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08.25: Christina Nichol
2014-07-16 01:40:56| Powells Books Events Calendar
Christina Nichol's Waiting for the Electricity (Overlook Press) is an exciting and hilarious debut novel set in post-Soviet Georgia — land of corruption, love, and power shortages. The Communists are long gone, but there are no jobs in the cities. In the village, life goes on much as it always did, but these days, the homemade farmers' cheese is giving way to the oil pipeline. But there's one man in Georgia who remains unseduced by corruption, unfazed by nostalgia, and unable to abandon chivalry, no matter how antiquated a notion it may be. This man is Slims Achmed Makashvili, a humble maritime lawyer. When Slims discovers an application for an American small business internship program sponsored by Hillary Clinton, he knows that he has found his calling. But when he finally gets to America — specifically to utopian San Francisco, where the streets are paved with quinoa — Slims sees what reform and progress look like up close. And suddenly, his loud, bickering family and his anguished, joyful country no longer seem so grim. A gleeful picaresque, a visionary satire, and a work of extraordinary empathy and imagination, Waiting for the Electricity is Nichol's marvelous debut.
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