Song of Slaves in the Desert

Song of Slaves in the Desert

Alan Cheuse

Language / Writing / Nonfiction

Based on historically accurate roots, this novel explores one New Yorker's involvement in his family's rice plantation and the wild tensions involved as he tries to right the wrong he sees at work in his family.Tracing the thread of slavery from 1500s Timbuktu up to the Civil War, Songs of Slaves in the Desert explores one man's struggle with the legacy of slavery and the loyalty of family, brought into sharp focus as he finds himself attracted to one young slave woman. A masterful writer, Cheuse grapples with the nether parts of our history and the wild nature of love, especially by those held closest in chains.
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Prayers for the Living

Prayers for the Living

Alan Cheuse

Language / Writing / Nonfiction

Prayers for the Living is a novel both grandiose in its vision and loving in its familiarity. Presented in a series of conversations between grandmother Minnie Bloch and her companions, Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio commentator on All Things Considered, unfolds a layered family portrait of three generations of the Bloch family, whose members are collapsing under everyday burdens and brutal betrayals. Her son Manny is a renowned, almost legendary rabbi. Respected by his congregants and surrounded by family, no one suspects that he yearns for a life of greater personal glory but when an oracular bird delivers what Manny believes to be a message from his deceased father, he abandons his congregation in pursuit of a life in business and his entire life spirals out of control.As Manny's fortunes rise in the corporate realm, he falls deeper into an affair with a congregant, a Holocaust survivor, his wife sinks deeper into alcoholism and depression and his daughter,...
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The Fires

The Fires

Alan Cheuse

Language / Writing / Nonfiction

Finely-honed portraits of hope and change, these two novellas are linked so skillfully that they achieve the intensity of a single novel in which some characters succeed and others fail on separate but equally compelling quests. In "The Fires," Gina Morgan makes a pilgrimage to Uzbekistan to carry out her husband's final wish—to be cremated—only to find herself entirely at sea in the strange new reality of the former Soviet republic, while in "The Exorcism," Tom Swanson begins to make sense of his life when he retrieves his angry daughter from her exclusive New England college after her expulsion for setting fire to a grand piano.
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