Modern Gods
A Novel
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4,0 • 1 note
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- 6,99 $US
Description de l’éditeur
A powerful novel about two sisters who must reclaim themselves after their lives are dramatically upended, from an award-winning author with “a wonderfully original and limber voice” (The New York Times)
“[Nick Laird’s] kinetic prose, full of insight about politics, history and religion, dazzles eye and ear." –The New York Times Book Review
“Nick Laird takes two experiences poles apart and unites them in gorgeous language…[with] fierce tenderness. ” –Dave Eggers, author of Heroes of the Frontier
Alison Donnelly has suffered for love. Still stuck in the small Northern Irish town where she was born, working for her father’s real estate agency, she hopes a second marriage will help her get her life back together. Her sister Liz, a fiercely independent professor who lives in New York City, is about to return to Ulster for Alison’s wedding, before heading to an island off the coast of Papua New Guinea to make a TV show about the world’s newest religion.
Both sisters hope to write their own futures, but the past has other ideas. Alison wakes up the day after her wedding to find that her new husband has a past neither of them can escape. While Liz, in a rainforest on the other side of the planet, finds herself increasingly entangled in the eerie, charged world of Belef, the charismatic middle-aged woman she has come to film, the leader of a cargo cult.
As Modern Gods ingeniously interweaves the stories of Liz and Alison, it becomes clear that both sisters must learn how to negotiate with the past, with the sins of fanaticism, and decide exactly what the living owe to the dead. Laird’s brave, innovative novel charts the intimacies and disappointments of a family trying to hold itself together, and the repercussions of history and belief.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulling from the real-life events of 1993, when a young supporter of the Ulster Freedom Fighters, a British loyalist paramilitary organization, shot up a small pub in Northern Ireland, Laird has written a truly superb novel exploring the possibilities and impossibilities of forgiveness. Protestant Kenneth and Judith Donnelly live in Ulster. They have three adult children: Liz has been living somewhat unhappily in the States after finishing her Ph.D. in anthropology; Allison has two small children and is planning to marry a mysterious local man whose background she hasn't pushed to understand; and Spencer has a big secret of his own. Gathering at their parents' house for Allison's wedding, the family will have to confront the suddenly very personal echoes of the "troubles" of the past. Liz, meanwhile, will leave after the ceremony, on her own journey to a small island off the coast of Papua New Guinea, where she'll be working on a BBC documentary. In a possibly heavy-handed move, Laird sends Liz to New Ulster, drawing a parallel between the two islands, thousands of miles apart, which seemingly share more than a name. "A lot of violence in these places," Kenneth remarks, as Liz first announces her plans. "Where are these places'?" Liz asks in turn, the very question Laird asks of himself and his readers. Though Liz's experiences are salient, its Allison's fate, thoroughly chilling and unsettling, that is the highlight.
