Feast Days

Written by Ian MacKenzie

Narrated by Christine Lakin

Intelligent and deeply felt, Feast Days follows a young wife who relocates with her financier husband to São Paulo—a South American megacity that impresses and unsettles, conceals and erupts. Here in her new home, she reckons with the twenty-first century as she encounters crime, protests, refugees gentrification, and the collision of art and commerce, while confronting the crisis slowly building inside her own marriage.

In stylish prose and with piercing wit, Ian MacKenzie tells the story of Emma, a young woman who has moved from New York to Brazil just as massive demonstrations against the government are breaking out across the country amid growing economic inequality. Emma has come to Brazil for her husband's career, with no job prospects of her own, a weak grasp of the language, and a deep ambivalence about having a child. Her early days in São Paulo are listless but privileged; she dines at high-end restaurants, tutors wealthy Brazilians in English, and observes the city she now calls home.

But when Emma volunteers at a local church to assist refugees and grows more deeply connected to the people she meets in the course of her days, she finds herself unable to resist the tug of São Paulo's political and social unrest.

As the country moves seemingly closer to a breaking point, so does Emma's marriage, as she and her husband can no longer ignore the silent, tectonic shifts beneath the surface of their relationship.

Feast Days is a sharply observed story of expatriate life, as well as a meditation on the hidden costs of modern living and how easily our belief systems can collapse around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hachette Audio
• Release date: Mar 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781478924036

Reviews for Feast Days

[gmmartz · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ian MacKenzie's 'Feast Days', a novel considerably outside my normal circle of genres, is a sort of trifling thing. If you're interested in following the travails of a couple young, affluent NYC-type ex-pats as they learn the ropes around Sao Paolo, Brazil by partying at nightclubs, dining at high end restaurants, and visiting art galleries while ruminating on poverty, it may well be up your alley. Feast Days is largely a collection of episodes. Couple visits a bar, runs into man's co-worker. They talk about work. Couple gets mugged on way home, causing much discussion and thoughts about the nature and unfairness of wealth and absence of same. Woman gets interested in political riots taking place in the city. Man works late. Woman may or may not decide to have a baby. Woman may or may not decide to have an affair. Couple goes on vacation.... I'm quite sure there's a message buried in there somewhere, but I think you need to care about the characters enough to try to figure out what it is and, alas, I couldn't get there.What I did enjoy, though, was MacKenzie's writing. It has a sort of DeLillo feel to it: mostly crisp, short sentences that create a staccato feel for the narrative. Thankfully, Feast Days is short, so although I liked the writing, the story was over quickly.