Mango Elephants in the Sun

Mango Elephants in the Sun
Author: Susana Herrera
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2000-08-08
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 0834800039

When the Peace Corps sends Susana Herrera to teach English in northern Cameroon, she yearns to embrace her adopted village and its people, to drink deep from the spirit of Mother Africa—and to forget a bitter childhood and painful past. To the villagers, however, she’s a rich American tourist, a nasara (white person) who has never known pain or want. They stare at her in silence. The children giggle and run away. At first her only confidant is a miraculously communicative lizard. Susana fights back with every ounce of heart and humor she possesses, and slowly begins to make a difference. She ventures out to the village well and learns to carry water on her head. In a classroom crowded to suffocation she finds a way to discipline her students without resorting to the beatings they are used to. She makes ice cream in the scorching heat, and learns how to plant millet and kill chickens. She laughs with the villagers, cries with them, works and prays with them, heals and is helped by them. Village life is hard but magical. Poverty is rampant—yet people sing and share what little they have. The termites that chew up her bed like morning cereal are fried and eaten in their turn ("bite-sized and crunchy like Doritos"). Nobody knows what tomorrow may bring, but even the morning greetings impart a purer sense of being in the moment. Gradually, Susana and the village become part of each other. They will never be the same again.

Save the Village

Save the Village
Author: Michele Herman
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781646030811

Life hasn't turned out quite the way Becca Cammeyer of Greenwich Village--once voted most likely to land on Broadway or in jail for a good cause--had planned. Her only child has moved to another continent, she's still living in a fifth-floor walkup with her aging dog, still single, still nearly broke, still not on speaking terms with her best friend or her mother, and still hearing the ghost of her long-dead father whispering in her ear. But she's a semi-famous tour guide, and on a perfect October evening, Becca almost believes all is well with her world as she helps a group of South Carolina tourists fall in love with her beloved Village. The tour concludes, and Becca sends the women on their way, unaware that her world is about to be upended. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Becca must come to terms with her own paralysis, her survivor's guilt, and the messiness of her life. She embarks on wildly improbable reconciliations and new relationships. At once a love story to Greenwich Village and a reflection on a changing world, Save the Village reveals how when a community comes together, everyone wins.

The Lost Village

The Lost Village
Author: Camilla Sten
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-03-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250249260

*BEST MYSTERY/THRILLER FOR THE YEAR* for NPR "Come for the mounting horror and scares, but stay for a devastating examination of the nature of family secrets." - New York Times book review "[A] scary, highly entertaining debut...that pays homage to Shirley Jackson." - South Florida Sun Sentinel A Most Anticipated Book Goodreads * Publishers Weekly * Crime Reads * Popsugar * Bookish * #1 Loanstar Pick in Canada An Indie Next pick! A Library Reads Pick! The Blair Witch Project meets Midsommar in this brilliantly disturbing thriller from Camilla Sten, an electrifying new voice in suspense. Documentary filmmaker Alice Lindstedt has been obsessed with the vanishing residents of the old mining town, dubbed “The Lost Village,” since she was a little girl. In 1959, her grandmother’s entire family disappeared in this mysterious tragedy, and ever since, the unanswered questions surrounding the only two people who were left—a woman stoned to death in the town center and an abandoned newborn—have plagued her. She’s gathered a small crew of friends in the remote village to make a film about what really happened. But there will be no turning back. Not long after they’ve set up camp, mysterious things begin to happen. Equipment is destroyed. People go missing. As doubt breeds fear and their very minds begin to crack, one thing becomes startlingly clear to Alice: They are not alone. They’re looking for the truth... But what if it finds them first? Come find out. "RELENTLESSLY CREEPY." —Alma Katsu, author of The Hunger (An NPR Best Horror Novel) "IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP READING." —Ragnar Jonasson, author of The Island "Readers will revel in the chills." - Booklist

Under the Tuscan Sun

Under the Tuscan Sun
Author: Frances Mayes
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2003-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0767917456

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The beloved memoir of self-discovery set against the spectacular Tuscan countryside that inspired the major motion picture starring Diane Lane—now in a twentieth-anniversary edition featuring a new afterword “This beautifully written memoir about taking chances, living in Italy, loving a house and, always, the pleasures of food, would make a perfect gift for a loved one. But it’s so delicious, read it first yourself.”—USA Today For more Frances Mayes, including a tour of her now iconic Cortona home, Bramasole, watch PBS’s Dream of Italy: Tuscan Sun Special! More than twenty years ago, Frances Mayes—widely published poet, gourmet cook, and travel writer—introduced readers to a wondrous new world when she bought and restored an abandoned Tuscan villa called Bramasole. Under the Tuscan Sun inspired generations to embark on their own journeys—whether that be flying to a foreign country in search of themselves, savoring one of the book’s dozens of delicious seasonal recipes, or simply being transported by Mayes’s signature evocative, sensory language. Now with a new afterword from Frances Mayes, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Under the Tuscan Sun revisits the book’s most popular characters.

Circling the Sun

Circling the Sun
Author: Paula McLain
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2015-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345534190

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, BOOKPAGE, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “Paula McLain is considered the new star of historical fiction, and for good reason. Fans of The Paris Wife will be captivated by Circling the Sun, which . . . is both beautifully written and utterly engrossing.”—Ann Patchett, Country Living This powerful novel transports readers to the breathtaking world of Out of Africa—1920s Kenya—and reveals the extraordinary adventures of Beryl Markham, a woman before her time. Brought to Kenya from England by pioneering parents dreaming of a new life on an African farm, Beryl is raised unconventionally, developing a fierce will and a love of all things wild. But after everything she knows and trusts dissolves, headstrong young Beryl is flung into a string of disastrous relationships, then becomes caught up in a passionate love triangle with the irresistible safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and the writer Baroness Karen Blixen. Brave and audacious and contradictory, Beryl will risk everything to have Denys’s love, but it’s ultimately her own heart she must conquer to embrace her true calling and her destiny: to fly. Praise for Circling the Sun “In McLain’s confident hands, Beryl Markham crackles to life, and we readers truly understand what made a woman so far ahead of her time believe she had the power to soar.”—Jodi Picoult, author of Leaving Time “Enchanting . . . a worthy heir to [Isak] Dinesen . . . Like Africa as it’s so gorgeously depicted here, this novel will never let you go.”—The Boston Globe “Famed aviator Beryl Markham is a novelist’s dream. . . . [A] wonderful portrait of a complex woman who lived—defiantly—on her own terms.”—People (Book of the Week) “Circling the Sun soars.”—Newsday “Captivating . . . [an] irresistible novel.”—The Seattle Times “Like its high-flying subject, Circling the Sun is audacious and glamorous and hard not to be drawn in by. Beryl Markham may have married more than once, but she was nobody’s wife.”—Entertainment Weekly “[An] eloquent evocation of Beryl’s daring life.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2010-10-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307373541

With her award-winning debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was heralded by the Washington Post Book World as the “21st century daughter” of Chinua Achebe. Now, in her masterly, haunting new novel, she recreates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria during the 1960s. With the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Adichie weaves together the lives of five characters caught up in the extraordinary tumult of the decade. Fifteen-year-old Ugwu is houseboy to Odenigbo, a university professor who sends him to school, and in whose living room Ugwu hears voices full of revolutionary zeal. Odenigbo’s beautiful mistress, Olanna, a sociology teacher, is running away from her parents’ world of wealth and excess; Kainene, her urbane twin, is taking over their father’s business; and Kainene’s English lover, Richard, forms a bridge between their two worlds. As we follow these intertwined lives through a military coup, the Biafran secession and the subsequent war, Adichie brilliantly evokes the promise, and intimately, the devastating disappointments that marked this time and place. Epic, ambitious and triumphantly realized, Half of a Yellow Sun is a more powerful, dramatic and intensely emotional picture of modern Africa than any we have had before.

Hurt Village

Hurt Village
Author: Katori Hall
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service Inc
Total Pages: 83
Release: 2013
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0822226820

"It's the end of a long summer in Hurt Village, a housing project in Memphis, Tennessee. A government Hope Grant means relocation for many of the project's residents, including Cookie, a thirteen-year-old aspiring rapper, along with her mother, Crank, and great-grandmother, Big Mama. As the family prepares to move, Cookie's father, Buggy, unexpectedly returns from a tour of duty in Iraq. Ravaged by the war, Buggy struggles to find a position in his disintegrating community, along with a place in his daughter's wounded heart."--Publisher description.

Tales from the Red Sun Village

Tales from the Red Sun Village
Author: Mark Swaine
Publisher:
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-05-31
Genre:
ISBN:

The legendary warrior Kamui Li visits the people of a settlement in the badlands of Purgatoria. In a bid to build morale, the dangerous Samurai recounts three campfire stories to the nervous people of the village to help them overcome their fears of this dangerous new world.The Midnight Foot MasseuseA down on his luck chef encounters a demon living under his bed, a demon with a penchant for giving foot massages that somehow improves his life, but at what cost. Plus a Few Upgrades A tech savvy girl purchases a cursed videogame console from a car boot sale, and now she's in the fight for her life whilst avenging her brother's.The Child's WardA monster seeks weapons of mental mass destruction as an ignorant teen keeps vigil over a sick infant in the children's ward of a hospital.

The Village

The Village
Author: Nikita Lalwani
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307374629

The long-awaited follow-up to the critically acclaimed, Booker longlisted Gifted, a provocative novel about an experimental open prison in India and the havoc a team of journalists wreaks on the delicate moral code of the inmates. After a long journey from England, Ray Bhullar arrives early on a winter morning at the gates of a remote Indian village called Ashwer which will be her home for the next three months. The door of the hut she will share with Serena, her English co-worker, is a loose sheet of metal, the windows simple holes in the walls. Beyond the lockless door, village life goes on as usual. And yet, the village is anything but normal. Despite the domestic chores being carried out, cooking, fetching water and sewing and laundering linens, Ashwer is a village of murderers, an experimental open prison. And when Ray and her crew take up residence, to observe and to make a documentary, it seems that they are innocent visitors into a violent world, on a mission to hold the place up to viewers as the ultimate example of tolerance. But the longer Ray and her colleagues stay and their need for drama intensifies, the line between innocence and guilt begins to blur and an unexpected and terrifying new kind of cruelty emerges. A mesmerizing and heartfelt tale of manipulation and personal morality, Nikita Lalwani's new novel brilliantly exposes how truly frail our moral judgment can be.