Waiting for Tomorrow
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A powerful examination of the artistic impulse, cultural identity, and family bonds
Anita is waiting for Adam to be released from prison. They met twenty years ago at a New Year’s Eve party in Paris, a city where they both felt out of place—he as a recent arrival from the provinces, and she as an immigrant from the island of Mauritius. They quickly fell in love, married, and moved to a village in southwestern France, to live on the shores of the Atlantic with their little girl, Laura.
In order to earn a living, Adam has left behind his love of painting to become an architect, and Anita has turned her desire to write into a job freelancing for a local newspaper. Over time, the monotony of daily life begins to erode the bonds of their marriage. The arrival of Adèle, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritius whom they hire to care for Laura, sparks artistic inspiration for both Adam and Anita, as well as a renewed energy in their relationship. But this harmony proves to be short-lived, brought down by their separate transgressions of Adèle’s privacy and a subsequently tragic turn of events.
With the careful observation, vivid description, and emotional resonance that are the hallmarks of her previous novel, The Last Brother, in Waiting for Tomorrow Nathacha Appanah investigates the life of the artist, the question of cultural differences within a marriage, and the creation and the destruction of a family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Appanah's rewarding follow-up to The Last Brother, Adam, a painter and aspiring architect from provincial France, is talked into attending a New Year's Eve party in Paris, where he feels hopelessly out of place. He takes refuge in a pile of coats on the couch; only Anita, a Mauritian-French girl who feels similarly lonesome, has gotten there first. Of course, they fall in love, delighting in their differences and shared creative dreams. After marriage, pregnancy, and the death of Anita's father, they decide to move to the region where Adam grew up. While Adam settles back in quickly, Anita flounders in a small town where her difference is noticeable and her education is considered unfavorable and untrustworthy by the locals. The strongest sections of the book belong to Ad le, their nanny. Ad le came to France from Mauritius, where she laid to rest the pain of her past life. She and Anita meet by chance, and soon Ad le is hired to care for Adam and Anita's daughter. Anita and Adam find themselves separately intrigued by Ad le's stoicism and her story. The novel begins and ends with Ad le's death, but the true tragedy, Appanah implies, is the inherent imbalance that exists in any relationship and how easily it is exploited. Though there is a concision to Appanah's language or perhaps the translation that holds the reader at an arm's distance, the characters are complicated and well-drawn and the story immersive.
