Floating in My Mother's Palm

Floating in My Mother's Palmis the compelling and mystical story of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in 1950's Burgdorf, the small German town Ursula Hegi so brilliantly brought to life in her bestselling novelStones from the River.Hanna's courageous voice evokes her unconventional mother, who swims during thunderstorms; the illegitimate son of an American GI, who learns from Hanna about his father; and the librarian, Trudi Montag, who lets Hanna see her hometown from a more >>

Floating in My Mother's Palmis the compelling and mystical story of Hanna Malter, a young girl growing up in 1950's Burgdorf, the small German town Ursula Hegi so brilliantly brought to life in her bestselling novelStones from the River.Hanna's courageous voice evokes her unconventional mother, who swims during thunderstorms; the illegitimate son of an American GI, who learns from Hanna about his father; and the librarian, Trudi Montag, who lets Hanna see her hometown from a dwarf's extraordinary point of view. Although Ursula Hegi wroteFloating in My Mother's Palmfirst, it can be read as a sequel toStones from the River.The New York Times Book ReviewWholly convincing...[Hegi] is an outstanding talent.Los Angeles TimesStunning...it can break your heart....[Hegi] has created an absolutely correct postwar Germany with all its forbidden questions and mysterious behavior, all its squalor, loss and longing.Michael DorrisLyrically transforms the memory of particular people and place into a song sung with great beauty and meaning. This novel is a gift to savor...stirring, unforgettable.Chicago TribuneBrilliant...mesmerizing reading [by] a talented and insightful author.The Seattle Times/Post-IntelligencerBeautiful...tender...vividly and memorably painted.Alice McDermottA graceful, lyrical, heartbreaking book that offers many pleasures, not the least of which is the opportunity to read a very talented author writing at the top of her form, telling stories she seems born to tell in a voice that is completely her own. Marvelous.Lynne Sharon SchwartzA treasure of a book. At once amazingly delicate and eerily powerful, it envelops the reader in the raw, painful, and poignant life of a small town in postwar Germany -- benumbed, bewildered, and, sadly, not much wiser. Ursula Hegi is a beautiful writer with much truth to tell.San Francisco Review of BooksExquisite...Hegi's language signals a rare and particular power. There is a sonorous, hypnotic hum about these sentences that resound as prose, poetry, and hymn -- and when we put the book down, its after-images burn the mind's eye.Bob ShacochisIf Stravinsky were a writer, I imagine he would have written a book such as this, for Ursula Hegi gathers all the tonal moods and emotional power to her work that we expect of music that moves us to appreciate our hearts and souls and their troubling complexity.New York NewsdayAn unusual, beautifully written book that sets the coming-of-age of a perceptive child, full of merriment, pain, and compassion, against the brilliantly realized small German town relatively untouched by the world outside...remarkable.White Lilacs

When my mother entered her tenth month of carrying me, I stopped moving inside her womb. She awoke that morning to a sense of absolute silence that startled her out of dreams filled with flute music and colorful birds, dreams she'd never had until she became pregnant with me, dreams she would have again when, two years later, she carried my brother.

When I imagine my mother that morning, I see her lying alone in the double bed with the birch headboard. I have tried to imagine my father in the room with her, but I can't see him -- only my mother who raises her nightgown and spreads both hands across her taut belly, waiting for me to move. On the window is a smudge where, just yesterday, she rested her forehead against the glass while gazing at the white lilac bush that grows behind the house. Nearly fourteen years later I will tear lilacs from that bush, wrap the stems in tissue paper, and carry them to the cemetery where I will drop them into my mother's open grave.

But this morning my mother's hands move across her abdomen as she tries to reassure herself of my life. All she feels is a cloak of fear that drapes itself around her. My mother waits. But her flesh does not stir against her palms. Sister Agathe will know, she thi << less