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4.0 

The Size of the World: A Novel

By Joan Silber
The Size of the World: A Novel by Joan Silber digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

Love and family loyalty meet up with the allure of far-off vistas in elegant new fiction by an acclaimed novelist.

A richly imagined novel—set in wartime Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Sicily, and contemporary America—about men and women whose jolting encounters with the unfamiliar force them to realize how many "riffs there are to being human." Travelers, colonials, immigrants, and returned ex-pats meet or pass one another in narratives spanning lifetimes.In the book's opening, an engineer in Vietnam is shaken to discover why his company's planes are getting lost. A modern marriage between a Thai Muslim and an American woman leads to a terrible family fight. In 1920s Siam a young woman experiences the colonial stance of her tin-prospecting brother. The last section returns the brother to the States, older now but ever in love with Asian women.Love, loss, yearning, self-delusion, and forgiveness are here in ways fresh and surprising. And in the tradition of E. M. Forster, seeing the size of the world changes the meaning of home-sickness for all the characters.

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3 Reviews

4.0
“I picked this for book club and I wanted to go ahead and read it and it was wonderful. I cannot wait to discuss it. I just hope I still remember it in December. :D The book is made up of 6 stories each about a different person but they are all tied together. I loved the way the stories wrap around each other. At times it reminded me of the scenes in Lost where you see two characters pass each other without knowing how connected they are. It's facinating to think of the ways we may be linked to someone else's life's story without even knowing it.”

About Joan Silber

Joan Silber is the author of eight works of fiction. Among many awards and honors, she has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City.

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