Come from Nowhere
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- £3.49
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- £3.49
Publisher Description
In the early hours of July 13, 1977, seven female characters – ranging from a nine-year-old girl and her Greek immigrant mother, to a young chef who is losing her vision, to a brown rat – share the same subway platform. They are unaware that the next 24 hours will see them struggling to find their way home, both literally and metaphorically, when a historic power outage hits the city.
For the women of Come From Nowhere, this blackout is personal: it brings revelation, self-awareness and, for at least one of them, tragedy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenfield s novel opens with seven female characters sharing a subway platform on the morning of July 13, 1977 the day of a historic New York City blackout. Greenfield s characters, each on her own mission, represent the city s diversity and parallel story lines: there s recent immigrant Althea and her daughter Celia; Judith, a Hasidic Jew bucking tradition by studying medicine at a secular college; Johanna, a homeless woman with schizophrenic delusions; recent college graduate Pia, hunting for a job that will allow her to become the artist she was meant to be ; Danielle, a chef suffering from the gradual loss of her vision; and a mother rat protecting her offspring in the dangerous tunnels of the subway. Despite their differences, each character is headstrong, independent, and looking for a piece of the city to call her own. The novel s secondary characters are less fully realized and function primarily as devices through which the women express feelings or share information with readers: a classmate of Judith questions her extremist religion and asks, What do you get out of living the way you do? While the dialogue and writing are heavy-handed at times, Greenfield s novel is a richly imagined look at women from different walks of life and the possibilities, threats, and surprises offered up by life in New York City.
