American Stranger

Brought up in a secularized Jewish household on Manhattan's upper Eastside, Nancy Green knows suspiciously little about her parents' past. She knows they were World War II Jewish refugees who were able to escape Germany with precious family heirlooms that are constant reminders of a lost life and world Nancy knows very little about. The longing she has for some kind of spiritual connection first leads her into an encounter with an Hassidic Jewish man who, unable to find meaning in his own religion, has taken vows to becomes a monk; and then an involvement with a Catholic boy in Boston where she is studying for her masters degree in English literature. Yvon, trying to escape the clutches of Catholicism and his overbearing mother, finds temporary refuge in Nancy and sees her as an escape from the insular enclave of Franco-Americans where he has spent most of his life. Their highly erotic, tempestuous relationship is frightening to both of them and a tragedy in Yvon's life eventually pulls them apart. Devastated by the breakup, Nancy ends up marrying a Jewish man from London, hoping to find herself with a man of her own religion. However, this new relationship, pale in comparison to her relationship with Yvon, ends very sadly and regrettably, inspiring Nancy to go back to Boston to track down the man who, she realizes, is the great love of her life.

Author: David Plante
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Delphinium Books
Published: 01/09/2018
Pages: 275
Weight: 0.7lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.80w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781883285739

About the Author
Plante, David: -

David Plante grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, within a French-Canadian parish that was palisaded by its language, a French that dated from the time of the first French colonists in the early 17th Century to what was then most of North America, la Nouvelle France. His background was 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, a contender for the National Book Award.

As a young man, Plante moved to London, where he lived for some fifty years, years in part accounted for in his memoirs Becoming a Londoner and Worlds Apart and in The Pure Lover, an elegy to his forty-year relationship with Nikos Stangos. He has published a number of novels, some referring back to his parish but also expanding into European and Russian settings. He has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker with short stories and profiles of people he knew, including the painter Francis Bacon, the aesthete Harold Acton, and the historian Steven Runciman. His renowned book, Difficult Women, a non-fiction work that profiled Jean Rhys, Sonia Orwell and Germaine Greer will be reissued by The New York Review of Books Press 2017

He has dual nationality, American and British, but lives in Lucca, Italy, and Athens, Greece.