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Recent Quaker Fiction
Quaker Authors, writing on Quaker Topics:
Almost friends
Publisher: San Francisco : HarperSanFrancisco, c2006.
It's summer in Harmony, but not everything is as sunny as the weather. The good citizens of Harmony are back and stirring up trouble as usual, sometimes with disastrous results. Pastor Sam Gardner must take a leave of absence from his post at Harmony Friends Meeting to take care of his ailing father. But when spunky pastor Krista Riley comes to fill his position, the quirky Quakers seem to fall in love with her, and it begins to look like Sam's sabbatical may be permanent. Krista's resilience is put to the test when Dale Hinshaw and Fern Hampton begin to question whether a woman (especially one rumored to be gay) can faithfully lead their flock, and it looks like the resulting tiff might just be the undoing of Harmony Friends Meeting.--From publisher description.
The back bench
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, 2007.
It's 1837, and fourteen-year-old Quaker Myra Harlan's mother has died, forcing her to leave her home and family in the country to live in Philadelphia. Shocked by the racism she sees all around her and caught in the aftermath of the Orthodox-Hicksite split in the Religious Society of Friends, Myra longs for her mother and struggles to make friends until she finds the Female Anti-Slavery Society, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Douglass, and - ultimately - herself.--Publisher's description.
A change of heart
Publisher: San Francisco, CA : HarperSanFrancisco, c2005.
Sam Gardner and his delightfully dysfunctional Quaker congregation are back again. There are lots of humorous moments with special Harmony events such as the Blessing of the Noodles, the Corn and Sausage Days Festival, and the Progressive Nativity Scene.
(http//www. amazon.com)
(http//www. amazon.com)
Downright Dencey
Publisher: Bathgate, N.D. : Bethlehem Books ; [2003]
This treasure of a novel is set on the island of Nantucket just before the War of 1812. Much more than a tale of whaling ships and gentle Quaker eccentricities, it is a tale of friendship--the kind most truly espoused by Friends, with all the struggle and complexity one should expect.
(http://www.quakerbooks.org/downright_dencey.php)
(http://www.quakerbooks.org/downright_dencey.php)
The friendly persuasion
Publisher: London : Hodder & Stoughton limited, [1946]
The classic novel is about life for a Quaker family in Indiana during the Civil War, and the basis for the William Wyler film starring Gary Cooper.
(http://www.quakerbooks.org/the_friendly_persuasion_sale_book.php)
(http://www.quakerbooks.org/the_friendly_persuasion_sale_book.php)
Life goes on
Publisher: [San Francisco, Calif.] : HarperSanFrancisco, c2004.
This is a presentation of charming vignettes about Quaker pastor Sam Gardner and his eccentric parishioners. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Mim and the Klan
Publisher: Carmel, Ind. : Guild Press of Indiana, 1999.
“Besides producing an interesting story for young readers, Cynthia Stanley Russell has also done something very important for adults in this debut novel: she has written as a Quaker about the reality of Quaker involvement in the Ku Klux Klan. This is the first time I have seen this shameful piece of history addressed in print by any Quaker”. (Chuck Fager)
Plain language
Publisher: New York : Simon & Schuster, c2003.
Virginia Mendenall a North Carolina Quaker, is thirty-three years old when she gives up everything and travels to Colorado to marry Alfred Bowen, a cattleman who is struggling to make his ranch succeed during the Dust Bowl era.
(Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
(Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Sails on the horizon
Publisher: New York : Random House, c2005.
Debut novelist Worrall works the standard ropes of the fighting-men-and-tall-ships genre while bringing such postmodern, sensitive-leader matters into play. The adventures on the high seas, now at a higher rank and astride different boards, are suitably action-packed to hold the reader's interest. (Kirkus Reviews, Feb 1, 2005)
Signs and wonders
Publisher: [San Francisco] : HarperSanFrancisco, c2003.
This is a presentation of charming vignettes about Quaker pastor Sam Gardner and his eccentric parishioners. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Silent Friends
Publisher: Urbana, Ill. : Stormline Press, 1992.
The stories in this collection interweave the lives of three generations of a small Iowa Yearly Meeting conservative Quaker family who cared for their farm and each other.
(Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
(Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Tunnell's boys
Publisher: New York : iUniverse, c2005.
Eben Soule, ship’s master in the middle of the Spanish-American War and a pacifist Quaker sympathizer, is in competition for the love of the daughter of a wealthy Quaker ship owner. This story of friendship, competition and conflict takes place in the midst of the political confusions of the time. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Voyageurs
Publisher: New York : Canongate U.S., c2003.
This is the story of the quest of an early 19th century English Quaker to find his sister in the wilderness of North American. It is a well-researched Quaker book and a riveting adventure story. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Year of grace
Publisher: Philadelphia, Pa. : Quaker Press of Friends General Conference, c2002.
A poignant and courageous tale of an elderly, but active, Quaker woman coming to terms with her own mortality in the final year of her life. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
Quaker Authors, Writing on Non-Quaker Topics:
The amateur marriage
Publisher: New York : Alfred A. Knopf : 2004.
In this story of two good people who make each other miserable, Tyler eschews her stock of whimsical oddballs and instead brings her famed empathy to bear on strikingly realistic characters. (Atlantic Monthly, Mar 2004)
Dragon on a pedestal
Publisher: New York : Ballantine Books, c1983.
There is trouble in Xanth again. The Gap Dragon had escaped and was ravaging across the land, the forget-spell was causing mass amnesia, three-year old Ivy was headed right for a hungry dragon. Could things get any worse? Probably....
(http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pper
l?isbn=9780345454362)
(http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pper
l?isbn=9780345454362)
Goodbye, Hessle Road
Publisher: Birmingham : Tindal Street Press, 2005.
Goodbye, Hessle Road captures the struggling and disenfranchised underbelly of a hard-working city in all its shabby grace and faded colours; in its past glories, and in the evaporating dreams and unravelling hopes of its present occupants; and in all its vibrant, determined, blowsy, spirited splendour. (http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/catalogue/category.php?id=16)
The Havana room
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
" Most thrillers begin with a murder or a kidnapping or some other dread deed. "The Havana Room" begins with a quote from Schopenhauer. The weighty epigraph signals an engagingly unconventional thriller, full of ruminations on the human condition. Harrison is much more interested in the subtler shadings of goodness and weakness than he is in the gaudy displays of bang-pow-splat that typify so many other thrillers. (The Economist, Jan 10, 2004)
Light
Publisher: Toronto : McArthur, 2006.
Sisters-in-law Lucy and Diya have three children between them and live on the remote island of Ellan Bride off the Isle of Man in 1831. Ever since Diya's husband died, Lucy has lit the lamps and polished the reflectors in the lighthouse, whose beam saves an untold number of sailors' lives every year in the treacherous seawaters. In this moving depiction of a close-knit family learning to navigate overwhelming change, Elphinstone brings alive the stark beauty of the island through her graceful, finely detailed descriptions of the wildlife and landscape. (Booklist, Dec 15, 2006)
Little black book of stories
Publisher: New York : Knopf : 2004.
This work of Byatt’s bears all the hallmarks of her style. Carefully constructed, highly allusive, containing fictional artists and artfully faked fiction within the fiction, these five stores are thrilling Gothic tales. New York Times Book Review, May 9, 2004)
Painter man
Publisher: Birmingham : Tindal Street, 2005.
A thoughtful and profound novel about the life and loves of a modern artist and sculptor - Painter Man Malcolm produces art as gritty and real as the Black Country from which he takes much of his inspiration. (http://www.tindalstreet.co.uk/catalogue/category.php?id=16)
Possession
Publisher: New York : Random House, c1990.
The first thing to say about this book is that it transports the reader to the realms of gold. This book proposes that the old vocabulary may be the gold that we have abandoned prematurely. Given the range of tongues, the attention to each sentence and image and idea, this is a great read, and a book to return to, after your curiosity has been satisfied by the unfolding dramas. (Commonweal, January 25, 1991)
The red queen
Publisher: Orlando : Harcourt, c2004.
"Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package - a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more than two hundred years ago. BOOK JACKET.
The solace of leaving early
Publisher: New York : Anchor Books, a division of Random House, 2003, c2002.
The heroine of this novel has given up on love. Langston Braverman is no ghost, but she acts like one. A grad school dropout, she haunts her old bedroom in her parents' attic, rarely going out except to walk her dog and curse the cretinous citizens of Haddington, Indiana. (The Christian Century, Oct 18, 2005)
Something rising (light and swift)
Publisher: New York : Free Press, c2005.
Cassie Claiborn drives a pickup, carries a knife or a pistol and works as a day laborer when she isn’t taking money from men foolish enough to play pool with her at her uncle’s pool hall. (New York Times Book Review, Feb 22, 2004)
Non-Quaker Authors, Writing on Quaker Topics:
Ahab's wife, or, The star-gazer
Publisher: New York : HarperCollins, c2000.
Ahab's Wife is a well-named novel, whether or not readers have finished MobyDick. Naslund's title has immediate name recognition, is much catchier than Moby Dina and indicates what Naslund has said was her intent: to put into her novel the women and domestic relations that Melville unfortunately omitted from his seafaring epic. (The Nation, Dec 13, 1999)
Crossfire
Publisher: New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 2003.
Jake Holman has organized an interstellar colony. His colonists are wealthy faux-Cheyenne, a deposed Arabic royal family, a delegation of Quakers, and assorted millionaire eccentrics. Their ship is the Ariel, their destination the world of Greentrees.. The journey is marred only by a single psychotic crisis and a possible sighting of a strange-alien-starship, and then they are there, breathing clean air, gazing upon open spaces, and listening to the news of chaos and breakdown back home. They seem to have escaped just in time. (Analog Science Fiction & Fact, June 2003)
Everyman
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
As is typical in Roth's writing, we are not expected to excuse gross moral failings. The man destroyed all three of his marriages-betraying his second and most devoted wife, Phoebe, a Quaker, by his affair with a Danish model. As a result, he's despised by his children and estranged from a wealthy older brother whose robust good health he envies. Yet we feel for this man, who, at the end of his life, feels a "longing ... to have it all over again. (People, May 15, 2006)
Forged in the fire
Publisher: London : Walker, 2006.
Will and Susanna struggle with maintaining their faith and love amidst the troubling backdrop of the plague in late 17th century London. The sequel to No Shame, No Fear. (http://www.quakerbooks.org/forged_in_the_fire.php)
My American Eden
Publisher: Shippensburg, PA : Burd Street Press, 2003.
A fictionalized account of Mary Dyer’s life in New England told from the perspectives of an indentured servant. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
No shame, no fear
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Candlewick Press, 2004.
A young adult novel of young love in the 17th century. The romance is between a Quaker servant, Susanna, and a merchant’s son, Will. Though the details of seventeenth century England and English history are accurate, the portrayal of early Friends may not be entirely authentic. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2006 catalog)
When Heather Reeves wrecks her Suburban outside Baltimore, two elderly Quaker women come to her rescue. Inspired by their radical lives, Heather experience s summer of awakening and grace. (Quaker Books of Friends General Conference 2007 catalog)
Harvey Peace image