Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR

Alice Walker

In The Temple of My Familiar, Celie and Shug from The Color Purple subtly shadow the lives of dozens of characters, all dealing in some way with the legacy of the African experience in America.

From recent African immigrants, to a woman who grew up in the mixed-race rainforest communities of South America, to Celie's own granddaughter living in modern-day San Francisco, all must come to understand the brutal stories of their ancestors to come to terms with their own troubled lives.

As Walker follows these astonishing characters, she weaves a new mythology from old fables and history, a profoundly spiritual explanation for centuries of shared African- American experience.

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award. Her work has been translated into more than two dozen languages, and her books have sold more than fifteen million copies. Along with the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker, in 2006, was honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the California Hall of Fame.

Available products
Book Published 2010-09-03 by Mariner / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Comments

As a sequel to The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar is a major achievement.

Walker's fictional creations are musicians, storytellers, artists and mothers: all of them embrace life with the characteristic optimism of this author, against a background of colour: love, for instance, blossoms on an "olive-green sailboat with its black-and-yellow sail.

THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR unfolds disquieting truths and mysteries; evils that resound through history; and wonders that attain the power of legend. "Walker holds a rare place...in the history of...writers... THE TEMPLE OF MY FAMILIAR is brilliant.

Part love story, part fable, part feminist manifesto, part political statement, Walker's novel follows a cast of interrelated characters, most of them black. and each representing a differ ent ethnic strain that contributes to the black experience in America. Marred by didacticism, theorizing and pontificating, ``the book never achieves the narrative power of The Color Purple.

The richness of Alice Walker's new novel is amazing, overwhelming. A hundred themes and subjects spin through it, dozens of characters, a whirl of time and places. None is touched superficially: all the people are passionate actors and sufferers, and everything they talk about is urgent, a matter truly of life and death. They're like Dostoyevsky's characters, relentlessly raising the great moral questions and pushing one another towards self-knowledge, honesty, engagement.

Walker follows the vast critical and popular success of The Color Purple (1982) with a sprawling mixture of feminism and spirituality centered on six characters searching for their identities and roots. Richly told and full of wonder, it's not so much a novel as an interlinked tapestry of oral tellings that ranges through time and history...