{"title":"Elaine Neil Orr","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"swimming-between-worlds-book-elaine-neil-orr-9780425282731","title":"Swimming Between Worlds","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom the critically acclaimed writer of \u003ci\u003eA Different Sun\u003c\/i\u003e, a Southern coming-of-age novel that sets three very different young people against the tumultuous years of the American civil rights movement...\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Tacker Hart left his home in North Carolina as a local high school football hero, but returns in disgrace after being fired from a prestigious architectural assignment in West Africa. Yet the culture and people he grew to admire have left their mark on him. Adrift, he manages his father's grocery store and becomes reacquainted with a girl he barely knew growing up.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Kate Monroe's parents have died, leaving her the family home and the right connections in her Southern town. 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Through it all, Henry's first gift to Emma, a simple writing box--with its red leather-bound diary and space for a few cherished keepsakes--becomes her closest confidant, Emma's last connection to a life that seems, in this strange new world, like a passing memory. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA tale of social and spiritual awakening; a dispatch from a difficult era at home and abroad; and a meditation on faith, freedom, and desire, \u003ci\u003eA Different Sun \u003c\/i\u003eis a captivating fiction debut. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e*\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e (starred review)","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49937598710033,"sku":"CIN1410462803G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1410462803.jpg?v=1750922258"},{"product_id":"gods-of-noonday-book-elaine-neil-orr-9780813925103","title":"Gods of Noonday","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe daughter of medical missionaries, Elaine Neil Orr was born in Nigeria in 1954, in the midst of the national movement that would lead to independence from Great Britain. But as she tells it in her captivating new memoir, Orr did not grow up as a stranger abroad; she was a girl at home?only half American, the other half Nigerian. When she was sent alone to the United States for high school, she didn't realize how much leaving Africa would cost her.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIt was only in her forties, in the crisis of kidney failure, that she began to recover her African life. In writing \u003ci\u003eGods of Noonday\u003c\/i\u003e she came to understand her double-rootedness: in the Christian church and the Yoruba shrine, the piano and the talking drum. Memory took her back from Duke Medical Center in North Carolina to the shores of West Africa and her hometown of Ogbomosho in the land of the Yoruba people. Hers was not the dysfunctional American family whose tensions are brought into high relief by the equatorial sun, but a mission girlhood is haunted nonetheless--by spiritual atmospheres and the limits of good intentions.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eOrr's father, Lloyd Neil, formerly a high school athlete and World War II pilot, and her mother, Anne, found in Nigeria the adventure that would have escaped them in 1950s America. Elaine identified with her strong, fun-loving father more than her reserved mother, but she herself was as introspective and solitary as her sister Becky was pretty and social. Lloyd acquired a Chevrolet station wagon which carried Elaine and her friends to the Ethiope River, where they swam much as they might have in the United States. But at night the roads were becoming dangerous, and soon the days were clouded by smoke from the coming Biafran War.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eInterweaving the lush mission compounds with Nigerian culture, furloughs in the American South with boarding school in Nigeria, and eventually Orr's failing health, the narrative builds in intensity as she recognizes that only through recovering her homeland can she find the strength to survive. 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