The Size of the World

By Joan Silber
(W. W. Norton & Company, Hardcover, 9780393059090, 322pp.)

Publication Date: June 2008

Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback

Categories: General

Buy online from an indie bookstore
Find an indie bookstore near you

Link to this Book


Description
A richly imagined novel set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.In the book's opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company's planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women.Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways fresh and surprising. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters.
Indie Bookstore Finder

This book is on these lists:

Kristin's Wish List by Kristin

All lists >>

Indie Bestsellers

1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Knopf
The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Knopf
Death Comes to Pemberley
PD James
Knopf

Make Your Own Wishlist






Update Profile