Elizabeth Nunez

Tracing the four days from the moment she gets the call that every immigrant fears to the burial of her mother, Elizabeth Nunez tells the haunting story of her lifelong struggle to cope with the consequences of the "sterner stuff" of her parents' ambitions for their children and her mother's seemingly unbreakable conviction that displays of affection are not for everyday use. But Nunez sympathizes with her parents, whose happiness is constrained by...

Anna In-Between is Elizabeth Nunez's finest literary achievement to date. In spare prose, with laser-like attention to every word and the juxtaposition of words to each other, Nunez returns to her themes of emotional alienation, within the context of class and color discrimination, so richly developed in her earlier novels. Anna, the novel's main character, who has a successful publishing career in the U.S., is the daughter of an upper-class Caribbean...

Justin and Sally Peters, both passionate educators--Justin, a hardened, Harvard-educated professor of British and classic literature at a small public Brooklyn college, and Sally, a gentle and spirited elementary school teacher teaching her students that happiness and joy require strength and perseverance--have had a calm and loving marriage, graciously enlivened by their curious four-year-old daughter, Giselle. Suddenly Sally, coming from a wrought...

Peter Gardner, a white scientist from England, is exiled after performing dangerous experiments on patients. He flees with his beautiful young daughter, Virginia, to the Caribbean, where he raises her in isolation among few people-all natives. One of those natives is Carlos, a young boy of mixed-race. Virginia and Carlos develop a forbidden friendship, which later blooms into a love that binds them above all cultural, racial, and paternal resistance....