Fuck me, she thought, what am I doing back here?ĭark plumes drifted from distant smokestacks, a chain of wind-rounded mountains, the taste of post-Soviet air like a dirty rag in her mouth. The backseat of the gypsy cab she took from the airport had been removed to allow room for luggage, and her single suitcase slid with the curvature of the road, thudding again and again against the back of her seat, as if to reiterate the lesson that despite the illusions she'd entertained while Brendan's chest rose and receded against hers, her life was small enough to fit inside a piece of luggage. Within days after the proposal of the Khasavyurt Peace Accord, Sonja broke up with her Scottish fiancé, resigned from her residency at the University College Hospital, and sat through connecting flights from London to Warsaw to Moscow to Vladikavkaz. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena will be published May 7. In this excerpt, Sonja has just returned from London to Chechnya, where she hopes she will find her missing sister. It's a war story like you've never read before. Humans can do terrible things to one another, but in this book they are capable of shocking devotion as well. The action takes place over only a couple days, but the stories span lifetimes. Do you inform on your neighbors to save your father? Do you expend your energies protecting your dying wife? In both places the people living in this war-torn land are faced with terrible decisions. The novel moves back and forth from the village to the hospital. There is only one doctor left at the hospital, the tough but overworked Sonja Rabina. They know his young daughter, Havaa, is hiding in the yard, and once the police are gone, a kind neighbor takes Havaa into the city, hoping the hospital will take her in. His neighbors watch as the police grab him from his house and burn it to the ground. The story begins with the disappearance of a man named Dokka. In short, it's not an obvious place for Anthony Marra to set his stunning new novel, but it works. It might not even be the country you're picturing as you read this. Until last week, when the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings were revealed to be Chechen, you might not have spent much time thinking about Chechnya. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Dimensions: 9.47in - 6.37in - 1.38in - 1.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Constellation Of Vital Phenomena Author Anthony Marra.It is a love letter to life's bit players, a panorama of an era that casts a long shadow over our own, and a tour de force by a novelist whose work The Washington Post calls "a flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles. Written with intelligence, wit, and an exhilarating sense of possibility, Mercury Pictures Presents spans many moods and tones, from the heartbreaking to the ecstatic. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate-and her own. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. Over the coming months, as the bright lights go dark across Los Angeles, Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. And the studio itself, Maria's only home in exile, teeters on the verge of bankruptcy. Her boyfriend, a virtuoso Chinese American actor, can't escape the studio's narrow typecasting. Her boss, a man of many toupees, has been summoned to Washington by congressional investigators. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart. Born in Rome, where every Sunday her father took her to the cinema instead of church, Maria immigrates with her mother to Los Angeles after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. sublime."- The New York Times (Editors' Choice) ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Guardian, Booklist Like many before her, Maria Lagana has come to Hollywood to outrun her past. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles-a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena "A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that's a true joy to read."-Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere "A gorgeous book.
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