This classic investigates the American frontier in the early 20th century. The protagonist Alexandra inherits a family farm in her youth. Even though the frontier seems rough and not a place for success, she decides to stick with it. Sixteen years later, she has grown a life of material riches, yet her personal life is somewhat insulated. She is lonely amidst all the financial prosperity. The world around her is divided by ethnic groups of…
Kalista is a medal-winning runner training for her third Olympics when she discovers that her father is dying. She and her fiancé/business partner are in the middle of building a business, but amidst all the distractions, she realizes that her father deserves her attention most. In so doing, she rekindles childhood memories and reassesses what she values in life. As a short story, the script ends with most of those storylines still open and unresolved,…
This book shares two Chinese tales of romance, placed in the setting of the Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. Western concepts of love were just starting to take root then in China’s artistic community, and these novels portray the first attempts to integrate these foreign themes in Chinese society. At the time, marital love, based in centuries of Confucian thought, was grounded in families, not individual feelings, so Western concepts stirred the cultural pot.…
Irish short story writer Claire Keegan here shares three succinct short stories to delight readers’ imaginations. Each of them bears her eloquent style with plot twists all the way until the last sentence. This collection has three stories about the tenuous relationship between women and men. “So Late in the Day” describes a romance as it evolves from courtship into engagement. In so doing, it comments on how the social mores in Ireland about marriage…
This tale, set in Paris, tells a sad story of an American man whose girlfriend is traveling on vacation in Spain. He meets an Italian bartender Giovanni and falls in love. At the time, such love is illegal in America, and while not illegal in France, it is culturally shunned. Renowned author James Baldwin captures what such social oppression can do to an innocent, loving relationship in that era. It ostensibly details a romantic tragedy…
This well-written short story, set in Spain, shares a shocking scenario. Before the opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, a bride is found inside and asleep with a naked man. The thing is, the man is not her groom, and they do not know each others’ names. How did they break in? And why are they together in the first place? A police detective peels the metaphoric onion, layer by layer, but uncovers…
Lucy Riley is someone with secrets that haunt her from England to the American East to the Mid-West to the West Coast. They even chase her out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands in the Pacific. She becomes a teacher to the rough island’s children. The handful of adults on the island are employed to man the lighthouse and harvest exquisite eggs. It’s a place that next to no one wants to go to,…
Feyi is a twenty-something-year-old widow. Her husband died one year into their marriage from a car accident. Her inner life is marked with a deep grief that no one around her seems to understand fully. With the encouragement of her best friend Joy, she begins to see other men in her home New York City. She begins to hang out with a friend Nasir. He is kind, but she has trouble moving from the friend…
The genre of historical fiction is as well-known for romances as it is for stories set in World War II. This book takes those simple premises but upends them by adding so much more to produce a beautiful product of art. Its setting – Shanghai, China, during the war – is unusual as are its main protagonists, a Chinese businesswoman and a Jewish refugee. Apparently, Shanghai, long-known for its prowess as an international business culture,…
This tale, set in the fall of Germany in World War II, unpacks themes of love, loss, the Third Reich, the Holocaust, and the meaning of life. One of the main characters Max returns home after being injured fighting for the Nazis only to find his mother housing two Jewish girls in the attic. All the girls’ relatives have been murdered. Max’s values – formed by the Hitler Youth in rebellion against his Christian parents…