Kirjahaku

 The big deal in this small town is the high school's 100th-anniversarycelebration, attracting politicos, town-boosters, the hoi polloi, thewayward, and the sinister, too. Some come out of curiosity. Some forlove. Others to stir trouble. And one to settle old scores.All teem about the local baseball hero, state champion, and one-timeteacher/coach, Finn Pyykonen, in his effort to right the grievous wrongvisited on a junior baseball catcher, unjustly imprisoned for a heinous crime aquarter-century before.Advent of Elizabeth tells the story of righteousness, of love's longing, of mischief--the malicious kind--and of the many winding ways in thehuman heart.Satire, angst, ego, and surprise draw the reader through the three-dayreunion-fete and lives touched by secret. In this burg, it turns out, everyone has something to confess."A story full of insight into the social feelings, antisocial behaviors, and internal torments of the alcoholic life. Told with humor, irony, and depth of feeling." Not to be overlooked.*People You've Been Before is a fierce and shattering portrait of a couple's 40-year relationship from marriage through divorce and its aftermath.Tim Jollymore's ambitious book is a day in a life-or better a life in one day-of novelist Els Mattila who has just completed a new work of fiction. Yet his visiting ex-wife charges that he's simply written a memoir that painfully exposes the addiction, abuse, and betrayals of their relationship.Their galvanizing encounter starts in Els' Manhattan apartment as the couple grapples with their complex and tragic history: a journey from Minnesota to Oakland and Hollywood, California, into a recovery program, and on to New York City. Yet at every turn, the reader must decide who is telling the truth.Wonderfully written and full of profound observations about life, the purpose of fiction, and the power of redemption, People You've Been Before is a beautiful and haunting novel.*When a novelist tells the story of an author writing another man's tale, whose story is it?Meet Els Mattila, an aging novelist who just spent three hundred days staring out the back window of his Manhattan, West Village apartment-writing. What came of those days?According to Els his finished manuscript is a work of fiction, but his visiting ex-wife calls it a memoir. Even Els admits-but only to the reader-that he wrote it "from memory."People You've Been Before is the story of a couple's day-long encounter colored by forty years of marriage, divorce, and tragedy-exploring questions of who we are today and who we were all the days before.The visit begins a morning in New York City and takes the couple, by late afternoon, through Minnesota, Northern California, and on to Hollywood as Els recounts his hell-and-back journey into-and out of-a recovery program that saved one of two lives.What in addiction-recovery circles is named denial is called politic in public office, and either saving face or betrayal in marriage, depending on who's talking. In the world of the writer, lies make fiction, but if the writer doesn't know the truth, fiction becomes a lie.Who has the real story?*

The concerns of the Fifth Century, solving problems with war; keeping people boxed in with vetted norms; keeping women in their places; keeping certain races in their places ring as clearly as the issues of the Twenty-first Century. Splashed across the landscape of the fall of the Western Empire, of Roman civil war, of Barbarian invasion is the story of the final days of Aurelius Augustinus, St. Augustine. Aged, tortured by incessant challenges to his authority from abroad as well as in his own backyard, Augustine's worldly troubles mirror his inner turmoil which he hopes to soothe in the company of the friend-of-his-youth, a lover and bonvivant whom he thought had been dead for fifty years. The interlocking story of his concubine and child of that woman-turned Christian seer, both needles and comforts the 72 year old Augustine, poised to destory or love his long-left partner.

At Thief Lake, Minnesota the past is not easily shaken off and is never forgotten. Events of fifteen, thirty, and more years have a way the cropping up when least expected, seldom pleasing and often causing mayhem. Even the long-dead and the supposed-to-be-dead have a way of coming to life bringing messages from one generation to another.Postmaster Tatty Langille and wife Morgan restart life and marriage in the north, raising grandchildren of a deceased daughter. Never mind that Tatty knew nothing about Morgan's daughter, had only a partial idea of who Morgan herself had been and is, and understood little about raising kids, the newly appointed postmaster is all in on the job, recommitted to his wife of fifteen years, and studies hard the art of childrearing.Besides innate difficulties of family life, the dalliance of a hot-footed evangelist, the reappearance of the fabled Bearman of Thief Lake, and economic and social struggles among local Natives, the US government, and a feeling-pinched white population complicate the paths the twins, Shookii and Popcorn pursue as Native girls in a less than spiritual but natural setting of Northern Minnesota.