My Name Is A Knife

Following on All True Not a Lie in It, her brilliant, award-winning first novel, Alix Hawley brings us the dramatic end of fabled frontiersman Daniel Boone's story--a heartbreaking and powerful imagining of a crucial period in North American history. The truth of it is that Daniel Boone, captured by the Shawnee, now the adopted son of a chief he respects and husband to a Shawnee wife, does not want to come back to his settler life. But when he learns the Shawnee and the English plan to attack the fort he founded, where his white wife and children remain, he escapes in order to warn them. No arms open to greet him, however: Rebecca has taken all of their children save one--Jemima--back east. The other settlers view him with suspicion, and some of them want him hanged as a traitor. Yet even his enemies know that nobody but Boone can save them in the brutal siege of the fort that is soon upon them, led by Blackfish, Boone's Shawnee father. Heartsick over the carnage, when the siege is over Boone travels east to retrieve his family. He finds a wife who has made a life for herself and their children, and still resents him for their oldest son's death. Slowly he woos her, until Rebecca finds herself following him back to Kentucky, to a new Boone settlement across the river from the old one. For a brief and peaceful time, Boone believes that maybe there's a way that indigenous and white can travel forward together, but inevitably he realizes that he can't control the juggernaut of hate and conquest that will soon roll over the Shawnee and the Cherokee. And he has to decide whether to simply be killed in the fighting, or to kill. In the tragic aftermath, Rebecca is left to wonder whether there is any way she can continue to love what remains of Boone.

A New Face of Fiction for 2015, All True Not a Lie in It is pioneer Daniel Boone's life, told in his voice--a tall tale like no other, startling, funny, poignant, romantic and brawling, set during the American Revolutionary War and hinging on Boone's capture by the Shawnee. Here is Daniel Boone as you've never seen him. Debut novelist Alix Hawley presents Boone's life, from his childhood in a Quaker colony, through 2 stints captured by Indians as he attempted to settle Kentucky, the death of 1 son at the hands of the same Indians, and the rescue of 1 daughter. The prose rivals Hilary Mantel's and Peter Carey's, conveying that sense of being inside the head of a storied historical figure about which much nonsense is spoken while also feeling completely contemporary. Boone was a fabulous hunter and explorer, and a "white Indian," perhaps happiest when he found a place as the captive, adopted son of a chief who was trying to prevent the white settlement of Kentucky. Hawley takes us intimately into the life-and-death survival of people pushing away from security and into Indian lands, despite sense and treaties, just before and into the War of Independence. The love story between Boone and his wife, Rebecca, is rich and tangled, but mostly it's Boone who fascinates, pushing into places where he imagines he can create a new "clean" world, only to find death and trouble and complication. He is a fabulous character, unrivalled in North American literature, and a prime candidate for the tall tale. The storytelling is taut and expert, the descriptions rich and powerful, the prose full of feeling, but Boone is what drives this outstanding debut.

Amy Thielen, author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table, traces her journey from Park Rapids, Minnesota, to cooking professionally under some of New York City's finest chefs -- including David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten -- and then back home again. A love of food and an overwhelming desire to get the hell out of small-town America drive Thielen to New York to seek out its intense culinary world, which she embraces enthusiastically, while her boyfriend finds success in its fickle art world. After years of living in the city, with frequent trips back home in the summertime, the couple eventually chooses life deep in the woods in a cabin Thielen's husband built by hand. There Aaron can practice his craft while Amy takes the skills she learned cooking professionally and turns them to undoing years of processed foods to uncover true Midwestern cooking, which begins simply with humble workhorse ingredients such as potatoes and onions.

WINNER OF THE 2020 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE WINNER OF THE 2021 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD FINALIST FOR THE 2021 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, the PEN AMERICA OPEN BOOK AWARD, and the DANUTA GLEED AWARD #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER Named one of Time's Must-Read Books of 2020, and featuring stories that have appeared in Harper's, Granta, The Atlantic, and The Paris Review, this revelatory book of fiction from O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa establishes her as an essential new voice in Canadian and world literature. Told with compassion and wry humour, these stories honour characters struggling to find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary "grunt work of the world." A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he'll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to make their own. In spare, intimate prose charged with emotional power and a sly wit, she paints an indelible portrait of watchful children, wounded men, and restless women caught between cultures, languages, and values. As one of Thammavongsa's characters says, "All we wanted was to live." And in these stories, they do—brightly, ferociously, unforgettably. A daughter becomes an unwilling accomplice in her mother's growing infatuation with country singer Randy Travis. A former boxer finds a chance at redemption while working at his sister's nail salon. A school bus driver must grapple with how much he's willing to give up in order to belong. And in the title story, a young girl's unconditional love for her father transcends language. Tender, uncompromising, and fiercely alive, How to Pronounce Knife establishes Souvankham Thammavongsa as one of the most important voices of her generation.

This gritty translated novel locates the power of resistance in women, and in the pen. In A KNIFE IN THE SKY, a journalist's decision to talk and a student's desire to know puts them in the crosshairs of a murderous dictatorship. As the novel opens, Mika is dangerously engaged in the pursuit of truth during Haiti's first Duvalier regime. Nearly thirty years later, her granddaughter Junon witnesses the repressive dynasty's unravelling. Brutal, terrifying, and hopeful, A KNIFE IN THE SKY is an homage to those who have survived tyranny. Originally published by Éditions du Remue-mènage in 2015 as Femmes au temps des carnassiers, this book, like most of the author's oeuvre, is preoccupied with colonial imposition. Marie-Célie Agnant writes on the ruthlessness of a dictatorship, on humanity, and locates the strength and power of resistance in women. "The work is shaped through a rich, crafted language that creates an acute awareness of what duvalierism was. This considerable effort is not a catharsis, nor an anamnesis; rather, it is the heart-rending testimony of the suffering, the inner struggles and the stand against Duvalierism of a woman caught in the midst of a regime that redefined the heights of horror."--Alain Saint-Victor, Potomitan "Marie-Célie Agnant's work is noble: she names and narrates terrible emotions and chaos, yet always in a sensitive and poetic way. The fate of the women in her books is not sealed by the torment of their daily lives, but in the humanity of each one. Through these portraits of women--courageous women, women who are full of hope, even without underestimating the weight on their shoulders--Agnant shows us the pain they carry from one generation to the next."--Le Fil Rouge Fiction.

Student volunteer Laurie Masters stumbles onto a ghastly secert at Shadyside Hospital--a secret that the nurses and doctors are willing to kill to cover up.

It is the best knife Colyn has ever seen. He finds it by chance, buried in the potato paddock where he is working with his father, and immediately he knows that he has wanted a knife of his own for a long time. It is special. It is his knife. But is it really chance that has led him to its discovery? Colyn soon learns that there is not only beauty in the knife, but magic too; and with magic come power and danger. For, with his knife, Colyn opens a doorway into a mysterious otherworld, and here he becomes involved in an adventure more exciting and more perilous than he could ever have imagined.

"[A] mordant debut novel....examines what it means to covet the lives of others, no matter the cost."—The New York Times "Tense, twisty, and packed with shocks."—Riley Sager, New York Times bestselling author of Survive The Night Six friends. One college reunion. One unsolved murder. Ten years after graduation, Jessica Miller has planned her triumphant return to her southern, elite Duquette University, down to the envious whispers that are sure to follow in her wake. Everyone is going to see the girl she wants them to see—confident, beautiful, indifferent. Not the girl she was when she left campus, back when Heather Shelby's murder fractured everything, including the tight bond linking the six friends she'd been closest to since freshman year. But not everyone is ready to move on. Not everyone left Duquette ten years ago, and not everyone can let Heather's murder go unsolved. Someone is determined to trap the real killer, to make the guilty pay. When the six friends are reunited, they will be forced to confront what happened that night—and the years' worth of secrets each of them would do anything to keep hidden. Told in racing dual timelines, with a dark campus setting and a darker look at friendship, love, obsession, and ambition, In My Dreams I Hold A Knife is an addictive, propulsive read you won't be able to put down. "Beautiful writing, juicy secrets, complex female characters, and drumbeat suspense—what more could you want from a debut thriller?"—Andrea Bartz, author of Reese's Book Club pick We Were Never Here