OPEN A BOOK,OPEN THE WORLD
出版日期：2024.08.05
ISBN：9780062997555
書號：20314682
裝訂：平裝
定價：$595
15年前，Echota一家在愛子Ray-Ray遭警察槍殺後似乎便已分崩離析。
女兒Sonja性格孤僻，深陷一段瘋魔的依附關係；兒子Edgar多年前就逃出家門，以藥物自我麻痺。
丈夫Ernest的阿茲海默症，令母親Maria飽受煎熬，然而她與Ernest同為切羅基人的養子Wyatt似乎擁有某種神秘力量，在冥冥之中讓Ernest的神智保持清明。
隨著切羅基族年度祭典，同時也是Ray-Ray的忌日逐漸接近，這家人終於願意開口，談論與早逝手足的回憶。Maria盼望消彌彼此的隔閡，讓漸行漸遠的Echota家再次貼近。但當祭典真的鄰近，那些私密的傷痛時刻、現實世界與神靈之所的界線也逐漸模糊。
匠心妙手揉進切羅基神話，作者Brandon Hobson靈巧穿梭在現實與神靈交界，觸碰個人創傷與家族記憶相連，震盪先祖與故土的嗡鳴共振。
“A haunted work, full of voices old and new. It is about a family’s reckoning with loss and injustice, and it is about a people trying for the same. The journey of this family’s way home is full—in equal measure—of melancholy and love.” —Tommy Orange, author of There There
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Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago—from National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson
In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.
With the family’s annual bonfire approaching—an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory—Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite—or perhaps because of—his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.
Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma—a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.
“The Removed is a marvel. With a few sly gestures, a humble array of piercingly real characters and an apparently effortless swing into the dire dreamlife, Brandon Hobson delivers an act of regeneration and solace. You won’t forget it.” —Jonathan Lethem, author of The Feral Detective
