SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER

New York, New York, U.S.A.: Free Press, 2008. First Edition, First Printing 1st Printing. ARC. New/No Jacket. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. Advance Reader's Edition/Uncorrected Proofs. Reminiscent of Nicole Krauss's THE HISTORY OF LOVE, Peter Manseau's SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER introduces us to two people who meet for the first time in the twilight of the twentieth century: Itsik Malpesh, a nintey-something Russian immigrant who is the last Yiddish poet in America, and his twenty-one-year-old American translator. In a book warehouse in western Massachusetts one sweltering summer, a man at the beginning of his adult life--and at the end of his career rope--becomes involved with a woman, a language, and a great lie that will define his future. Most suspiciously of all, he runs across Itsik Malpesh and a set of accounting ledgers in which Malpesh has written his memoirs, twenty-two volumes brimming with so much adventure, drama, deception, passion, and wit that the young man is compelled to translate them, telling Malpesh's story as his own life unfolds, and bringing together two paths that coincide in shocking and unexpected ways. A novel of lost faith and hope found in translation, SONGS FOR THE BUTCHER'S DAUGHTER is at once an immigrant's epic saga, a love story for the ages, a Yiddish-inflected laughing-through-tears tour of world history, and a testament to Manseau's ambitious genius. New ARC in pictorial wraps. 384 pp. L66