The Language Of Others – Clare Morrall
The world is a puzzling, sometimes frightening place for Jessica Fontaine. As a child she only finds contentment in playing the piano and wandering alone in the empty spaces of Audlands Hall, the dilapidated country house where she grows up.
Twenty-five years later, divorced, with her son still living at home, Jessica remains preoccupied by the desire to create space around her. Then her volatile ex-husband reappears, the first of several surprises that both transform Jessica’s present and give her a startling new perspective on the past. The Language of Others tells the absorbing story of a woman who spends much of her life feeling that she is out of step with the real world, until she discovers why. Related with humour and compassion, it offers a fresh, illuminating insight into what it means to be ‘normal’.
Syrian immigrant Khadra Shamy is growing up in a devout, tightly knit Muslim family in 1970s Indiana, at the crossroads of bad polyester and Islamic dress codes. Along with her brother Eyad and her African-American friends, Hakim and Hanifa, she bikes the Indianapolis streets exploring the fault-lines between “Muslim” and “American.”
A clerk called Coinman can’t stop jingling the coins in his pocket. It’s a simple addiction, but it’s one that comes to rule his life. His wife, Imli, an actress who’s so obsessed with her craft that she becomes her characters at home, bans coins from the house. It goes horribly wrong when his co-workers conspire in their own way, sending a number of them on previously unknown paths.
On the surface, fifteen-year-old Sonil has come to her adored grandmother’s house on a small island off the coast of India to mend her shaky health. Secretly, however, she longs to find out why her mysteriously distant mother agreed to have her sent away as a child.
During World War II and the last days of British occupation in India, fifteen-year-old Vidya dreams of attending college. But when her forward-thinking father is beaten senseless by the British police, she is forced to live with her grandfather’s large traditional family, where the women live apart from the men and are meant to be married off as soon as possible.
Memories and Such 