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A Stone For Bread Miriam Herin Available November 2015 |
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Synopsis:
In 1963, North Carolina poet Henry
Beam published a collection of poems, claiming they had been
saved from a Nazi death camp. The controversy over authorship
that followed cost Henry his teaching position and forced him
into decades of silence. Then, thirty-four years after the
book’s publication, Henry breaks his silence and begins telling
grad student Rachel Singer about his year in Paris, his
entanglement with the fiery right-wing politician Renard
Marcotte, his love affair with the shop girl Eugenié, and his
unnerving encounter with the enigmatic René, the man who
supposedly gave Henry the disputed poems. The novel moves from 1997 North Carolina to post-World War I France, to Paris
in the mid-50s and into the horror of the Mauthausen
concentration camp in Austria. Even while Rachel wonders how
much is true, Henry’s story forces her to examine her own life
and the secret she has never acknowledged.
ISBN: 978-1-60489-156-0 Hard cover $30.00 Sale $13.00 ISBN: 978-1-60489-157-7 Trade paper $18.95 Sale $7.00 302 Pages |
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About
the Author: Miriam Herin’s first novel Absolution won the 2007 Novello Press Literary Award and was cited by Publishers Weekly as an “impressive” debut. A native of Miami, Florida, she has been a social worker, taught composition and literature at two universities and three colleges and been on the editorial staffs of Good Housekeeping Magazine and the Winston-Salem Journal. She has also free-lanced as a writer, editor, public relations consultant and producer of films and videos. As a volunteer, she organized and directed an inner city program for teenaged children of Southeast Asian refugee families. Her second novel A Stone for Bread was a top-ten finalist in the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom novel competition and will be published in September, 2015 by Livingston Press of West Alabama University. Miriam is the mother of two, grandmother of one and lives with her husband in Greensboro, N.C.
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Excerpt from the Book: |
René was four years old when he buried a
grenade in the garden behind his house. It was the
summer of 1917 and there was war in France. Months
before, soldiers had bivouacked in the village. When
they moved on, René’s father went to join the
fighting farther north. The boy’s grandparents spoke
in hushed tones about Les Boches and guns with
names, Big Bertha and Albrecht and one called the
Distant Princess. René heard the booms from his
bedroom window. He watched the sky flare with light.
One morning a line of French soldiers passed through
the village. That afternoon, his grandfather buried
a tin box in a corner of the barn. The box held
coins, a silver vanity set, two gold watches, a
jeweled brooch belonging to a grandmother
generations back, medals won by his great-uncle
Albert in the war with Prussia. René held the small
box while his grandfather dug. He watched him place
the box in the hole, tamp down the dirt and cover it
with straw and hay bales. The next day, René buried
his treasures, bits of metal and colored rock
scavenged from the woods. His twelve-year-old
brother Etienne found them in the garden a week
later when his hoe sliced into the grenade.
Etienne’s arms were blown from his body and he bled
to death quickly. Of course, it was an
accident. The notary who investigated sadly shook
his head and reminded the family it was wartime. A
dog could have dragged it in. René wasn’t told the
notary’s explanation. He was, after all, a child and
did not understand why his brother had died, what
evil thing waited in ambush among the leafy turnips.
Did it too have a name? Realization came to him only
gradually, the way one’s hands go slowly numb with
cold. |
