The Broken Land
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“At once disturbing and beautiful . . . superbly realized.” —The Times (London)
Grandfather was a tree, Father grew trux, in fifteen colours. Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them...
The Land is a living, breathing, sentient world, where careful skills and talent can manipulate its very substance into a myriad different shapes and forms.
This is the world in which Mathembe Fileli grows up, until the conflicts tearing her country apart shatter her village, her home and her family and scatter them to the four winds. Can Mathembe reunite her family in a world full of angels, talking trees, squalor and glory?
“Ian McDonald takes on all the atrocity and strife of the 20th Century, radically displaces it, and dares to envision a means of change. It’s a brilliant achievement.” —Locus
“McDonald is a superior writer.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mathembe Fileli and her family enjoy a nearly perfect existence in their native village of Chepsenyt, where her father raises trux, live organisms resembling trucks and used in heavy construction work, and her mother spins clothing, food and tools from basic DNA. Even Confessors and Proclaimersp. 8 , members of the town's two opposing religions, manage to live side by side; but when the town hides two Warriors of Destiny--guerilla fighters who oppose the Emperor Across the River--it is destroyed in a firestorm organized by the Emperor's soldiers. Mathembe, her family and the rest of the villagers are forced to flee. When her father is taken as a political prisoner, Mathembe realizes that she cannot turn for protection to her parents--or to her grandfather's decapitated-but-still-living head. From her shaky beginnings as a street vendor, she learns to rely upon herself in order to survive, and embarks on a painful journey to adulthood. Mathembe's world is a captivating one with its rampant biotechnology and passionate characters. But McDonald ( King of Morning, Queen of Day ), a lifelong resident of Belfast, also succeeds in presenting the religious and national conflict of an Ireland that still knows no respite from bloodshed.
