This morning, at a special event for readers on The Dock at The Mill, in downtown Lincoln, sponsored by The Foundation for Lincoln City Libraries, the three finalists for the 2017 One Book - One Lincoln community reading project were revealed. Lincoln-area readers now have until July 31st to vote on which of the three you'd like to see as this year's winning title.
Here are the descriptions of this year's finalists:
Moonglow
By Michael Chabon [Chabon]
Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue,
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary
masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential
adventure--and the forces that work to destroy us.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century, and, above all, of the destructive impact--and the creative power--of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator's grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York's Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the "American Century," the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.
Amazon Book Review, Spotlight Pick
Best Book of the Year, Wall Street Journal
Starred Review, Booklist
Starred Review, Library Journal
[ Moonglow is available from the libraries in a wide variety of formats. ]
Homegoing
By Yaa Gyasi [Gyasi]
A
novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three
hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great
American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable
sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the
forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.Two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle's dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast's booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia's descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Generation after generation, Yaa Gyasi's magisterial first novel sets the fate of the individual against the obliterating movements of time, delivering unforgettable characters whose lives were shaped by historical forces beyond their control. Homegoing is a tremendous reading experience, not to be missed, by an astonishingly gifted young writer.
Winner of the PEN/ Hemingway Award
Winner of the NBCC’s John Leonard Award
A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Book
One of the Best Books of the Year: NPR, Time, Oprah.com, Harper’s Bazaar, San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Esquire, Elle, Paste, Entertainment Weekly, the Skimm, Minneapolis Star Tribune, BuzzFeed
[ Homegoing is available from the libraries in a wide variety of formats. ]
A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles [Towles]
He can't leave his hotel. You won't want to.From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility --a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.
"Towles's greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia." - The New York Times Book Review
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count's endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.
[ A Gentleman in Moscow is available from the libraries in a wide variety of formats. ]
Cast your electronic vote for your favorite of this year's finalists!
Would you like to be kept up-to-date on One Book - One Lincoln news, and receive reminders about upcoming One Book - One Lincoln programming events?
Would your book group or organization like a library staff member to facilitate a One Book - One Lincoln discussion?
If your answer to either of those two questions is "yes," then please visit our sign-up form, and check off the appropriate boxes. Or, you may call the Lincoln City Libraries' One Book - One Lincoln staff contact at 402-441-8503.
One Book One Lincoln on Facebook -- "Like" the libraries One Book - One Lincoln Facebook page to stay in the loop!
Posts
