Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
Author: Gina B. Nahai
Publisher:
Total Pages: 376
Release: 1999
Genre: Mothers and daughters
ISBN: 9780684851396

One star-studded night, five-year-old Lili witnesses her mother, Roxanna, sprout wings and vanish into the sky, undisturbed by the rules of gravity. Roxanna leaves no farewell, no word of explanation, no trace of her existence. Lili's subsequent search for her mother - spurred by the tireless efforts of her aunt Miriam the Moon - is at the heart of this mesmerising epic tale that follows Roxanna, born as a bad-luck child in the harsh Jewish ghetto of Tehran, through the opulent world of Iran's aristocracy to the whorehouses of Turkey and beyond, to present day Los Angeles. At stake are Roxanna's hopes for happiness, for escaping the bonds of Old World tradition and finding forgiveness for that most terrible of sins - desire. Weaving together strands of Persian and Jewish culture with heartbreaking, lyrical prose, Gina Nahai brings to life a courageous circle of women rooted in their homeland but trying to reshape their lives as exiles in a new world.

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
Author: Gina B. Nahai
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2000-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0671042831

An epic tale blending Persian and Jewish cultures travels from Tehran's Jewish ghetto, through Turkish whorehouses, to Los Angeles as Lili, with the help of Aunt Miriam the Moon, searches for her magical mother Roxanna the Angel.

Bookclub-in-A-Box Discusses Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith

Bookclub-in-A-Box Discusses Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith
Author: Marilyn Herbert
Publisher: Bookclub-In-A-Box
Total Pages: 80
Release: 2005-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781897082089

Bookclub-in-a-Box guides the reader first across the ocean to Iran and then back to California to explore the magic of place and culture in Gina Nahai's lovely novel, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith. In her book, Nahai tells the story of Roxanna the Angel who disappears one night when her daughter is five years old. Mother and daughter do not see each other again for thirteen long and lonely years. In the intervening time, Nahai describes the Iranian-Jewish community in the years prior to the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith is a richly poetic and moving novel. Bookclub-in-a-Box takes the reader on an exotic journey through this little-known world where faith in love can overcome bad-luck, attempted murder, jealousy and all things that cannot be proved or explained.

Cry Of The Peacock

Cry Of The Peacock
Author: Gina B. Nahai
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2000-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743403371

Peacock is jailed in Iran by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard. While in prison she recounts her remarkable 116 year life to her fellow inmates.

Sunday's Silence

Sunday's Silence
Author: Gina B. Nahai
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2003-04-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0743459458

"Denied by his father, abandoned by his mother, Adam has been in flight from his past for twenty years--until he returns to investigate the possible murder of his father by one of the church members."--Jacket.

Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures

Moments of Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures
Author: Lyn Di Iorio Sandín
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1137329246

A collection of essays that explores magical realism as a momentary interruption of realism in US ethnic literature, showing how these moments of magic realism serve to memorialize, address, and redress traumatic ethnic histories.

Sunday's Silence

Sunday's Silence
Author: Gina Barkhordar Nahai
Publisher:
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2002-04
Genre: Snake cults (Holiness churches)
ISBN: 9780684866406

* From the author of the mesmerising MOONLIGHT ON THE AVENUE OF FAITH, long-listed for the Orange Prize, comes an unforgettable story about religious fervour and extreme love. After years reporting on the world's war-zones, Adam returns home to the wild Appalachian mountains of Kentucky to investigate the death of Little Sam Jenkins - evangelist, snake-handler, womaniser, and also his father. Ninety-year-old Little Sam was bitten by a snake his faith couldn't defeat, handed to him by one of his followers - a beautiful young Kurdish woman called Blue. With violet eyes, red-golden hair and a reputation for being immune from earthly harm, Blue has a magic of her own, brought from the tribe she left at thirteen, and unextinguished by America and the cool reason of her husband the Professor. Irresistibly, defiantly and fatally, she is drawn to the fervour of the Appalachian Holiness snake-handlers, and then to Adam. In Adam and Blue's fierce relationship, love collides with faith, and beauty is opposed to truth, in a conflict which could destroy or redeem them. Written in mesmerising prose, Gina Nahai's new novel spans two extraordinary cultures at different ends of the world, united on

Moonglow

Moonglow
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006222557X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal’s Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next Bestseller "This book is beautiful.” — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review 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 midcentury, 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.

Drawing in the Dust

Drawing in the Dust
Author: Zoe Klein
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2009-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1416599126

Scorned for agreeing to help an Arab couple excavate allegedly haunted grounds under their house, archaeologist Page Brookstone finds what may be the tomb of the prophet Jeremiah, as well as the remains of a woman, and intriguing scrolls documenting their relationship.

Caspian Rain

Caspian Rain
Author: Gina B. Nahai
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2011-01-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385673019

From the best-selling author of Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, a stirring, lyrical tale that offers American readers unique insight into the inner workings of Iranian society. In the decade before the Islamic Revolution, Iran is a country on the brink of explosion. Twelve-year-old Yaas is born into an already divided family: Her father is the son of wealthy Iranian Jews who are integrated into the country’s upper-class, mostly Muslim elite; her mother was raised in the slums of South Tehran, one street away from the old Jewish ghetto. Yaas spends her childhood navigating the many layers of Iranian society. Her task, already difficult because of the disparity in her parents’ worldview, becomes all the more critical when her father falls in love with a beautiful woman from a noble Muslim family. As her parents’ marriage begins to crumble and the country moves ever closer to revolution, Yaas is plagued by a mysterious and terrifying illness. But despite her ailment, when she learns that her father is about to abandon her and her mother—to immigrate to America with his mistress—Yaas is determined to save herself and her family. At once a cultural exploration of an as-yet-unfamiliar society and a psychological study of the effects of loss, Caspian Rain takes the reader inside the tragic and fascinating world of a brave young girl struggling against impossible odds.