For Abeje and her brother Adunbi, home is the slave quarters of a Caribbean sugar plantation on the Island of Martinique. Under the watchful eye of their mother they survive, despite what threatens to break them. But when one night of brutality leaves the two children orphaned, it is the strength of their extraordinary bond that carries them through, establishing a legacy of tremendous spirit and courage that will sustain the Rougeaux family for generations to come. In literary prose, award-winning author Jenny Jaeckel creates a brilliantly imagined epic, weaving a multi-layered narrative that celebrates family as much as it exposes systemic brutalization and the ways in which it marks us. As each new member of the family takes the spotlight a fresh piece of the puzzle is illuminated until at last, spanning nearly two centuries, the end brings us back to the beginning. Jaeckel masterfully blends genres of mysticism, coming-of-age, folklore, and historical fiction with explorations of gender and race, creating a wondrous tale of hope and healing through trauma. A relevant work of love, determination, and the many small achievements that make up greatness, House of Rougeaux draws a new map of what it means to be family.

Harboring a grave secret, Gerard purses a dream that leads him from New York City to Jazz Age-Paris, only to be drawn back by the family he has left behind.

A "novel based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, following a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia"--

In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

Reminiscent of The Catcher in the Rye and Colette's Claudine, Eighteen is an intimate coming-of-age exploration of love, friendship, sex, and self-discovery, through the eyes of a uniquely observant protagonist.

Chief factor: In the Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade monopoly, the title of chief factor was the highest rank given to commissioned officers, who were responsible for a major trading post and its surrounding district. Colonial Victoria in 1858 is an unruly mix of rowdy gold seekers and hustling immigrants caught in the upheaval of the fur trade giving way to the gold rush. Chief Factor John Work, an elite of the Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade and husband to a country-born wife, forbids his daughters to go into the formerly quiet Fort Victoria, to protect them from its burgeoning transient population. Margaret, the eldest daughter, chafes at her father’s restrictions and worries that, at 23, she is fated to be a spinster. Born of a British father and Métis mother, Margaret and her sisters belong to the upper class of the fur-trade community, though they become targets of snobbery and racism from the new settlers. But dashing naval officers and Royal Engineers still host parties and balls, and Margaret and her sisters attend, dressed in the fashionable gowns they order from England. As happens the world over, these cultural tensions lead to love and romance. An elegant recreation of real events and people, The Chief Factor’s Daughter takes readers inside a now-vanished society, much like Pride and Prejudice. Margaret Work, with her aspirations, hopes and dreams, is a recognizable and thoroughly appealing heroine.

The Perfect Slime presents the latest state of knowledge and all aspects of the Extracellular Polymeric Substances, (EPS) matrix – from the ecological and health to the antifouling perspectives. The book brings together all the current material in order to expand our understanding of the functions, properties and characteristics of the matrix as well as the possibilities to strengthen or weaken it. The EPS matrix represents the immediate environment in which biofilm organisms live. From their point of view, this matrix has paramount advantages. It allows them to stay together for extended periods and form synergistic microconsortia, it retains extracellular enzymes and turns the matrix into an external digestion system and it is a universal recycling yard, it protects them against desiccation, it allows for intense communication and represents a huge genetic archive. They can remodel their matrix, break free and eventually, they can use it as a nutrient source. The EPS matrix can be considered as one of the emergent properties of biofilms and are a major reason for the success of this form of life. Nevertheless, they have been termed the “black matter of biofilms” for good reasons. First of all: the isolation methods define the results. In most cases, only water soluble EPS components are investigated; insoluble ones such as cellulose or amyloids are much less included. In particular in environmental biofilms with many species, it is difficult to impossible isolate, separate the various EPS molecules they are encased in and to define which species produced which EPS. The regulation and the factors which trigger or inhibit EPS production are still very poorly understood. Furthermore: bacteria are not the only microorganisms to produce EPS. Archaea, Fungi and algae can also form EPS. This book investigates the questions, What is their composition, function, dynamics and regulation? What do they all have in common?