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 A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet — these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality. It is a story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

"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." Atlantic Monthly

"A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent." The New York Times Book Review

"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." The Philadelphia Inquirer

"A remarkable, often disturbing portrait...Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality." Los Angeles Times Book Review

Sigrid Nunez's early novel is the beautifully wrought story of one woman living precariously between cultures, a haunting tale of un-assimilation. Our narrator, the daughter of a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother, comes of age in the 1960s housing projects of New York. Desperate to escape from her troubled home, Christa throws herself into the world of ballet and language. It is only when she begins a passionate affair with a Russian immigrant that she discovers how much she remains bound to the past and the world of her parents.

Sigrid Nunez is also the author of the novels Naked Sleeper, For Rouenna, and The Last of Her Kind. She has been the recipient of several awards including a Whiting Writers' Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She currently lives in New York City.