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Book Cover for: A Feather on the Breath of God, Sigrid Nunez

A Feather on the Breath of God

Sigrid Nunez

From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend, A Feather on the Breath of God, is a mesmerizing story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

With a new introduction by Susan Choi, the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercises

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet--these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Aug 31st, 2021
  • Pages: 208
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.00in - 5.30in - 0.60in - 0.45lb
  • EAN: 9781250816238
  • Categories: Cultural HeritageComing of AgePerforming Arts - Dance, Theater & Musicals

About the Author

Nunez, Sigrid: - Sigrid Nunez is the New York Times bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and of several other novels, including What Are You Going Through and The Last of Her Kind. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her work has been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Choi, Susan: - Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and The Foreign Student. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn.

Praise for this book

"A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent." --Bharati Mukherjee, The New York Times Book Review

"This is a very honest, painful book, almost relentless in its objectivity. The heroine's Chinese father, German mother, and Russian lover embody different fates of American immigrants. This novel is a genuine piece of immigrant literature and deserves a large readership." --Ha Jin, Bookforum

"This strange, lucid story of the unwished-for child of unassimilated immigrants takes us well beyond the particulars of 'mixed ethnicity'--beyond even the experience of 'America'--into deep paradoxes of identity and love. Both old-fashioned and subversive, stringent and redemptive, it's a pleasure from the first page to the last." --Jonathan Franzen

"A remarkable, often disturbing portrait . . . Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality." --Los Angeles Times Book Review

"An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement, and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth." --Atlantic Monthly

"A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity. . . . A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness." --The Philadelphia Inquirer