' And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with harmony'
Love's Labour's Lost, William Shakespeare





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When her brother-in-law dies in a freak accident, Marcy Moon rushes to offer support & solace to her older sister Cleo. Their reunion opens the floodgates of family memory, & Marcy is forced to re-examine her childhood hero-worship for her older, glamorous sister, as well as her relationship with her strange, unassimilated mother, her own emotional affairs, & the cultural conflicts that arise from being first generation children of Korean immigrants. Like Amy Tan, Park conjures up her characters, & the clash of old & new cultures, with a faultless sense for where absurdity shades into heartbreak, & with perfect pitch for a whole range of wonderful voices. & there's a delightfully satisfying twist in the tail of the story, as we discover that our narrator
- now running from her past in Indian territory in the Nevada desert
- is less than reliable, & that her own weird ideas & easy sentiment are not the author's.

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'I just know this plane is going to run into turbulence & crash!'
' My mind will go blank when I give my presentation at work &
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'I just know this plane is going to run into turbulence & crash!'
' My mind will go blank when I give my presentation at work &
...

Penny's friend Natasha Linnett is a minx, & when she's bad she's very, very good. When a dominant, wealthy American wine buyer takes an interest in Natasha, she realises she can pretend to secure for him some bottles of real Napoleon-era brandy. She doesn't realise, however, just how many are the bizarre & lewd sex acts in which she must collude to maintain the deception. Will Natasha manage to line her pockets as she wishes, or will she be caught out ignominiously like the bad girl she really is? ...

Penny's friend Natasha Linnett is a minx, & when she's bad she's very, very good. When a dominant, wealthy American wine buyer takes an interest in Natasha, she realises she can pretend to secure for him some bottles of real Napoleon-era brandy. She doesn't realise, however, just how many are the bizarre & lewd sex acts in which she must collude to maintain the deception. Will Natasha manage to line her pockets as she wishes, or will she be caught out ignominiously like the bad girl she really is? ...

In this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel. the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded & ferociously moralistic young woman.
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy & her hapless, childlike husb&, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning & discontent that is at once pitiless & compassionate.
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