A Feather on the Breath of God

The first time I ever heard my father speak Chinese was at Coney Island.

From the award-winning author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through, a story about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love.

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother who settle in New York City. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, the narrator escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet - these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

'A Feather on the Breath of God brilliantly succeeds in describing a life on the fringe, outside the conventional categories of cultural and personal identity . . . A remarkable book, full of strange brilliance, trembling with fury and tenderness' Philadelphia Inquirer

'Written with such extraordinary and seemingly unstudied conviction that one accepts every word of it as truth' Atlantic Monthly

'A forceful novel by a writer of uncommon talent' New York Times Book Review

[Thumbnails of THE FRIEND, THE LAST OF HER KIND, SALVATION CITY]