American Stranger

A daughter of Jewish refugees searches for love and a spiritual home in this novel by the National Book Award-nominated author of Difficult Women. Brought up in a secular household on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Nancy Green knows suspiciously little about her parents' past. She knows they escaped Germany, avoiding the fate of so many of their fellow Jews during World War II, but the few family heirlooms they brought to the United States are reminders of a lost life that, for Nancy, remains shrouded in mystery. She seeks connection and a sense of belonging, a relationship in which she can find some sort of religious fulfillment. Unfortunately, Nancy's first encounter is with a Hasidic man who, dissatisfied with Judaism, has taken vows to become a monk. Then, while studying English literature in Boston, she meets a Catholic boy who captures her interest, but he's desperate to escape his overbearing mother and the clutches of the Church. After a devastating breakup, Nancy finally settles down with a husband whose background and beliefs seem at least similar to her own. Perhaps now she'll stop yearning for something more, and trade volatility and heartbreak for a sensible, practical life. But forcing a fit--into a society, a sect, a family, or even a marriage--isn't easy for anyone, and Nancy still has a long way to travel before she finds her true home. From an acclaimed author of both fiction and memoirs, including National Book Award finalist The Family, American Stranger is a wise and insightful story about the search for identity, and how our real lives are far more complex than our labels. "Plante . . . is always worth reading." --The Washington Post

About the Author :
David Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parish palisaded by its language, a dialect that dates back to the first French colonists, in the early seventeenth century, in La Nouvelle France--or what was then most of North America. His background is very similar to that of Jack Kerouac, who was brought up in a French-speaking parish in Lowell, Massachusetts. Plante has been inspired to write novels rooted in La Nouvelle France, most notably in The Family, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His renowned Difficult Women, a nonfiction work that profiles Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell, and Germaine Greer, was reissued by New York Review Books in 2017. Plante has dual nationality, American and British, and resides in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece.

Review :
Praise for David Plante "Beautiful." --The Washington Post Book World "Mesmerizing . . . Reads like a late-night conversation at a sidewalk café between J.M. Coetzee and Ingmar Bergman." --The Boston Globe "Remarkable." --Newsday "Plante is a powerful writer . . . capable of locking the reader in the mute, chest-crunching hug of inarticulate family love." --The New York Review of Books "Powerful, courageous, curiously invigorating." --Margaret Drabble "Difficult Women is creepy, it is cruel, it is morally indefensible--and it is exhilarating. . . . There may be no defending these heartless portrayals, but there's also no denying their power. Each scene is expertly staged, and burns with the same dark excitement you find in Mary Gaitskill's fiction or Harold Pinter's plays, the feeling that these characters have sought one another out to exercise hidden fears and desires, to expose primal wounds." --The New York Times