This Nordic Prize-winning novel is a truly gripping epic that relates the lives of four generations of a unique and strange family with touching intimacy and surreal comedy.
It traces four generations of a family marked by the untimely birth of Fred, a misfit and boxer conceived during a devastating rape. Fred forges an unusual friendship with his younger half-brother, Barnum. The story unfolds as Barnum, now a screenwriter with a fondness for lies and alcohol, narrates his family’s saga. He chronicles generations of independent women and absent and flawed men whom he calls the Night Men.
Among these characters is his father, Arnold, who bequeaths to Barnum his circus name, his excessively small stature, and a con man’s belief in the power of illusion. Filled with a galaxy of finely etched characters, this novel is a tour de force and a literary masterpiece richly deserving of the accolades it has received.
Michael Dorris has crafted a fierce saga of three generations of Indian women, beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of kinship. Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women: fifteen-year-old part-black Rayona; her American Indian mother, Christine, consumed by tenderness and resentment toward those she loves; and the fierce and mysterious Ida, mother and grandmother whose haunting secrets, betrayals, and dreams echo through the years, braiding together the strands of the shared past.
Mama Day is a fascinating novel that reworks elements of Shakespeare's The Tempest. On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
This powerful generational saga is at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense. It's the story of Ophelia and George, two Black Americans, and how they fall in love while trying to reconcile their differences of upbringing and culture. It's about the dying culture of Gullah on the Georgia sea islands.
Told from multiple perspectives, Mama Day is equal parts star-crossed love story, generational saga, and exploration of the supernatural. It is the kind of book that stays with you long after the final page.