In the Kingdom of Men

Zusatztext 73383612 Informationen zum Autor Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two previous novels, including A Country Called Home, which received the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in fiction and was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, the Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian. She is the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction, and her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of publications and anthologies, including The New York Times; MORE magazine; The Oprah Magazine; Good Housekeeping; Fourth Genre; The Georgia Review; Shenandoah; and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Barnes is a professor of writing at the University of Idaho and lives with her husband, the poet Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain. Klappentext Raised in a two-room shack by her strict Oklahoma grandfather, Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Even so, nothing can prepare her for what's to come when Mason takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in 1960s Saudi Arabia. Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin's life has become the stuff of fairy tales. But when the body of a young Bedouin woman washes up on the shores of the Persian Gulf and Mason disappears, her world starts to close in around her. January 1, 1970 Rome, Italy Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I’m a bare- foot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that. Here is the second thing: that young woman they pulled from the Arabian shore, her hair tangled with mangrove—my husband didn’t kill her, not the way they say he did. There is so much, now, that you will want to know, that you believe I will be able to tell you. If not, why even begin? Because I can’t stop thinking of her, not yet eighteen, per- fectly, immutably silent, just as they wanted her to be. It is the dream of her face shining up from the sea like a watery moon that still haunts me. Not even her mother will speak her name. Because, among these Roman people whose language flows like a river over rocks, my own name drops heavy as a stone, no husband, no father, no family or tribe to tether me. Because I don’t know who I am anymore and have forgotten who it was I meant to be. Let me tell it from the beginning, then, remember the truths of my own story so that I might better bear witness to hers, trace the threads to that place where our lives intertwined—one of us birthed to iron-steeped clay, the other to fallow sand, each of us brought to this place by men born of oil. Chapter One In the beginning—­these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the Bible open in front of me. Before then, just as the Korean War was beginning, I remember my mother humming honky-­tonk as she fried spuds for our dinner, two-­stepping to the table in an imaginary waltz. She was the daughter of a Methodist circuit preacher who extolled separation from the world, and his wife, who bowed her head in submission and held her tongue even as she secreted away the money she made selling eggs, a penny at a time added to the sock hidden beneath the nest of her beloved Rhode Island Red, a hen so fierce and prone to peck that my grandfather gave it wide berth. My mother loved to tell the story: how my grandmother scraped and saved until she had enough for a train ticket back to her family in Pawhuska, then rose one morning, fixed her husband a big pot of pork hocks and brown beans—­enough to last him a week—­made...

Product details

• Authors: Kim Barnes
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.02.2013
• EAN: 9780307474698
• ISBN: 978-0-307-47469-8
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 18 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature