The Grapes of Wrath von Steinbeck, John

Als Nazneen 18 Jahre alt ist, wird sie mit einem deutlich älteren Mann verheiratet und zieht von Bangladesch zu ihm nach England. Aber die Brick Lane in London ist ganz anders als Nazneens Dorf, und außerdem spricht sie kein Englisch. Nazneen kümmert sich um ihre Familie und muss lernen sich in dem fremden Land zurechtzufinden. Nach und nach hinterfragt sie immer mehr die ihr zugeschrieben Rolle als Mutter und Hausfrau.

Jack Kerouac (1922 ¿ 1969) was an American novelist, poet, artist and part of the Beat Generation. Most of his life was spent in the vast landscapes of America or living with his mother, with whom he spent most of his life. Kerouac's best known works are On the Road and The Dharma Bums.

Ann Charters, professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has been interested in Beat writers since 1956, when as an undergraduate English major she attended the repeat performance of the Six Gallery poetry reading in Berkeley where Allen Ginsberg gave his sencond public reading of Howl. After his death she wrote the first Kerouac biography and edited his posthumous collection, Scattered Poems. She was the general editor of the two-volume encyclopaedia The Beats: Literary Bohemians In Postwar America and has published a collection of her photographic portraits of well-known writers in the book Beats & Company.

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia, an existence made even more hellish by her status as an outcast among her fellow Africans. And she is approaching womanhood, where greater pain and danger awaits. So when Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, Cora takes the momentous decision to accompany him on his escape to the North.

In this razor-sharp novel, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form, a dilapidated box-car pulled by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Thus begins Cora's perilous journey, as she is pursued by a ruthless slave-catcher named Ridgeway, obsessed both with Cora and her mother, who eluded him years before.

The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage, and a shatteringly powerful meditation on both history and the unfulfilled promises of the present day.