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Sebastian Ritscher
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A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD

Sigrid Nunez

Sigrid Nunez's A Feather on the Breath of God is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.
A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

Sigrid Nunez's A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

Sigrid Nunez was born in New York City, the daughter of a German mother and a Chinese-Panamanian father, whose lives she drew on for part of her first novel, A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD (1995). She went on to write six more novels, including THE LAST OF HER KIND (2006), SALVATION CITY (2010), and, most recently, THE FRIEND (2018). She is also the author of SEMPRE SUSAN: A MEMOIR OF SUSAN SONTAG (2011). Her honors include a Whiting Writers' Award, a Rome Prize, a Berlin Prize, the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.
Available products
Book

Published 2005-12-27 by Picador / Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Book

Published 2005-12-27 by Picador / Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Comments

This is a very honest, painful book, almost relentless in its objectivity. The heroine's Chinese father, German mother, and Russian lover embody different fates of American immigrants. This novel is a genuine piece of immigrant literature and deserves a large readership.

A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent.

A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity.... A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness.

This strange, lucid story of the unwished-for child of unassimilated immigrants takes us well beyond the particulars of 'mixed ethnicity'--beyond even the experience of 'America'--into deep paradoxes of identity and love. Both old- fashioned and subversive, stringent and redemptive, it's a pleasure from the first page to the last.

An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth.

A remarkable, often disturbing portrait.... Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality.