Sign-In
Cart
Foreign Body
Paperback
General FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $22.95
ISBN13: 9781636143279
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Published: Feb 14 2027
Pages: 336
Language: English
IN FOREIGN BODY, BEE TELLS HER STORY IN THE LILTING VERNACULAR voice of a young Black West Indian woman--wise, humorous, resourceful, and resilient. She is the victim of multiple assaults in her brutally patriarchal village, with the sole support of a stalwart grandmother. In spite of this, Bee becomes a record-winning sprinter, expert seamstress, trusted housekeeper, a successful cutterman in the sugarcane fields, and a voracious reader.
Along the way, Bee falls in love with Cherry, a beguiling character equal parts tender and violent. With Cherry, she discovers another side of sex: their pleasures heightened to ecstasy by their custom of cross-dressing. But, eventually, Cherry's tender qualities are subsumed by the violent ones and Bee flees; she leaves their son and daughter with her grandmother and escapes to Brooklyn, New York to take a job as the caretaker of an Orthodox Jewish family. In Brooklyn, she forms a special bond with Mistress Kuchinski--particularly after an attempted assault on Bee by Kuchinski's rabbi-husband that ends up resulting in Bee's own imprisonment.
After she is released with Mistress Kuchinski's help, Bee starts a lucrative sewing business and sends for her two children. Despite herself, Bee falls deeply in love with Pastor Amy, the Jamaican-American minister of an Anglican church--and an outspoken lesbian. Pastor Amy moves into the brownstone with Bee and her children, and together they take a mortgage as joint owners. Bee feels the longing to become a mother again--in vitro, the child to be raised with Pastor Amy--with a rehabilitated Cherry, freshly arrived from the West Indies, as the donor-father. In the final pages it becomes clear that it is this unborn child, along with the reader, to whom Bee tells her unforgettable story.
Also from
Antoni, Robert
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback