Grove Press, Black Cat – serie

“Astonishingly beautiful . . . It’s a revelation.”—Jenny Offill, New York Times bestselling author of Weather

From the National Book Award-winning translator, an atmospheric and wise debut novel of a young Brazilian woman’s first year in America, a continent away from her lonely mother, and the relationship they build over Skype calls across borders

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, and in elegant prose that recalls the work of Sigrid Nunez, Katie Kitamura, and Rachel Khong, Bruna Dantas Lobato paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.

“Ambitious, brave, and strange.”—Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan 

From the NBCC-winning author, a subversive, rollicking, and feminist retelling of Moby-Dick through the eyes of one inimitable woman

I must work on a ship as a man . . . Yes, I must seek a new life, more adventurous than that of my fellows on this desolate salt marsh. I must find freedom on the seas.

One of the most acclaimed Chinese-born writers of her generation, Xiaolu Guo is the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Nine Continents and a Granta Best Young British Novelist. In Call Me Ishmaelle, Guo turns Herman Melville’s masterpiece on its head with a modern feminist,  diasporic sensibility.

1843. Ishmaelle is born in a small village on the stormy Kent coast where she grows up swimming with dolphins. After her parents and infant sister die, her brother, Joseph, leaves to find work as a sailor. Abandoned and desperate for a life at sea, Ishmaelle disguises herself as a cabin boy and travels to New York. Years later, as the American Civil War breaks out, Ishmaelle boards the Nimrod, a whaling ship led by the obsessive Captain Seneca, a Black free man of heroic stature who is haunted by a tragic past. Here, she finds protectors amidst the bloody male violence of whaling and discovers a mysterious bond between herself and the white whale who claimed Seneca’s leg. 

Built on the bones of Melville’s classic, Call Me Ishmaelle is a dynamic new tale, imbued with a diverse, swashbuckling crew—from a Polynesian harpooner to a Taoist Monk—and a powerful exploration of human nature, gender, man’s place among the animals, and the nature of home.