Books by Linn Ullmann
Grace
by Linn Ullmann, Calvin Baker, T. Greenwood, Natashia Deon
When Johan was a boy, he bargained with Death, and in good time Death obligingly took his father. And when Johan was miserably married, Death kindly took his equine first wife, leaving him a tidy sum. But now, with the Reaper coming for him, Johan cries out for certainties, for control, for dignity.
He enlists his adoring second wife, the grace of his otherwise mean existence, to be, “when he couldn’t fight any longer,” his reluctant angel of death. But as he drifts away into melancholic, hallucinatory recollection, the bonds of their mutual devotion gradually dissolve and the living and the dying begin their inevitable divergence. And as Johan, his wife beside him, slips under the solitary shadow he fears most, we are made to witness the muted tragedy of the Scandinavian way–now more and more our own way–of dying.
Linn Ullmann has written a haunting meditation on mortality that nonetheless pulses with the aching beauty of life.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace
by Linn Ullmann, Calvin Baker, T. Greenwood, Natashia Deon
T. Greenwood's extraordinary novels, deftly combining lyrical prose with heartrending subject matter, have earned her acclaim as a "family-damage specialist" (Kirkus). Now she explores one year in a family poised to implode, and the imperfect love that may be its only salvation.
Every family photograph hides a story. Some are suffused with warmth and joy, others reflect the dull ache of disappointed dreams. For thirteen-year-old Trevor Kennedy, taking photos helps make sense of his fractured world. His father, Kurt, struggles to keep a business going while also caring for Trevor's aging grandfather, whose hoarding has reached dangerous levels. Trevor's mother, Elsbeth, all but ignores her son while doting on his five-year-old sister, Gracy, and pilfering useless drugstore items.
Trevor knows he can count on little Gracy's unconditional love and his art teacher's encouragement. None of that compensates for the bullying he has endured at school for as long as he can remember. But where Trevor once silently tolerated the jabs and name-calling, now anger surges through him in ways he's powerless to control.
Only Crystal, a store clerk dealing with her own loss, sees the deep fissures in the Kennedy family--in the haunting photographs Trevor brings to be developed, and in the palpable distance between Elsbeth and her son. And as their lives become more intertwined, each will be pushed to the breaking point, with shattering, unforeseeable consequences.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace
by Linn Ullmann, Calvin Baker, T. Greenwood, Natashia Deon
Harper Roland has abandoned his job as a war correspondent, and returned home a weary, jaded 37-year-old. Uncertain of the future but determined to move forward with his life, he begins a search for enduring love--hoping he will also regain the ability to see the beauty of the world.
Along the way, he meets an intellectually gifted but emotionally absent doctor, a beautiful Parisian artist who burns too hot to the touch, and a human rights lawyer who has left New York in search of a more centered life.
The novel's sweeping tale encompasses four continents--where prior assumptions are constantly tested, and men who cling too passionately to certainty unleash destruction--and ultimately leads Harper back to the chaos he was trying to escape. The result is a startlingly fresh view of the contemporary world, in which place and history are mere starting points for the deeper journey into the geography of the human heart.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace
by Linn Ullmann, Calvin Baker, T. Greenwood, Natashia Deon
Named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, 2016
For a runaway slave in the 1840s south, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That's what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. Amidst a revolving door of gamblers and prostitutes, Naomi falls into a love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy.
The product of their union is Josey, whose white skin and blond hair mark her as different from the others on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches her and a day of supposed freedom turns into one of unfathomable violence that will define Josey―and her lost mother― for years to come.
Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history. It is a universal story of freedom, love, and motherhood, told in a dazzling and original voice set against a rich and transporting historical backdrop.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace: A Novel
by Richard Paul Evans, Linn Ullmann, Natashia Deon
Johan has sometimes been fortunate but never particularly successful: he lost his job for a breach of professional integrity, and he and his son haven’t spoken in eight years. His greatest happiness–his grace–is his competent, confident wife Mai, who loves him unreservedly. Now, with six months to live, and with Mai’s help, he intends to die well. But as he broods on the pleasures and regrets of his life, and death slowly envelops him, Johan’s resolution begins to waver. Morally intricate and full of sly humor, Grace is a touching and unexpectedly dramatic exploration of the territory between life and death.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace: A Novel
by Richard Paul Evans, Linn Ullmann, Natashia Deon
Originally titled Grace, this award-winning novel gets a brand-new look in this beautiful repackage.
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Christmas Box and The Mistletoe Promise comes a novel filled with hope and redemption about two teens who turn to each other to find trust and love.
If only I could stay with you forever. I would.
Eric is having a hard time adjusting to his family’s move from California to Utah. Then he meets Grace—his classmate and a runaway—dumpster diving behind the burger joint where he works. Eric decides the only thing to do is to hide Grace in the clubhouse in his backyard.
With the adults concerned about the looming Cuban Missile Crisis and his father recovering from an immune disorder, Eric grows closer to Grace but can their new relationship survive the harsh realities of life?
In this poignant, sensitive, and realistic narrative, Richard Paul Evans shares Grace’s heartbreaking predicament and Eric’s realization that everything is not as simple as it might appear.
Copies
No copies available.
Grace: A Novel
by Richard Paul Evans, Linn Ullmann, Natashia Deon
Named a New York Times Best Book of the Year, 2016.
For a slave in the 1840s South, life on the run can be just as dangerous as life under a sadistic Massa. That’s what fifteen-year-old Naomi learns after she escapes the brutal confines of life on an Alabama plantation and takes refuge in a Georgia brothel run by a gun-toting Jewish madam named Cynthia. Amidst a revolving door of gamblers and prostitutes, Naomi falls into a love affair with a smooth-talking white man named Jeremy.
The product of their union is Josey, whose white skin and blond hair mark her as different from the others on the plantation. Having been taken in as an infant by a free slave named Charles, Josey has never known her mother, who was murdered at her birth. Josey soon becomes caught in the tide of history when news of the Emancipation Proclamation reaches her and a day of supposed freedom turns into one of unfathomable violence that will define Josey—and her lost mother—for years to come.
Grace is a sweeping, intergenerational saga featuring a group of outcast women during one of the most compelling eras in American history. It is a universal story of freedom, love, and motherhood, told in a dazzling and original voice set against a rich and transporting historical backdrop.
Copies
No copies available.
Stella Descending: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
Stella descends, over and over, in the course of this haunting novel. She falls from the womb, since her mother gives birth standing up; she falls for Martin, who delivers her new green sofa and refuses to leave; she falls ill and eventually recovers; but her biggest fall, the descent that suffuses her story, is a plunge to her death off a nine-story building. Memories and observations related by Stella’s adolescent daughter, her curmudgeonly octogenarian friend, three old ladies who witness her final moments, and finally Stella herself combine in cryptic and beguiling ways to unravel the mystery: Playing a lover’s game on that rooftop, did she fall out of her husband’s arms, or was she pushed?
Copies
No copies available.
Stella Descending
by Linn Ullmann
On a warm summer night in Oslo, Martin draws Stella into one of the risky games that have defined their ten years together: a balancing act on the edge of their rooftop, nine stories up. Amid the shouts of horrified onlookers, Stella stumbles, falling for a moment into Martin’s arms before plummeting to her death. (Did he try to save her?)
So begins Linn Ullmann’s transfixing tale of Stella—jealous wife, forbearing lover, angelic nurse, unloved daughter, devoted mother, and finally, a woman possessed of a secret now for-ever lost to the living. As Stella’s life unfolds in the recollections of those she has left behind, we observe the fabric of many lives unraveling. And as Stella herself bears witness from a place beyond death, we come to understand how precarious her life was behind its facade of loveliness and order.
With a quiet power, Stella Descending gives us the backlit dailiness—and the dark metaphysical underworld—of life in a fabled metropolis. And in brilliantly evoking the loneliness that haunts all our intimacies, it becomes a fable of life everywhere.
Copies
No copies available.
Unquiet: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
Praised across Scandinavia as a "literary masterpiece," "spellbinding," and "magnificent," Unquiet reflects on six taped conversations the author had with her father at the very end of his life.
He is a renowned Swedish filmmaker and has a plan for everything. She is his daughter, the youngest of nine children. Every summer, since she was a little girl, she visits him at his beloved stony house surrounded by woods, poppies, and the Baltic sea. Now that she’s grown up and he’s in his late eighties, he envisions a book about old age. He worries that he’s losing his language, his memory, his mind. Growing old is hard work, he says. They will write it together. She will ask the questions. He will answer them.
When she finally comes to the island, bringing her tape recorder with her, old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen.
Unquiet follows the narrator as she unearths these taped conversations seven years later. Swept into memory, she reimagines the story of a father, a mother, and a girl―a child who can’t wait to grow up and parents who would rather be children.
A heartbreaking and darkly funny depiction of the intricacies of family, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old. Linn Ullmann nimbly blends memoir and fiction in her most inventive novel yet, weaving a luminous meditation on language, mourning, and the many narratives that make up a life.
Copies
No copies available.
Unquiet: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
“Didionesque.” ―New York Times Book Review
A heartbreaking and darkly funny portrait of the intricacies of family life, Unquiet is an elegy of memory and loss, identity and art, growing up and growing old.
Copies
No copies available.
Copies
-
$29.99
The Cold Song: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
One of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2014!
Ullmann’s characters are complex and paradoxical: neither fully guilty nor fully innocent
Siri Brodal, a chef and restaurant owner, is married to Jon Dreyer, a famous novelist plagued by writer’s block. Siri and Jon have two daughters, and together they spend their summers on the coast of Norway, in a mansion belonging to Jenny Brodal, Siri’s stylish and unforgiving mother.
Siri and Jon’s marriage is loving but difficult, and troubled by painful secrets. They have a strained relationship with their elder daughter, Alma, who struggles to find her place in the family constellation. When Milla is hired as a nanny to allow Siri to work her long hours at the restaurant and Jon to supposedly meet the deadline on his book, life in the idyllic summer community takes a dire turn. One rainy July night, Milla disappears without a trace. After her remains are discovered and a suspect is identified, everyone who had any connection with her feels implicated in her tragedy and haunted by what they could have done to prevent it.
The Cold Song is a story about telling stories and about how life is continually invented and reinvented.
Copies
No copies available.
The Cold Song: A Novel
by Linn Ullmann
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year, this subtle psychological thriller explores the gray areas between innocence and guilt, truth and lies.
Siri Brodal, a chef and restaurant owner, is married to Jon Dreyer, a famous novelist plagued by writer’s block. Siri and Jon have two daughters, and together they spend their summers on the coast of Norway, in a mansion belonging to Jenny Brodal, Siri’s stylish and unforgiving mother.
Siri and Jon’s marriage is loving but difficult, and troubled by painful secrets. They have a strained relationship with their elder daughter, Alma, who struggles to find her place in the family constellation. When Milla is hired as a nanny to allow Siri to work her long hours at the restaurant and Jon to supposedly meet the deadline on his book, life in the idyllic summer community takes a dire turn. One rainy July night, Milla disappears without a trace. After her remains are discovered and a suspect is identified, everyone who had any connection with her feels implicated in her tragedy and haunted by what they could have done to prevent it.
More than an absorbing mystery, The Cold Song is a story about telling stories and about how life is continually invented and reinvented.
Copies
-
$18.99
Before You Sleep
by Linn Ullmann
The acclaimed debut novel of passion and subtlety that links three generations of eccentric, formidable women.
Through the sublimely unreliable voice of its narrator, Karin, Before You Sleep reaches back from present day Oslo to 1930s Brooklyn to relate the emotional legacies of the Blom family. Karin is both playful and melancholy—a serial seductress who defines herself in contrast to the women in her life: her mother Anni, alluring, manipulative, and melodramatic; her sister Julie, a wife and mother nearly undone by suspicions of her husband’s infidelity; her aunt Selma, “the world’s angriest old woman”; and her soldier grandmother June, who bets that Karin will be the best damn soldier of them all. Inventive and wise, funny and disquieting, Before You Sleep marks the arrival of a gifted new literary voice.
“Ullmann creates such a powerful mood of intimacy here that the reader feels like a part of the family.” —Los Angeles Times
“Ullmann’s imagination . . . is formed by a love of the intricacies of family life, of the ties that bind.”—The New Yorker
Copies
No copies available.