For the reader in your life, I am pleased to share with you two poignantly powerful novels about friendship and family set in New York City: SMALL MERCIES by Eddie Joyce and WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY by Kristopher Jansma. These new releases are powerful and poignant reads that will feed your reading desires this spring. Check them out below!
ABOUT SMALL MERCIES
Named Martha Stewart Living’s book club pick, Eddie Joyce’s debut novel SMALL MERCIES (Penguin Paperback; on sale February 9th) is the kind of book that will remind you why you love reading. Set on Staten Island (the most forgotten borough in NYC), it’s is a touching and familiar story about that most complicated and essential group–family.
An ingeniously layered narrative, told over the course of one week, Small Mercies masterfully depicts an Italian-Irish American family and their complicated emotional history. Ten years after the loss of Bobby—the Amendola family’s youngest son—everyone is still struggling to recover from the firefighter’s unexpected death. Bobby’s mother Gail; his widow Tina; his older brothers Peter, the corporate lawyer, and Franky, the misfit; and his father Michael have all dealt with their grief in different ways. But as the family gathers together for Bobby Jr.’s birthday party, they must each find a way to accept a new man in Tina’s life while reconciling their feelings for their lost loved one
Q&A with Eddie Joyce, author of SMALL MERCIES
Q. SMALL MERCIES is a story about family, and it doesn’t shy away from any of the complications (and joys) that are inherent in family life. How did the Amendolas take shape in your mind? What do you hope readers will take away from this particular family story?
A. I wanted to show a real family in all its messy glory. Families are wonderful, bizarre, confounding. Every family has its own mythology, about who they are collectively and about the roles that each member occupies in the group. Within the context of our families, I think we all fall into patterns of behavior that we’re not entirely aware of. And many positive qualities can stagnate into negative ones within a family. The Amendolas are a very resilient, very loyal family and that’s to be admired. But loyalty and resiliency can slide quite easily into dysfunction and I think that happens with the Amendolas as well, particularly with respect to their treatment of Franky and their reception of Wade.
Q. SMALL MERCIES will strike a chord with many Americans, especially those who lost loved ones on 9/11. How did you decide to include this in the book?
A. It was not a decision I made lightly. I thought about it at the outset and revisited the question many times. A few times, I even considered changing the nature of Bobby’s death: maybe he could have died in a random fire, maybe his death could have been purely accidental, entirely unrelated to his job as a firefighter. But those seemed like safe choices, like deliberately ignoring the elephant in the room because it might be difficult to write about.
ABOUT WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY
WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY (Viking; on sale: February 16th), which has already been named one of 2016’s most anticipated books by Chicago Tribune, The Millions, Brooklyn Magazine, and Bustle, is an elegant and deeply moving meditation on friendship.
With incredible magnetism, Jansma—author of the critically acclaimed novel The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards—chronicles the trials of a tightly knit group of twentysomethings, taking on post–9/11 New York City in the midst of the 2008 economic meltdown.
When we first meet Irene, William, George, Sara, and Jacob, they have been in New York nearly five years. They are overworked, underpaid, and trapped in coffin-sized apartments. Yet somehow, through the bug infestations, the boozy late nights, and myriad uncomfortable dates, they have stuck together, ambitious young professionals on the verge of something bigger. None of them, however, imagined that that something could be a death that would tug at the very fabric between them until it nearly unspools.
Q&A with Kristopher Jansma, author of WHY WE CAME TO THE CITY
Q: Was there any particular event that compelled you to write this novel?
A: Nine years ago, my younger sister, Jennifer, was diagnosed with cancer. She’d had a small bump on her tongue for months that wouldn’t go away. She was only twenty-one at the time (I was twenty-four) and nobody thought it could be a tumor, but that’s what it turned out to be. She began treatment in North Carolina, where she continued to live and dance professionally in a ballet company. But when a new lump appeared, Jenn came to New York City to begin more aggressive treatment at Sloan Kettering.
For five or six months she stayed with me and my fiancée in the cramped one-bedroom apartment where we had to continue facing all the usual day-to-day challenges and excitements of being in New York City in our twenties while also getting Jenn to and from her treatments, managing their many awful side effects, and trying to keep her strong enough to carry on.
After a while it became clear that as hard as we fought, it was a losing battle. Jenn passed away about a year after her initial diagnosis, and my family and I were left to deal with our grief, which in many ways I felt even less prepared for than her illness. Although we were all grieving the same loss, but none of us grieved in the same way, and so the experience became even lonelier.
It was a long time before I was able to begin writing about some of this in my fiction, but once I started I couldn’t stop, and Why We Came to the City took its shape from all that love and failure and grief and hope.
Q: The city of New York looms large in your book, which is set in a post–9/11 world and in the midst of the Great Recession. What made you decide on this particular time and place?
A: 9/11 happened when I was halfway through college and hardly knew New York, so my experience of it was very much from the outside, and seeing the way it changed the whole future ahead of us.
When I moved to New York City in 2003, to begin graduate school at Columbia University, I came with two college friends, and a few more joined us in 2005. Our first few years there were difficult but we all felt like we were making progress. The city, too, was getting back on its feet. Our internships soon became assistant positions, and then some of my friends had interns of their own. I was adjuncting, teaching freshman essay writing at one school, then two, and then two more. It was incredibly hard, but even when we were putting in insane hours and scraping by on meager salaries, we had this sense that things were moving in the right direction. The city seemed to be supporting us and we were rising up with it.
Then in 2008 the market crash happened and everything just sort of stopped. So many people we knew lost their jobs. Those of us lucky enough to keep ours felt like we’d managed to get ahead just before an axe fell.
And then . . . nothing happened. Our bosses went from panic mode to wait-and-see mode. We kept working as hard as ever only to stay still. There was a year when my rent actually didn’t increase and, at the time, I remember it was the only reason I was able to stay. But everything was uncertain, and it seemed like the perfect moment for the events of Why We Came to the City, because those characters are suddenly being gripped by forces beyond their control.
Enter to Win These 2 Books
2 Powerful Novels about Friendship and Family set in NYC will be shipped to one lucky winner. Enter below for your chance to win these 2 great reads!
Giveaway Details: This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or over. You must complete the Mandatory Entry to be eligible. Follow the directions in the Giveaway Tool below. This giveaway will close on Feb 25, 2016 at 11:59pm EST Time.
Disclaimer:
Chris received no complimentary product for review purposes. Prize provided by the Sponsor. Please read our Official Rules before entering this giveaway. We must receive all entries by the end date of the contest and the odds of winning are determined by the number of entries received. No purchase necessary to enter. A Midlife Wife is not responsible for prize fulfillment.
Hi! I’m Chris! Just a Midlife Wife sharing about life’s journey; screaming and kicking through it while supposedly aging gracefully…
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