenges of life in rural North Dakota, Louise Erdrich writes complex stories that are peopled by a diverse array of characters. The men and women she writes about generally lead difficult lives, often on the fringes of society; the slow pace of her stories and her precise, clear, and simple writing style puts the focus on the relationships among these men and women. Many readers are also drawn to Erdrich's books for the way she writes about Native American culture. For those of you who have already read her latest, The Plague of Doves, or who are waiting for your turn with it, one of the books below might appeal to you.
Accordion crimes
by E. Annie Proulx
F PRO
When an accordion-maker is murdered, his finest button accordion carries the novel on to illuminate the lives of the founders of a nation. Nine intricately connected stories allow Mexicans, Poles, Germans, Irish, Scots and Franco-Canadians to express their fantasies, sorrows and exuberance.
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
F RUS
Miles Roby, a gentle, funny loser, runs the Empire Grill and hopes one day to own it. Meantime, though, his wife has run off with his worst customer, he's anxious about his adored teenage daughter and his one-handed brother, and his incorrigible father sponges off everyone.
Digging to America
by Anne Tyler
F TYL
A chance airport encounter between two families--the Donaldsons, and the Iranian-born Yasdans--as both couples await the arrival of an adopted daughter from Korea, prompts an examination about what it means to be an American.
Returning to earth
by Jim Harrison
F HAR
Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, married to a white woman who renounced the wealth she was raised with, and father to two grown children. He is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease and realizes no one alive will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone - about how three generations ago his family settled in Michigan at the height of the logging industry; about his own relationship to his unique spiritual heritage. Meanwhile, around him, his family struggles with how to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he always lived. Over the course of the year following Donald's death, his loved ones struggle to make sense of their loss. His daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues on her father's religion, and her mother, Cynthia, is at loose ends for how to protect or guide her. Bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, Cynthia and her eccentric brother, David, find, all these years later, that redeeming the past is not a lost cause.
The night birds
by Thomas Maltman
F WIL
The summer of 1876 feels like the end of the world to 14 year-old Asa Senger. 14 years after the Dakota Indians are banished from Minnesota, two visitors change young Asa's life forever in Maltman's glittering evocation of plains life.
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