Here are some books that have recently hit my radar and set off my alarm bells...
Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood
Hag-Seed is a re-visiting of Shakespeare’s play of magic and illusion, The Tempest, and will be the fourth novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series.
The Tempest
is set on a remote island full of strange noises and creatures. Here,
Prospero, the deposed Duke of Milan, plots to restore the fortunes of
his daughter Miranda by using magic and illusion -- starting with a
storm that will bring Antonio, his treacherous brother, to him. All
Prospero, the great sorcerer, needs to do is watch as the action he has
set in train unfolds.
In Margaret Atwood’s ‘novel take’ on
Shakespeare’s original, theatre director Felix has been unceremoniously
ousted from his role as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Festival.
When he lands a job teaching theatre in a prison, the possibility of
revenge presents itself – and his cast find themselves taking part in an
interactive and illusion-ridden version of The Tempest that will change their lives forever.
There’s a lot of Shakespearean swearing in this new Tempest adventure…but also a mischief, curiosity and vigour that’s entirely Atwood and is sure to delight her fans.
Human Acts by Han Kang
In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.
The story of this tragic episodeunfolds in a sequence of interconnected
chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial,
and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho s best friend who
meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship;
to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic
memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their
collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized
people in search of a voice.
An award-winning, controversial
bestseller, HUMAN ACTS is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an
historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns
tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding,
extraordinary poetry of humanity."
Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly
Set against the
backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the civil rights movement, the
never-before-told true story of NASA’s African-American female
mathematicians who played a crucial role in America’s space program—and
whose contributions have been unheralded, until now.
Before
John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a
group of professionals worked as “Human Computers,” calculating the
flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these
were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated
from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these “colored
computers,” as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and
pencil and paper to support America’s fledgling aeronautics industry,
and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and
astronauts, into space.
Drawing on the oral histories of scores
of these “computers,” personal recollections, interviews with NASA
executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and
reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America’s
greatest adventure and NASA’s groundbreaking successes through the
experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and
patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson,
Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine.
Moving from World War II
through NASA’s golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space
Race, the Cold War, and the women’s rights movement, Hidden Figures
interweaves a rich history of scientific achievement and technological
innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever
changed the world—and whose lives show how out of one of America’s most
painful histories came one of its proudest moments.
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