Book Spotlight
Book Details:
Book Title: Liberty Landing by Gail Vida Hamburg
Category: Adut Fiction, 344 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Mirare Press
Release date: March 2018
Tour dates: July 2 to 20, 2018
Content Rating: PG-13 + M (This book contains love scenes, one explicit love scene, and some profanity)
Book Description:
Liberty Landing — a 2016 Finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction — narrates the American Experience of the 21st century through the lives of a polycultural cast of natives, immigrants, and refugees in Azyl Park–a town in the Midwest.
After Angeline Lalande, a journalist and historian, unearths the real meaning of the name, “Azyl,” conferred on the town in the 1800s by immigrant-hating politicians, the town elders begin the act of renaming it. During the course of the renaming, we meet the intriguing denizens of the town–survivors, strugglers, and strivers of every race and nationality, see the intersection of their lives, and the ways they find home, heaven, and haven in each other. We learn about the singular journeys that brought them to Azyl Park–a place that both transforms them and is transformed by them.
The larger story of the American Experiment is told through the personal story of Alexander Hamilton, the essential immigrant among the Founding Fathers, as Angeline writes a book about him. By the end of the novel, after Azyl Park is renamed, each of the characters has lost or found something essential.
Liberty Landing is about the personal and the political, family and loss, memory and migration, finding new love and a new home, and about history and the American Experiment. Seminal moments of the American Experience figure in this literary and historical fiction. Inspired by John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy about early 20th century Americans, Liberty Landing is a sweeping, lush, layered saga, set in a vibrant community, with a cast of Americans marked by neuroses, flaws, secrets, unspeakable pasts, humor, warmth, vulnerability, and humanity.
Liberty Landing is Gail Vida Hamburg’s love letter to the American Experiment–the first in a trilogy.
To follow the tour, please visit Gail Vida Hamburg’s page on iRead Book Tours.
Gail Vida Hamburg is an award-winning American journalist, author, and museum storyist. She is the author of The Edge of the World (Mirare Press, 2007), a novel about the impact of American foreign policy on individual lives. A nominee for the 2008 James Fenimore Cooper Prize, it is a frequent text in undergraduate post- colonial studies, war studies, and creative writing programs. Born in Malaysia, she spent her teens and twenties in England before migrating to the United States. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington Writers Seminars at Bennington College, Vermont. Liberty Landing, the first volume in her trilogy about the American Experience, is her love letter to the great American Experiment.She lives in Chicago—the setting for Liberty Landing, a finalist for the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Author Interview.
Tell us about your book?
Liberty Landing is a literary, historical, and imagined historical fiction about the American Experiment and Experience, told through the lives of a diverse group of denizens of a fictional small town in the Midwest.
How did you begin writing? Did you intend to become an author, or do you have a specific reason or reasons for writing each book?
How did you come up with the title of your book?
What authors do you like to read? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?
What’s more important: characters or plot?
What types of books do you enjoy in your downtime?
What sort of research did you do to write this book?
What are you working on now? Any chance of a sequel?
What are the upsides and downsides to being an author?
What is the main thing you want readers to take away from your book?
I’d like readers to recognize the inevitability of multicultural, polycultural societies in this era of mass migration across the globe, and see the humanity and essential sameness of people unlike themselves.
What does your writing space look like?
What keeps you motivated during creative slumps?
If your novel were being made into a movie, whom would you pick to play the lead roles?
My protagonist, Gabriel Khoury, is a Palestinian Christian.
I’d pick Adam Bakri, the Palestinian-Israeli actor. To me, he is Gabriel Khoury https://www.asiapacificscreenawards.com/apsa-academy-members/adam-bakri
Angeline LaLande, in my book is a journalist and historian, a Louisiana Creole of African American and French descent.
the Guyanese Canadian actress. http://hollywoodsblackrenaissance.com/kylie-bunbury-get-christie-love/
Can you recommend any new or upcoming authors to us?
What do you like and dislike about book reviews?
Are there any nuggets of wisdom you can impart to aspiring writers?
Learn the craft of fiction by enrolling in classes led by writers one admires. Read great authors in the genre you’re writing in, and join a writing community.
If you think you have a good book and you get rejected by agents and publishers for more than than a year, give up the torture, and go small press or indie.
Any last thoughts for our readers?
Readers are royalty to me. I would love them to enter risky territory with me into Liberty Landing.
