Where I share my love of books with reviews, features, giveaways and memes. Family and needlepoint are thrown in from time to time.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

ARC Arrival: Elynia by David Michael Belczyk

Elynia by David Michael Belczyk

About the book: Elynia is about humility. It examines four generations of characters diverse in time and place whose varied struggles distill a unified expression of human need. The characters are interconnected in unusual but intimate ways, for example: the immigrant shoe-man works his life away in a dying town to see his son wrongly arrested by a man whose shoes he shines; as a student, the son watched his friend betray the memory of a departed mother by stealing her makeup for a drunken gag; the friend marries a waitress who secretly loves a man atoning for his past by refurbishing a house; a man whose paintings were rejected by his love, the granddaughter of the woman who boards the shoe-man after a fire. Elynia is the only named character in the manuscript but appears only in reference by others. The other characters occupy iconic roles, each representing a stage or state in life. The reader's second-hand knowledge of Elynia mirrors the search for identity that haunts the unnamed, tactile characters and blurs their distinctions. (back cover)

About the author: Elynia is David's first inventive and rawly expressive recreation of the traditional novel. He wrote Elynia on the golden plains of the northern midwest, sailing on the great lakes, in Chicago, D.C., London, and on the canals of France. These diverse places and the struggles of their people give Elynia its compassionate pulse and proud and stately sense of decay. David, an engineer and lawyer, is also the author of two forthcoming poetry collections. He currently writes in his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he is producing his next work of fiction. (back cover)

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