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. ]
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.
“And the intrigue! … [A Gentleman in Moscow]
is laced with sparkling threads (they will tie up) and tokens (they
will matter): special keys, secret compartments, gold coins, vials of
coveted liquid, old-fashioned pistols, duels and scars, hidden
assignations (discreet and smoky), stolen passports, a ruby necklace,
mysterious letters on elegant hotel stationery… a luscious stage set,
backdrop for a downright Casablanca-like drama.” –The San Francisco Chronicle
Cast your electronic vote for your favorite of this year's finalists!
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