From Sigrid Nunez, the National Book Award-winning and bestselling author of The Friend, comes this mesmerising story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

'A pleasure from the first page to the last' JONATHAN FRANZEN

***With an introduction by Susan Choi***

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, who meet in postwar Germany and settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet-these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

'A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

About the Author
Sigrid Nunez is the New York Times bestselling author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award, and of seven other novels, including Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, and What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Her books have been translated into over thirty languages.

Reviews
This strange, lucid story of the unwished-for child of unassimilated immigrants takes us well beyond the particulars of 'mixed ethnicity'--beyond even the experience of 'America'--into deep paradoxes of identity and love. Both old-fashioned and subversive, stringent and redemptive, it's a pleasure from the first page to the last * Jonathan Franzen *
This strange, lucid story of the unwished-for child of unassimilated immigrants takes us well beyond the particulars of 'mixed ethnicity'--beyond even the experience of 'America'--into deep paradoxes of identity and love. Both old-fashioned and subversive, stringent and redemptive, it's a pleasure from the first page to the last * Jonathan Franzen *
A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent * New York Times Book Review *
A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent * New York Times Book Review *
A remarkable, often disturbing portrait . . . Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
A remarkable, often disturbing portrait . . . Nunez's language throughout is spare, utterly lacking in sentimentality * Los Angeles Times Book Review *
An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement, and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth * Atlantic Monthly *
An intelligent and poignant examination of social and erotic displacement, and written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth * Atlantic Monthly *
A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity ... A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness * Philadelphia Enquirer *
A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity ... A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness * Philadelphia Enquirer *



Book Information
ISBN 9780349014258
Author Sigrid Nunez
Format Paperback
Page Count 192
Imprint Virago Press Ltd
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 157g
Dimensions(mm) 196mm * 126mm * 22mm