PW Picks of the Week

Publishers Weekly "Picks of the Week" for August 19 include new books by two past visitors to the Institute-- James McBride (pictured here) and Thomas Keneally.

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (Riverhead) - McBride offers a fresh perspective on abolitionist firebrand John Brown in this novel disguised as the memoir of a slave boy who pretends to be a girl in order to escape pre–Civil War turmoil, only to find himself riding with John Brown’s retinue of rabble-rousers from Bloody Kansas to Harpers Ferry. “I was born a colored man and don’t you forget it,” reminisces Henry Shackleford in a manuscript discovered after a church fire in the 1960s.

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally (Atria) - The horrific butcher’s bill of WWI trench fighting, which took a toll not only on the wounded soldiers but on the doctors and nurses who tended to them, is at the heart of this moving epic novel from the author of Schindler’s List. The story is told through the experiences of two sisters, Sally and Naomi Durance, both nurses, who enter the morally complex area of treating the devastatingly injured with peacetime experience.

McBride's visit to the Institute: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mcbride.html

Keneally's visit to the Institute: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/keneally.html