Little crosses : a novel / Reeves, Sabrina

"A daughter examines her complicated relationship with a charismatic, narcissistic mother who now lives with alcohol-related dementia. When Cassie Wolfe brings her mother, Nina, to the Albuquerque Presbyterian Hospital to be detoxed, the doctors ask her to write a profile of the patient. But how can she fit Nina into a Word document? The last two years have left Cassie stunned, unable to reconcile this shell of a woman lying in the hospital bed with the force of nature that was her mother. Nina was an iconoclast--a painter and architect who could wield a chainsaw as easily as discuss politics or play the Emperor's Concerto on the piano. She was passionate and driven. As Cassie reflects on her life with Nina, she begins to wonder whether drive is simply another word for anxiety. Were Nina's "dark moods" the sign of deeper depression? Cassie finds that she can look back on her mother's life with a critical eye but when her gaze turns to her own and how she's raising her own daughters, her grief changes shape as she sees how her choices and values are a direct reflection of Nina's."-- Provided by publisher.

The backstreets : a novel from Xinjiang / Byler, Darren

"An astonishing novel by a preeminent contemporary Uyghur author who was disappeared by the Chinese state. It follows an unnamed Uyghur man who comes to the impenetrable Chinese capital of Xinjiang after finding a temporary job in a government office. Seeking to escape the pain and poverty of the countryside, he finds only cold stares and rejection. He wanders the streets, accompanied by the bitter fog of winter pollution, reciting a monologue of numbers and odors, lust and loathing, memories and madness. Perhat Tursun's novel is a work of untrammeled literary creativity. His evocative prose recalls a vast array of canonical world writers -- contemporary Chinese authors such as Mo Yan; the modernist images and rhythms of Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kafka; the serious yet absurdist dissection of the logic of racism in Ellison's Invisible Man -- while drawing deeply on Uyghur literary traditions and Sufi poetics and combining all these disparate influences into a style that is distinctly Tursun's own. The backstreets is a stark fable about urban isolation and social violence, dehumanization and the racialization of ethnicity. Yet its protagonist's vivid recollections of maternal tenderness and first love reveal how memory and imagination offer profound forms of resilience. A translator's introduction situates the novel in the political atmosphere that led to the disappearance of both the author and his work"--