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Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: November 2023 (0 comment)
Here we are, with our final literature in translation round-up of 2023! And what a year it’s been, full of great books from around the world, all enthusiastically recommended by Powell’s booksellers. We’ll be back with a new post in January 2024, but until then, we hope you enjoy these eight new titles, released in November. On this list...
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  • Powell's Staff: Best Books of 2023: Fiction (0 comment)
  • Powell's Staff: Best Books of 2023: Nonfiction (3 comments)

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Mortifications A Novel

by Derek Palacio
Mortifications A Novel

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ISBN13: 9781101905692
ISBN10: 1101905697
Condition: Standard
DustJacket: Standard

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Synopses & Reviews

Synopsis

Derek Palacio s stunning, mythic novel marks the arrival of a fresh voice and a new chapter in the history of 21st century Cuban-American literature.
In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnacion father, husband, political insurgent refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami s familiar heat, Soledad pushes further north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of growth and transformation.
Each struggles and flourishes in their own way: Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself tethered to death and the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes the boy's thoughts and desires. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacions begin to cultivate their strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.
Breathtaking, soulful, and profound, The Mortifications is an intoxicating family saga and a timely, urgent expression of longing for one's true homeland."

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Average customer rating 4 (1 comments)

`
Tonstant Weader , October 12, 2016 (view all comments by Tonstant Weader)
The Mortifications asks, answers, and asks again all the important questions about life, love, family, and fate. Why again? Because the answers change which is what you would expect when a story goes from Cuba to Connecticut by way of death threats and hostage-taking in three paragraphs. The usual American migration story focuses on the immigrant struggle to succeed and prosper in their new home. There’s not much about the longings of exile, how their lost home can be like a missing limb, an aching void, an itch that can’t be scratched. Palacio’s The Mortifications not only recognizes that aching emptiness, he sends the exiles home to scratch their itch. The Mortifications is an excellent, engrossing and deeply moving novel. Palacio has an ability to write you deeply into a scene so you feel the wind, the heat, hear the sounds and smell the bouquet or the stench. There is a lot of stench, but you won’t care. You will sink into his book and not come up for air. I don’t recommend trying to read a chapter or two before bed because you will find yourself at 4 a.m. wondering where the night went. I was provided an ARC through NetGalley.

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Product Details

ISBN:
9781101905692
Binding:
Hardcover
Publication date:
10/04/2016
Publisher:
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Pages:
320
Height:
1.40IN
Width:
6.70IN
Author:
Derek Palacio

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