Town Of A Thousand

A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishes. Dubbed by the New Yorker as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters," Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises. Here, in an account that "reads as if Pete Seeger and Jane Jacobs teamed up" (New York Times), Williams muses on why some towns flourish while others fail, examining elements from the significance of history and nature to the uniting power of public spaces and food. Drawing on her own travels and the work of urban theorists, Williams offers real solutions to rebuild declining communities. What I Found in a Thousand Towns is more than a love letter to America's small towns, it's a deeply personal and hopeful message about the potential of America's lively and resilient communities.

A novel of great humanity, compassion and astonishing immediacy, this unique debut portrays the emotional reality of contemporary life in the West Bank and the irreconcilable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A collage of narrative voices and different points of view are woven around the murder of two young people, one Israeli and one Palestinian. Brave and bold, this gorgeously written work of fiction introduces a large cast of characters in a setting where violence is routine, even normal, and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them. Hamid has come into Israeli territory illegally to work. He runs into Vera, a German journalist on her way to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy who is in a coma after being beaten by Israeli teenagers. On her way to the hospital, Vera runs in front of a car driven by Ido, a new father, who is distracted by thoughts of a young Jewish girl murdered by a terrorist. Ori, an eighteen-year-old soldier from a nearby settlement, is guarding the checkpoint through which Hamid’s professor, Samar, must pass. This powerful novel delivers an eminently human, complex and compassionate view of an irreconcilable conflict. Sacks writes unflinchingly about the hate and violence that continues to fuel tensions in the West Bank. It’s an extraordinary debut work of fiction that mines the range of shared human emotions with riveting engagement and understanding.

A riveting and powerful story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship and an indestructible love

A heart-wrenching story of how one young boy's life was forever changed during the Rwandan genocide Agabande, Rwanda, April 1994. Life is simple but good. Pascal and his brother go to school with their friends, their parents work hard, their little sister is growing up, and on Sunday almost everyone they know goes to church to thank God for his goodness. But lately, there have been whispers and suspicious glances around town, and messages of hate on the radio, and people are leaving. . . Then, in one awful night, Pascal’s ordinary life in the land of one thousand hills is turned upside down. One Thousand Hills an important story of the awful consequences of unfettered prejudice in the modern world, written by a survivor.

The girl with no past, and no future, may be the only one who can save their lives. Nisha was abandoned at the gates of the City of a Thousand Dolls when she was just a little girl. Now sixteen, she lives on the grounds of the isolated estate, where orphan girls apprentice as musicians, healers, courtesans, and, if the rumors are true, assassins. She makes her way as Matron's errand girl, her closest companions the mysterious cats that trail her shadow. Only when she begins a forbidden flirtation with the city's handsome young courier does she let herself imagine a life outside the walls. Until one by one, girls around her start to die. Before she becomes the next victim, Nisha decides to uncover the secrets that surround the girls' deaths. But by getting involved, Nisha jeopardizes not only her own future in the City of a Thousand Dolls—but also her life.

“A brave and moving novel [that] has a tender empathy with the natural world.” —Hermione Lee, The New York Review of Books From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author of Days Without End comes a dazzling companion novel about memory and identity, set in Tennessee in the aftermath of the Civil War Winona Cole, an orphaned child of the Lakota Indians, finds herself growing up in an unconventional household on a farm in west Tennessee. Raised by her adoptive parents John Cole and Thomas McNulty, whose story Barry told in his acclaimed previous novel Days Without End, she forges a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. Tennessee is a state still riven by the bitter legacy of the Civil War, and the fragile harmony of her family is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand. Exquisitely written, A Thousand Moons is a stirring, poignant story of love and redemption, of one woman's journey and her determination to write her own future.