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THE ANGRY GODS Wendy Brandmark 'The passion and guilt of two eras crystallise in exact and compelling language. History, personal and public, condenses here into flashes of Manhattan lightning.' The Independent. New York City in the depths of the 1950s. Schoolchildren cower under their desks during atom bomb drills. McCarthy has been humiliated but the witch-hunts continue. Sonia, a thirty-year old Jewish school teacher living at home, resists her brothers’ attempts to find her a husband. She moves out to share a flat with a fellow teacher, an ex-communist fearful of losing her job. But Sonia can think only of the poet she met in Harlem. He is divorced and old enough to be her father, but what outrages her family is the fact that he is 'colored'. Seventeen years later Sonia’s teenage daughter Helen tries to learn about sex by reading marriage manuals in Woolworth's, but finds a school friend’s exploits with a black boy more instructive. Helen's parents warn her against dating ‘one of them’, so she is shocked to discover that her mother once had a passionate affair with a black man. The Angry Gods is a powerful first novel about feeling outcast in America. Sonia and her black lover move between two worlds and find they belong in neither. Within this fable about racism and transgression is a funny and tender story of a mother and daughter who don't quite belong. Wendy Brandmark has published short stories in anthologies and magazines, including Critical Quarterly, Writing Women and The Jewish Quarterly. Her fiction reviews have appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review and The Independent. She has also published drama and film reviews, interviews and critical essays. She now directs the Creative Writing programme at Birkbeck College, London. Wendy grew up in the Bronx, but now lives in north London with her husband and daughter. |
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A paperback original
£8.99 softback 160 pages 152mm x 216mm ISBN: 1-899235-94-9  |
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