Word: graywolf
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Early in to Siberia, a new novel by Per Petterson (Graywolf Press; 245 pages), the narrator and her older brother cut their hands and mix their blood. It's a familiar childhood ritual, sweetened by naive redundancy: How much closer than siblings can you be? The bond between this sister and brother turns out to be a love story--pure, but as painful as the touch of steel to skin...
...South Wind Changing by Ngoc Quang Huynh (Graywolf Press). A Vietnamese refugee to the U.S. who was a young student in Saigon when the war ended tells movingly of surviving a Marxist re-education camp and escaping Vietnam by boat. His adventures in the U.S. include earning a bachelor's degree at Bennington College and learning the rhythms of English well enough to write this haunting, oddly pastoral memoir. Even today, concerned that he may never see his parents in Vietnam, he writes, "I sat on the hill, surrounded by trees in their spring blossom, looking over the pond...
This remarkable account, reworked and eased of learner's stiffness, is now published as South Wind Changing (Graywolf Press; 320 pages; $20). The author's childhood was pastoral and amazingly peaceful. Although an older brother was a military pilot, the war at first did not touch the island in the Mekong Delta where his large, prosperous family grew rice. But fighting swept through with the Tet offensive of 1968, when Jade was 12, and afterward "the war continued on and off like a chronic disease." He had passed his university exams when the North won its victory and the Americans...
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