The Displacements: A Novel - Softcover

Holsinger, Bruce

 
9780593542170: The Displacements: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593542177 ISBN 13: 9780593542170
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

“Hypnotic.” – New York Times

“Cinematic.” – USA Today

"I gripped the covers of this book as though it might be blown from my hands. . .powerful." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"A full-throttle page turner."– Miranda Cowley Heller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

An adrenaline-fueled story of lives upended and transformed by an unprecedented catastrophe

To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. Their deluxe new Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna—the world’s first category 6 hurricane—upends everything they have taken for granted.
 
When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort. Their home destroyed, two of its members missing, and finances abruptly cut off, the family finds everything they assumed about their lives now up for grabs. Swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, they are transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter where their new community includes an insurance-agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. Will “normal” ever return?
 
A suspenseful read plotted on a vast national tapestry, The Displacements thrillingly explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce Holsinger is the author of The Gifted School, which won the Colorado Book Award. He teaches at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. 
 
 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1.

Shortly after sunrise, a squall off the Gambian coast joins a rank of thunderheads crowning miles into the stratosphere. Dueling systems, two storms converging where the Canary Current dips to meet the North Atlantic Equatorial. A play of lightning and sheeting rain roils the ocean waters. Whitecaps foam the crests of waves.

Late the same morning, from the south and the scattered islands of the Bijagós archipelago, another storm edges in. Lower, more tempestuous in its churnings. The third system carries warmer waters beneath its front. The storms mingle and convect, a cycling dance of sea, sky, and rain.

Hundreds of miles to the south-southeast, the father-son crew of a fishing charter off Cape Verde help a banker from Lisbon struggle a blue marlin to the deck. Once the fish is stowed in ice below, the three clients arrange themselves along the gunwales, swilling coffee from foam cups while the craft rides the swells.

Without warning, a heavy gust sweeps the deck, wrenching cups into the sea, slamming one of the men against the superstructure. The other two clients share a good laugh at their companion's expense.
 
The captain and his son trade looks. A subtle wag of the father's beard. When you've fished the countercurrents for going on thirty years you know a thing when you smell it. The pressure rises in your bones and bends the invisible air. Even the son knows what this new sea means.
Another hour, two at most, then it's all out for São Vicente. The Lisboans will not be pleased.

The gathering storms fuse and collide. For hours the system remains loose, a disturbance in the Atlantic weather pattern.
 
Deep within a high cloud there is a shift in the convection flow and a modification in vertical temperature variation. The system organizes the warms, rallies the winds, until, as one, the three storms accelerate and spin.

A slow cyclonic spiral 108 nautical miles north of the equator. The rotation is counterclockwise. By 4:00 p.m. Gambian time, the satellites have captured enough data to effect a change in status. The system upgrades to a tropical depression, drawing more eyes to weather screens in the Caribbean islands, along the eastern seaboard of the Americas.
 
Five hours later, the depression has matured into a tropical storm. She spins and strengthens until she is hale enough to earn a name.

She is Luna.


2.

She spins and pedals and turns the clay mound until a cylinder rises in her hands. With four fingers in the mouth and a sponge on the shoulder she lightens the walls, creating form. The glaze will be an aquamarine, one of twelve shades Daphne and her Key West client have selected for the installation, a spectrum of blue-green hues inspired by the client's love of the Caribbean Sea. Six finished vessels already line a shelf and gather the sunlight brimming off the lagoon. Today Daphne has been working on the seventh, but each time she pulls, something goes wrong. Too much water, a flinch of the hand. Some unseen flaw in the clay.

She pinches along the neck ring so the mouth floats above the body, creating a slight pressure with only her pinkie engaged, to the edge of what the thickness can withstand. The wall thins, goes thinner still-

Too much, and the neck collapses into the base. She rams the sponge down through the upper walls until a shapeless lump sits on the bat. She pulls it off and slams it into the reclaim bin.
Cricket, alarmed, cranes up from her bed. "It's okay, girl." The beagle mutt lowers her patchy head, brown eyes moist with concern.

Daphne stretches on her stool and breathes in the earthy air of her studio, a high-ceilinged room flooded with light from windows on two sides, so different from the old converted garage back in Ann Arbor, where she belonged to a co-op and relied on a collective kiln. Here she has her own high-end Paragon, a guilt gift from Brantley after the move. Built-in shelves along the walls display her work, over a hundred figures in ceramic and porcelain, many shipped from Michigan, others crafted here in Miami. Sentinel stands at the highest point with her floating tendrils and her many eyes, looking down on it all.

There are years of labor in this studio, countless hours at wheel and workbench. Daphne could sell every piece if she wanted to. But Pilar Guerra, the Miami Beach gallerist who represents her, likes to hold back stock to keep potential buyers hungry. Daphne's most important pieces are already out at Gallery 25 on South Beach, installed in advance of next week's opening. Hybrid beasts of sea and air, delicate fantastical creatures that make even her newest vessels appear weighty and dense. For two years her art has been building toward this moment-which makes this sudden dry spell all the more jarring. There have been other stale periods, though nothing like this summer.

No mystery why. Bedsprings creak from upstairs, plucking her nerves as if connected by some invisible filament to the tendons in her neck. Now a parade of stomps into the bathroom where her stepson pees a stallion-worthy bucketful, slams the lid, and thumps back into his lair to collapse on his bed. His bass amp powers on and the thudding reverb rattles Daphne's sculptures like the percussive ring of a bomb.
 
The suite on the second floor was supposed to stay unoccupied, reserved for occasional visitors. Instead, Gavin has colonized the space since moving back home in March, nested like a buzzard up there. She imagines him rolling over to check his phone, fast-forwarding through stale episodes of Survivor.
 
A puff of plaster dust loosens from the acre of drywall. A five-thousand-square-foot house and yet every thump of the kids' feet pounds through the floors, every flushworth of waste rattles the drain pipes. You'd think the architect might have anticipated a soundproofing issue, that Brantley might have lavished as much attention on noise-reduction technology as he did on the Miele convection range in the kitchen, or the LG Signature washer-dryer sets in both laundry rooms, or the "tropical landscape package" installed around the yard.
 
The wall clock reads 3:12. Oliver's eighth birthday party starts in less than two hours. After a few minutes cleaning her equipment, Daphne hangs her smock and trudges into the kitchen, where the party list sits on the counter, staring her down.

"Alexa, start the Odyssey," she says, so the minivan will be cool when she leaves. The AI burbles and chimes.

The X factor is the cake. She glances again at the ceiling, trying to decide whether her immediate need is worth another skirmish. Bracing herself, she climbs the stairs and knocks.

"Yeah?" No hitch in the bass rhythm.

The door opens to a waft of late adolescence. Stale laundry, old pizza, open luggage half-unpacked, and, in the middle of it all, Gavin, huddled against a bed pillow two-fingering his bass, with an open laptop and an iPad at his feet, phone by his knee. Behind him rises a floor-to-ceiling bookcase stuffed with volumes he once devoured at the rate of three or four a week. These days her stepson reads on his phone, if he reads at all.

"Hi, sweetie," she says brightly.

"Heya." Two flat syllables from behind the curtain of hair. Cricket noses in, jumps on the bed.

"You busy right now?" she asks.
 
He looks around blankly as the dog nudges at his free hand.

"I need you to run to Beachery Bakes and pick up the birthday cake. Make sure they've put Oliver's name on it with the soccer decorations. Can you do all that?"

Wrong question. She winces.

 "I don't know, Daphne." Sarcasm thickens his voice. "I mean, I'm a Stanford dropout and this task sounds almost...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593542177
ISBN 13 
9780593542170
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Anja's
service@anja-karge.de

Von-Gumppenberg-Str. 94
Pöttmes
86554
Deutschland

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