Now Available in Paperback!
Plum Wine a Booksense Book Club pick
Angela Davis Gardner's first job after graduate school was teaching at Tokyo's Tsuda College. In the intervening years—during which she published the novels Felice and Forms of Shelter as well as a number of short stories and essays—she had wanted to write a novel set in Japan. But two decades passed before Plum Wine, Davis-Gardner's latest novel, was conceived.
A plot idea came to her: a young American teacher, Barbara Jefferson, is bequeathed a mysterious legacy by Michi Nakamoto, a Japanese colleague who dies suddenly. In a tansu chest are bottles of homemade plum wine, around each one a sheet of writing in Japanese, which Barbara cannot read. She must have the papers translated… she must find a translator… and the novel was set in motion. After considerable research, including time in Hiroshima as a Japan Foundation Fellow, and many years of writing, Davis-Gardner saw Plum Wine published by the University of Wisconsin in Spring 2006. Set during the Vietnam era in Tokyo, the novel shows the effects of war—particularly World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima—on a complex love relationship. A Book Sense pick, Plum Wine was featured on National Public Radio and has received excellent print reviews as well, including starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly and Booklist.
Plum Wine is now available in paperback from Dial Press. Davis-Gardner's first two novels, Felice and Forms of Shelter, will be published in paperback in the Fall of 2007.
Felice and Forms of Shelter
reissued in paperback
November 1stThe December 16th issue of the New York Times Book Review includes a mention of both Felice and Forms of Shelter in the "Paperback Row" section (scroll halfway down).
A native of North Carolina, Angela Davis-Gardner was encouraged to write beginning in childhood by her teachers and her parents, both of whom were writers. At Duke University, she studied with the legendary writing teacher William Blackburn and at the University of N.C. at Greensboro, where she received her M.F.A., with Peter Taylor, Robert Watson, and Randall Jarrell.
She was drawn to write her first novel Felice (Random House, 1982) in an effort to understand the life of her French Acadian grandmother, who was raised as a orphan in a lonely convent on the Bay of Fundy. Davis-Gardner knew nothing of her grandmother's life except for the presence, in a nearby town, of a shipwreck survivor, a tongueless man. The tongueless man found his way into the novel, an imagined world of a young woman with an artistic temperament coming of age in a suppressed but highly charged environment. The novel was widely praised in the U.S. and in France, where it has been published twice; it has also been made into an opera.
Davis-Gardner's second novel, Forms of Shelter (Ticknor & Fields, 1991) is set in her home state of North Carolina. It is the story of a family with rather ordinary problems which gradually tilt out of balance, resulting in disaster. Forms of Shelter also received critical acclaim in the U.S. and in France, and won the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for the best novel by a North Carolinian in the year of its publication.
In Plum Wine, as in her first two novels, Davis-Gardner explores parent-child and family relationships, but against a larger backdrop of world events that have timeless relevance. Each of her novels is driven by a search to understand a mystery, or loss.
Davis-Gardner is also interested in the short-short story form, for which she has won awards from STORY Magazine and Writer's Digest. Her stories and personal essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Shenandoah, The Cream City Review, The Greensboro Review, The Great River Review, and Between Friends: Writing Women Celebrate Friendship (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
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