Green City Books

THE INTERPRETERPulitzer prize-winning author David K. Shipler’s fictionalized story of a Vietnamese interpreter, based on his own experiences as a war correspondent, brings back the tensions within Vietnam during the war, focusing on a local with close ties to American journalists and politicians. The Interpreter is based on the true story of a Vietnamese translator who is wounded—not physically—by a love of country too pure for the contaminated choices that confront him. Dragged by an inner search, he has wandered among the neat categories of allegiance imposed by Vietnam’s lifetime of warfare and foreign occupation. But he fits into none of the available boxes—not Communist, not Government, not pro-American, nor any of the assortment of political dissidents who populate the shadowy warrens of Saigon. He finds no home with either the tortured or the torturers. Instead, he tries to interpret Vietnam through an evolving comradeship with an American correspondent, to distant, weary audiences who barely listen anymore. He commits a futile betrayal against the correspondent’s wife. He harbors a secret. He clings to a simple nobility, he believes, as an authentic Vietnamese of transcendent patriotism, and so he keeps his footing in the whirlwind of panic as Saigon falls. By refusing an offer to escape with his family to the US, he consigns his future to an intricate, stumbling dance with the victorious Communist regime. This man is fictionalized, but he is not alone in the world. His torment is a hidden story not only of Vietnam but of the hundreds like him who have interpreted their war-torn countries for the foreigners who fuel the fighting with weapons and blood.

In this short, masterful gem of a novel, David Plante’s seasoned narrator contemplates the connection between physical beauty and love, drawing on literary references and personal experiences to explore these themes.The unnamed narrator of this brief, urgent novel, a young novelist making his way in the literary world, writes of his fascination with two enigmatic, troubled young men, one a Boston Brahmin and the other a lofty undergraduate at England’s Cambridge University whom the narrator meets during his writer-in-residency. With each young man the narrator engages in a complex relationship filled with intellectual and erotic tension and each relationship leaves him feeling unfulfilled. By contrast, the narrator relates the story of his deep and abiding romantic life with an English poet, who introduces him to the remaining members of The Bloomsbury group as well as E.M. Forster and who guides him toward the publishers who bring out his early work. However, the poet dies young, and the narrator is once against cast adrift and his quest to find new, intimate interactions with the tragic young men he encounters causes him to reflect on the nature of beauty, love, and the intellectual life, emphasizing the transient and often unfulfilled desires that drive human connections. 

Stranger from Across the Sea is the new novel from acclaimed author Regina McBride. It''s a thrilling mystery with a depth of sensation that verges on the supernatural. Stranger from Across the Sea examines the powerful relationships that occur between women, best friends, mothers and daughters, their joys and secrets, their longing and sometimes dangerous jealousy.As a teenager, Violet O’Halloran spent a summer at a Catholic boarding school in Northern Ireland, emptied of all other students but one: Indira Sharma, a blind girl from India with an extraordinary story. The beautiful but ultimately catastrophic friendship that formed between the two girls would go on to haunt Violet for years. A decade later, Violet meets an Irishman, Emmett Fitzroy, at a party in New York City and is swept into an intense romance that brings her back to Ireland. While there, she unearths the stunning answers to mysteries left unresolved when Indira vanished from her life. Set in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, Stranger from Across the Sea explores place, displacement, and exile and the ways in which the personal and the political are inseparable. At its heart, this is a story about a passionate friendship between two singular young women, one that transcends the limits of time and distance.

A searingly original story of the tragedies and indomitable ecstasies of youth on the verge of adulthood, Song for the Dead captures the tempest of being a seventeen-year-old boy in a haunting and lyrical still frame.Declan cannot accept the loss of his older brother Mason. Mason’s suicide note said only: I AM NOT GONE, which tortures Declan with the possibility that his brother ran away, that the footage of the boy jumping from the bridge was someone else, and somehow Mason is still alive.For Declan the possibility is both hope and torture. He wants so badly to believe it that he cannot accept the reality of life without Mason. Declan seeks only to escape the present by taking refuge in the past or running headlong into the future. Mason exists in the past and the future, but not in the devastation of the present.Declan can’t move on. Mason seems to be all around him, walking beside him, playing along at band practice, looking out over the water with him at their old surfing spot on the Jersey shore. A song that Mason wrote is growing in popularity and may become a breakthrough hit. Someone is sending him messages on Instagram, claiming to be Mason. It is only a cruel hoax, Declan thinks, but the Instagram ghost knows secrets only Mason could know.  Could it be true? Is Mason alive? Maybe Declan can reach Mason somehow, or manage to let him go, if he finishes his brother’s last song.

Award-winning author Joseph Olshan’s latest novel, Milo’s Reckoning, follows a grieving New York PhD student through an investigation into the death of his mentor, leading him along a trail of dark clues that take him to Italy and beyond.When Milo Rossi, a graduate student in Italian at New York University, learns of the sudden and mysterious death of his mentor, Lenny D''Ambrosio, despite the official ruling of suicide, he suspects foul play. Embarking on a quest for answers, his investigation unexpectedly intertwines with the accidental death of his brother, Carlo, six years prior. As Milo delves deeper, he encounters unsettling truths about his brother''s life and death, uncovering a web of secrets and hidden connections. His search takes him across New York City and eventually to Italy, where he stumbles upon a horrifying reality: a network of human sex trafficking and exploitation. Confronted with the harsh realities of human suffering and the complexities of justice, Milo''s journey is one of personal reckoning and profound transformation. He must confront his own grief, question his assumptions, and ultimately decide how to respond to the darkness he has uncovered.

THE INTERPRETERPulitzer prize-winning author David K. Shipler’s fictionalized story of a Vietnamese interpreter, based on his own experiences as a war correspondent, brings back the tensions within Vietnam during the war, focusing on a local with close ties to American journalists and politicians. The Interpreter is based on the true story of a Vietnamese translator who is wounded—not physically—by a love of country too pure for the contaminated choices that confront him. Dragged by an inner search, he has wandered among the neat categories of allegiance imposed by Vietnam’s lifetime of warfare and foreign occupation.But he fits into none of the available boxes—not Communist, not Government, not pro-American, nor any of the assortment of political dissidents who populate the shadowy warrens of Saigon. He finds no home with either the tortured or the torturers. Instead, he tries to interpret Vietnam through an evolving comradeship with an American correspondent, to distant, weary audiences who barely listen anymore. He commits a futile betrayal against the correspondent’s wife. He harbors a secret. He clings to a simple nobility, he believes, as an authentic Vietnamese of transcendent patriotism, and so he keeps his footing in the whirlwind of panic as Saigon falls. By refusing an offer to escape with his family to the US, he consigns his future to an intricate, stumbling dance with the victorious Communist regime.This man is fictionalized, but he is not alone in the world. His torment is a hidden story not only of Vietnam but of the hundreds like him who have interpreted their war-torn countries for the foreigners who fuel the fighting with weapons and blood.  

Award-winning author Susan Daitch''s new novel, The Adjudicator, is a visionary cyberpunk mystery that explores the boundaries of consciousness and individual autonomy within an authoritarian state that controls the genetics of its citizens. In a near future where the surveillance state legislates the genetic code of its citizens, babies are created in a laboratory according to a template set by parents and the corporation. It is a utopian world of perfect control, where disease has been eliminated and the human genome has reached apotheosis. Mistakes, though unlikely, still occur, and it is adjudicator Zedi Loew’s job to fix them. One day, a cold case file based on an absurd premise crosses her desk: that gene-coding can go beyond structuring the body, it can alter consciousness. Fearing exposure, Zedi’s boss makes the case top priority, and she has only a few days to solve it. The case will prove to be an entry into a dangerous labyrinth, and Zedi follows a taut thread of information, one which, she will learn, connects to the corporation’s hidden mechanism of power as well as her own origin story.