March 16, 2021
 March 16, 2021 This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this spring. Read more about it, and enter our Spring Preview Contest by Wednesday, March 17th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of AFTERSHOCKS: A Memoir by Nadia Owusu, which is now available. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!  Today's Featured Book and Contest:  In the tradition of THE GLASS CASTLE, a deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through. Young Nadia Owusu followed her father, a United Nations official, from Europe to Africa and back again. Just as she and her family settled into a new home, her father would tell them it was time to say their goodbyes. The instability wrought by Nadia’s nomadic childhood was deepened by family secrets and fractures, both lived and inherited. Her Armenian American mother, who abandoned Nadia when she was two, would periodically reappear, only to vanish again. Her father, a Ghanaian, the great hero of her life, died when she was 13. After his passing, Nadia’s stepmother weighed her down with a revelation that was either a bombshell secret or a lie, rife with shaming innuendo. With these and other ruptures, Nadia arrived in New York as a young woman feeling stateless, motherless and uncertain about her future, yet eager to find her own identity. What followed, however, were periods of depression in which she struggled to hold herself and her siblings together. AFTERSHOCKS is the way she hauled herself from the wreckage of her life’s perpetual quaking, the means by which she has finally come to understand that the only ground firm enough to count on is the one written into existence by her own hand. Heralding a dazzling new writer, AFTERSHOCKS joins the likes of DON'T LET'S GO TO THE DOGS TONIGHT and William Styron’s DARKNESS VISIBLE, and does for race identity what Maggie Nelson does for gender identity in THE ARGONAUTS. Click here to enter the contest by noon ET Carol Fitzgerald Interviewed Nadia Owusu for the  As part of the Morristown Festival of Books @Home series, Carol Fitzgerald interviewed Nadia Owusu about AFTERSHOCKS. Click here to watch the interview and here to listen to the podcast. This is a special newsletter for our Spring Preview contests, which will mail on select days in March and April. This newsletter is separate from our weekly Bookreporter.com newsletter, which mails every Friday. You can subscribe to that newsletter here. Please visit the other websites in TheBookReportNetwork.com: ReadingGroupGuides.com and AuthorsOnTheWeb.com. |
