The Light That Remains

The despair of refugees has haunted us long before the civil war in Syria. Lyse Champagne's evocative new story collection attempts to put these collective and individual tragedies into an historical context.Two Armenian sisters write to each other in the year leading up to the deportations. A young Ukrainian mother embroiders her life story as famine threatens. A boy travels to Hong Kong by train while the Japanese march towards his hometown of Nanjing. A Jewish girl collects words and falls in love as she hides in a French mountain village in 1942. A Cambodian refugee recalls his childhood in his home country and his new life in Canada on a makeshift stage. A Rwandan family prepares to emigrate days before President Habyarimana's plane is shot down.These stories span the twentieth century and reach into the twenty-first. We discover letters, maps, and the kindness of strangers. Word lists, a falling piano, and young love. Hiding places, history lessons, and conversations around the table. Music, a makeshift stage, and life breathed into memories.

"As we passed from the city center into the Fukushima suburbs I surveyed the landscape for surgical face masks. I wanted to see in what ratios people were wearing such masks. I was trying to determine, consciously and unconsciously, what people do in response. So, among people walking along the roadway, and people on motorbikes, I saw no one with masks. Even among the official crossing guards outfitted with yellow flags and banners, none. All showed bright and calm. What was I hoping for exactly? The guilty conscience again. But then it was time for school to start. We began to see groups of kids on their way to school. They were wearing masks." Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure is a multifaceted literary response to the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown that devastated northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. The novel is narrated by Hideo Furukawa, who travels back to his childhood home near Fukushima after 3/11 to reconnect with a place that is now doubly alien. His ruminations conjure the region's storied past, particularly its thousand-year history of horses, humans, and the struggle with a rugged terrain. Standing in the morning light, these horses also tell their stories, heightening the sense of liberation, chaos, and loss that accompanies Furukawa's rich recollections. A fusion of fiction, history, and memoir, this book plays with form and feeling in ways reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory and W. G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn yet draws its own, unforgettable portrait of personal and cultural dislocation.

This poetry collection explores the sacredness of humanity, written with the influence of the author's Italian background. These stark, poetic meditations are hopeful and lyrical, focusing on the nature of love and truth, and the creative essays report the experiences of seeking to reconcile and restore what is lost on the human journey.

If you made the decision to call out to God for answers when you are broken, lost, and uncertain of your future, would you be open to see the help that he sends for you? Would you trust in him to know exactly what you need, even if it isn't what you think the answer should be? If he sent a guardian angel to help you, although not knowing who or what they would appear as, would you accept their help even if they only appear as a caring friend or family member? It is in the darkest hours of our lives that we face such critical decisions. We struggle to combat the forces that seek to draw strength from our weaknesses, hoping that God is still there fighting for us. The truth remains that he, in fact, is and always has been fighting for our salvation, even in the times that we push him away. He waits for us to open our hearts to accept his love and blessings. God knows the hearts and trials of not only all the angels that serve him but all his beloved children on earth as well.

What if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want? Twenty-something, suit-clad, and upwardly mobile, Joshua Fields Millburn thought he had everything anyone could ever want. Until he didn’t anymore. Blindsided by the loss of his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself. Then, he accidentally discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism…and everything started to change. That was four years ago. Since, Millburn, now 32, has embraced simplicity. In the pursuit of looking for something more substantial than compulsory consumption and the broken American Dream, he jettisoned most of his material possessions, paid off loads of crippling debt, and walked away from his six-figure career. So, when everything was gone, what was left? Not a how-to book but a why-to book, Everything That Remains is the touching, surprising story of what happened when one young man decided to let go of everything and begin living more deliberately. Heartrending, uplifting, and deeply personal, this engrossing memoir is peppered with insightful (and often hilarious) interruptions by Ryan Nicodemus, Millburn’s best friend of twenty years.

Set at either ends of a century, Where the Light Remains weaves the stories of two remarkable women linked by art, landscape, and the intricacies of marriage. In 1886 Cornwall, an artist from the Newlyn School paints a portrait of a striking woman, Claira, the wife of a Methodist farmer. In the painting, Claira basks in the luminescence of a woodland sunset, violin in hand, the still air holding the notes she has just played. In 1986, Claire, a painter, and her husband settle with their two boys in the Cornish farmhouse where Claira once lived. As Claire falls in love with the rugged landscape -- and her husband with another woman -- Claire makes two discoveries that change her as a woman and as a painter. The lives that fill this elegant novel are a testament to the powerful ways that sensual discovery, creativity, and the experience of marriage connect women across time.