β Scribed by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
"Divakaruni is a brilliant storyteller; she illuminates the world with her artistry; and shakes the reader with her love." --Junot Diaz Late afternoon sun sneaks through the windows of a passport and visa office in an unnamed American city. Most customers and even most office workers have come and gone, but nine people remain. A punky teenager with an unexpected gift. An upper-class Caucasian couple whose relationship is disintegrating. A young Muslim-American man struggling with the fallout of 9/11. A graduate student haunted by a question about love. An African-American ex-soldier searching for redemption. A Chinese grandmother with a secret past. And two visa office workers on the verge of an adulterous affair. When an earthquake rips through the afternoon lull, trapping these nine characters together, their focus first jolts to their collective struggle to survive. There's little food. The office begins to flood. Then, at a moment when the psychological and emotional stress seems nearly too much for them to bear, the young graduate student suggests that each tell a personal tale, "one amazing thing" from their lives, which they have never told anyone before. And as their surprising stories of romance, marriage, family, political upheaval, and self-discovery unfold against the urgency of their life-or-death circumstances, the novel proves the transcendent power of stories and the meaningfulness of human expression itself. From Chitra Divakaruni, author of such finely wrought, bestselling novels as Sister of My Heart, The Palace of Illusions, and The Mistress of Spices, comes her most compelling and transporting story to date. One Amazing Thing is a passionate creation about survival--and about the reasons to survive. Praise for One Amazing Thing "One Amazing Thing collapses the walls dividing characters and cultures; what endures is a chorus of voices in one single room." --Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake "I was up very late. I read straight through because this is the sort of book that pulls you along. Divakaruni is so adept with her characterizations...I wanted to be in any of the beauty salons described so lovingly. I wanted to eat the bits of food described with such delicacy." --Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and A Plague of Doves, from her blog at birchbarkbooks.com "Ingeniously conceived and intelligently written, this novel is a fable for our time. The characters, troubled or shattered by their past, vibrate with life whenever they begin to speak. The book is a fun read from the first page to the last." --Ha Jin, author of A Free Life and the National Book Award-winning Waiting "Chitra Divakaruni understands the power of stories to heal us, make us laugh, and comfort us in the most difficult of circumstances. One Amazing Thing is one powerful and beautifully written book. I loved it, and I'm sure that readers everywhere will embrace it too." --Lisa See, author of Shanghai Girls "An incredible and highly original premise in the hands of a gifted storyteller has resulted in this jewel of a story. It is, to paraphrase the book's title, an amazing thing." --Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone Praise for Chitra Divakaruni "[Her] sentences dazzle; the images she creates are masterful." --The Los Angeles Times "Divakaruni beautifully blends the chills of reality with the rich imaginings of fairy tale." --The Wall Street Journal "Authentic and complex . . . Sophisticated and compassionate . . . Moving . . . [It is] a vision of what it means to be human, and in that resonance lies this collection's triumph." --The Washington Post "Divakaruni's stories will touch everyone who reads them . . . It is her gift of language and her ability to cast sentences of exquisite beauty that make her such a high-performance writer." --USA Today
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