A Feather on the Breath of God: A Novel by Sigrid Nunez

A young woman looks back to the world of her immigrant parents: a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother. Growing up in a housing project in the 1950s and 1960s, she escapes into dreams inspired both by her parents' stories and by her own reading and, for a time, into the otherworldly life of ballet. A yearning, homesick mother, a silent and withdrawn father, the ballet—these are the elements that shape the young woman's imagination and her sexuality.

A story about displacement and loss, and about the tangled nature of relationships between parents and children, between language and love. Each of the characters remains in his or her way deeply rooted in the past and may be said to bear out the truth of Jane Austen’s observation that one does not love a place the less for having suffered in it.