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    Improvement: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Improvement: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Improvement: A Novel
    Ebook206 pages3 hours

    Improvement: A Novel

    By Joan Silber

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    NATIONAL BESTSELLER

    WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

    WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION

    AUTHOR IS THE WINNER OF THE 2018 PEN/MALAMUD AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN THE SHORT STORY

    Named 1 of 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2017 by The Washington Post
    Named 1 of 10 Top Fiction Titles of 2017 by the Wall Street Journal
    A Newsday Best Book of 2017
    A Kirkus Best Book of 2017
    A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

    One of our most gifted writers of fiction returns with a bold and piercing novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and the decisions they make that have unexpected implications for the world around them.

    Reyna knows her relationship with Boyd isn’t perfect, yet as she visits him throughout his three-month stint at Rikers Island, their bond grows tighter. Kiki, now settled in the East Village after a journey that took her to Turkey and around the world, admires her niece’s spirit but worries that she always picks the wrong man. Little does she know that the otherwise honorable Boyd is pulling Reyna into a cigarette smuggling scheme, across state lines, where he could risk violating probation. When Reyna ultimately decides to remove herself for the sake of her four-year-old child, her small act of resistance sets into motion a tapestry of events that affect the lives of loved ones and strangers around them.

    A novel that examines conviction, connection, and the possibility of generosity in the face of loss, Improvement is as intricately woven together as Kiki’s beloved Turkish rugs, as colorful as the tattoos decorating Reyna’s body, with narrative twists and turns as surprising and unexpected as the lives all around us. The Boston Globe says of Joan Silber: "No other writer can make a few small decisions ripple across the globe, and across time, with more subtlety and power." Improvement is Silber’s most shining achievement yet.

    "Without fuss or flourishes, Joan Silber weaves a remarkably patterned tapestry connecting strangers from around the world to a central tragic car accident. The writing here is funny and down-to-earth, the characters are recognizably fallible, and the message is quietly profound: We are not ever really alone, however lonely we feel." —The Wall Street Journal, 1 of 10 top fiction titles of 2017

    "[I]t feels vital to love Silber’s work. . . Now is the moment to appreciate that she is here, in our midst: our country’s own Alice Munro. Silber’s great theme as a writer is the way in which humans are separated from their intentions, by desires, ideas, time. . . Like Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin, she’s a master of talking a story past its easiest meaning; like Munro, a master of the compression and dilation of time, what time and nothing else can reveal to people about themselves." —Washington Post

    Editor's Note

    PEN/Faulkner & NBCC Winner…

    One of the top books of 2017 has won two major fiction awards this month, bringing much-deserved attention to the intricately beautiful novel.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateNov 1, 2017
    ISBN9781619029712
    Unavailable
    Improvement: A Novel

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    Reviews for Improvement

    4/5

    97 ratings11 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I am unsure what all the hype was about....this was an OK book, not the masterpiece that people were expecting.
    • 4/5
      This is a great novel. Weaving together the stories of three people with the connecting theme of Turkey and rugs, Silber takes us on a journey as different people who have been connected however loosely go about their lives and find happiness.
    • 5/5
      Silber's newest 'novel' is more of a collection of interconnected stories--a pattern she has used before, most successfully in my favorite work of hers, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories. Reyna is a young single NYC mother whose current boyfriend, Boyd, is serving time in Rikers Island Prison for petty theft. He follows the straight and narrow for a while after getting out but soon becomes involved in a cigarette smuggling scheme that ends in a tragedy--a tragedy that is indirectly blamed on Reyna. Kiki, Reyna's aunt, has an interesting past. While travelling in Turkey as a young woman, she fell in love with the culture and decided to stay, marrying a rug seller who, due to political upheaval, soon took her from Istanbul to live on a farm--a life for which she was unsuited. She came back to New York after a few years, bringing with her a collection of Turkish rugs. Individual chapters focus on Reyna, Kiki, and Boyd, and also on the friends involved in the cigarette smuggling scheme, including a young man named Claude; his sister Lynette (Boyd's former girlfriend and an eyebrow shaping artist); and Darisse, a hospice worker, who is Claude's latest and last girlfriend. A series of other intriguing characters-- Teddy, a truck driver who can't seem to quit his ex-wife; and three German artifact hunters, Bruno, Dieter, and Steffi, and, years later, Steffi's daughter Monika and her husband Julian--fill in the gaps. Silber does a fine job of playing Six Degrees of Separation while exploring the way that people and events can change our lives forever. As for the title, all of the characters are seeking to improve their lives in some manner, whether it is through a get rich scheme, finding the right man, doing what's best for a child, hiding the past, or making amends.I enjoyed this book and find I am still thinking about it and appreciating new things about it even days after I finished reading it. I would still rank Ideas of Heaven as my favorite by Silber; I liked the way the individual stories there were set in different places and time periods yet all linked by blood and faith. But Improvements is coming in at a close second.
    • 4/5
      I had heard about this author and given her listing of well received books I thought I would read her newest. It was written as many books are these days with a linkage among the characters. It traverses time and location. It is well written and each of the characters and their piece in the big picture held my interest. The story eventually comes back to Reyna, a single mom in New York and her aunt Kikki. They are the main characters but the linkage takes us to Turkey, Berlin, etc. There were aspects to the actions of the characters that didn't always ring true for me but the book held my interest and sometime I will read her other books that were nominated for National Book Awards.
    • 4/5
      The butterfly effect ably displayed in literary form. We start with an aunt, KiKi, who has had a varied life, but is now living fairly close to her neice, Reyna. Reyna has a young son, but visits her boyfriend who is serving a short term at Rikers. When he gets out, he and his friends, hatch a money making scheme, which if discovered could carry serious penalties. Reyna, in a moment of weakness, makes a decision that she later rescinds. This would have a snowball effect on many lives.A decision made by one, leads to a decision by another, and that decision another, and so on and so on. It was extremely interesting to see how these people, and others besides are affected by one decision. Never really thought of it before, but probably should have. While I didn't particularly like, nor dislike any of these characters, I was very caught up in where this was going, how it would end. Decisions we make have consequences, many times outside of our view. Quite interesting to think about, and of course to read about.Very well written, maybe a cautionary tale for our lives as we live them. Definitely s novel that makes one think. I love the connections here, and found this to be truly novel read.
    • 3/5
      It was interesting, I enjoyed how the lives of all the characters intersected
    • 4/5
      This "novel" is really more a set of short stories loosely tied together by a minor character in one appearing as the main character in the next. They are also thematically related as the characters are essentially making improvements to their lives by making rational decision about relationships. I enjoyed each story and found the writing to be outstanding and characters to be very authentic and well developed. I could see the attempt in the last story to wrap things up and weave the stories together. It didn't really work. Instead I found the ending wanting something more that was just missing. Still a very worthwhile read.
    • 2/5
      This book is well-written, I just didn't care about the characters. Most of them didn't feel real to me or particularly differentiated from each other. This is possibly too subtle a novel for me.
    • 4/5
      I really liked the gentleness of the narrative--I'm so tired of muscular prose and feeling jerked here and there by the weird combination currently favored in American fiction of brutal realism and rigorous hitting of plot points. I wasn't entirely convinced of the characters but I appreciated the truths they collectively conveyed about love and conflict.
    • 5/5
      I loved this—delightful, a little profound but not obsessively so. Actually it made me think of Prezi—remember that, the presentation software that everybody wanted to play with a few years back because they were so sick of Powerpoint, how you could make it swoop in and out and go from macro to micro and back again? I hated Prezi, it made me dizzy. But this book is what Prezi wished it could be. Silber uses these beautiful little declarative sentences to paint a whole mural, and it's just neat how she does it—plus entertaining and very sweet. This is a morally decent novel and god knows we need more of those right now.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Story telling at its best. Really enjoyed this.