2026 Summer Time Reading

Summer Season Pick

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Patchett’s lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.

Please note that Ann Patchett has published a new book: Whistler- listed in Fiction for summer reading. Amazon

Fiction

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

The multimillion-copy-selling author of The Help returns with a bold, big-hearted novel about a group of unbreakable women, fighting for what’s rightfully theirs—and the power of friendship to change everything.

Oxford, Mississippi, 1933.

Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed.

Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister’s seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies.

Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates—and Meg’s—converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan for them to take control of their lives. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women’s freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.

The Calamity Club will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to underestimated women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time. Amazon

Contrapposto By Dave Eggers

Cricket Dib, born on the American prairie, has no particular prospects or ambitions until, in grade school, he realizes he can draw. He soon meets a girl, Olympia Argyros, one year older, who is captivating and brilliant and far more worldly. Recognizing his talent, she convinces him to deface, with profound vulgarity, a popular playground. Under her direction, he does it willingly, already in love, and thus begins a sixty-five-year entwining between Cricket and Olympia, encompassing friendship, working partnership and love affair. Together they go to art school—an experience of dubious value—and then navigate the art world for the next fifty years, together and apart.

Contrapposto is a moving and very funny novel about allies and art, and what it means to be an artist. All through their lives, Cricket sees Olympia as his soulmate and destiny, and while she is always his champion, romantically her eyes are always seeking something—and someone—else. Their love changes over the decades, but their commitment to each other, and their search for meaning in the making of art, never wanes. The novel spans the globe, from New York to Cambodia, Indiana to Paris, and follows Cricket and Olympia through sickness and health, war and death. Book Browse

Exit Party by Emily Mandel

The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.

As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change. Amazon & BookBrowse

Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell by Robert Dugoni

Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends.

Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.

Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design―especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open―bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters. Winner of Suspense Magazine’s Crimson Scribe Award.https://www.bookbub.com/blog/favorite-book-of-2025-readers-share?position=seemore&source=multicontent&target=title

The Hill By Harriet Clark

Suzanna Klein was a baby when her mother got up early one morning to rob a bank with a group of fellow radicals. Now, every Saturday, Suzanna lines up at the prison gates among the other children, each dressed as if for celebration. Inside there is a nursery and a cemetery; there are watchful guards and distractable nuns; there are women counting down to release and women like Suzanna’s mother, who will never be released.

At home, Suzanna is raised by her grandmother, who is entirely unforgiving of her daughter’s crime and refuses to visit the prison. Surrounding Suzanna are her grandmother’s friends, who know one another from their years in the Communist Party and still spend extended cocktail hours debating the Hitler-Stalin pact. Though these women once insisted on changing the world, they are torn between teaching Suzanna how the world works and shielding her from it.

Suzanna vows to return to the prison forever but her mother wants her to be free. Harriet Clark’s The Hill is an incandescent novel of a child growing up between worlds, the last of three generations whose fates have been tied to punishment. It is the tale of a family broken apart by the desire for change, told with irreverent wisdom and visionary force. The Hill brings new music to American fiction. Amazon

Ironwood by Michael Connelly

Detective Sergeant Stilwell knows that his posting on Catalina Island is no paradise, but to most residents, it seems blissfully separated—by twenty-two miles of ocean—from the troubles of Los Angeles County. But now a threat is coming to his safe haven.

Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, Stilwell and his deputies watch a plane land in the middle of the night at the Airport in the Sky, a remote airstrip in the mountains. A duffel bag of drugs is dropped and the deputies move in, but things quickly go sideways. While Stilwell chases the fleeing pickup man into the mountainside brush, shots are fired on the runway and the plane flies off.

An internal inquiry follows, putting Stilwell on the bench until he is cleared of responsibility for the disastrous operation. But he is determined to find out who brought deadly violence to his island, and begins his own secret investigation into the drug deal gone wrong.

While under orders to remain in the sheriff’s substation, he finds in the lost and found a valuable backpack that was never claimed. He traces it to a woman who disappeared while hiking on the island four years ago. But then why was the pack only turned in two months back? Now thoroughly intrigued, he follows the mystery all the way to the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and Detective Renée Ballard.

Stilwell and Ballard work the case from both sides of the channel, and soon realize they are on the trail of a criminal who revels in taunting the authorities. Meanwhile, frustrated at being shut out of an investigation on his own island, Stilwell risks his already shaky standing in the department to pursue a case whose reach is wider than he ever imagined.

Page-turning, packed with intrigue, and bringing together an unstoppable investigative team, Ironwood continues the Catalina series with all of Michael Connelly’s signature “relentless narrative drive…evocative atmosphere, realistic dialogue, and well-developed characters” (Washington Review of Books). Amazon

Land by Maggie O’Farrell

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a novel about separation and reunion, tragedy and recovery, colonization and rebellion. It is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away. As spellbinding and varied as the landscape that inspired it, Land is, above all, a story of survival, for our times, and for all time. Book Browse

Palaces of the Crow by Ray Nayler

In Ray Nayler’s speculative novel of the recent past, four young teens caught between Nazis and the Red Army survive winter in the woods with the help of a flock of highly intelligent crows with a magnificent secret of their own to protect.

Neriya, a young Jewish girl who dreams of becoming a biologist, has befriended a local flock of crows in her shtetl. Czeslaw is an underage Polish soldier who deserts the Red Army and runs into the freezing Lithuanian woods. Kezia is a Roma horse trader whose family is on the run from Soviet collectivization. As the German blitzkrieg crashes across the border in June 1941, all three are caught up in the onslaught. Along with Innokentiy, an abandoned boy who cannot speak, they are driven into the primeval forest, where they survive by forming an unbreakable bond with one another―and with Neriya’s intelligent crows, who for years have been bringing her intricate gifts suggesting they are no ordinary corvids.

As the war goes on, the crows warn the children of danger and help them hide from the human threats of the forest―not only the Germans but also Russian deserters, Polish partisans, fascist Lithuanian police, and the other bandits and outcasts wandering the benighted landscape.

From the Ray Bradbury Prize and Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, and Hugo and Locus Award winner, Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow blends history and haunting speculative wonder into a story of survival, loyalty and the fragile beauty of life in the darkest of times. BookBrowse & Amazon

Whistler by Ann Pachett

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything. BookBrowse, BookBub

https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/books/whistler-by-ann-patchett?readworthy_edition_id=672

The Young Will Remember by Eve Chung

1950. It’s the coldest winter in decades, and twenty-eight-year-old Chinese American journalist Ellie Chang is on a military flight to cover a battle in the mountains of North Korea when her plane is shot down.

As she emerges from the fallen aircraft onto an icy field surrounded by the enemy, Ellie is sure it’s the end, certain she’ll never make it home to her parents…until a woman pushes her way through the crowd and claims Ellie as the lost daughter that she’s been searching for since the last war ended. Never mind that Ellie doesn’t speak a word of Korean.

Ellie is taken in by her rescuer—a woman who calls herself “Emma”—and the Paks, a pastor’s family. She knows she can’t stay and yet there’s no way she’ll survive on her own.

As the war intensifies, the sky alighting with bombs overhead, Ellie convinces Emma and the Paks to travel south towards an elusive promise of safety, and where Ellie insists they are more likely to find Emma’s real daughter, stuck on the other side of the frontlines.

Emma’s decision to claim Ellie, and Ellie’s choice to take her hand will connect their lives forever.

Moving and triumphant, The Young Will Remember sheds light on a “Forgotten War,” the resilience of love within our darkest histories, and the indefatigable determination of mothers to protect their children. Book Browse

Non Fiction

Beasts of the East: the Fall and the Rise of of America’s Eastern Wilderness by Andrew Moore

A fresh and fascinating portrait of the eastern wilds, The Beasts of the East is a celebration of the extraordinary lost natural wonder of the eastern U.S.—an astonishingly abundant landscape that was once the center of American wildness before its despoliation—and a revelatory journey through recent efforts to return elk, bison, wolves, and other creatures to their native landscapes

“A REVELATION. Andrew Moore recreates a lost world of not long ago, when the eastern part of North America was wild, when there were elk in Illinois, bison in Indiana, and much of Ohio and Michigan were covered by swamps. This book is both an elegy for what we’ve lost over the last few centuries of so-called human progress, and a clarion call for conservation, rewilding, and finding wonder in those pockets of history that still remain.” ?STEVE BRUSATTE, author of The Rise and Reign of the Mammals and The Story of Birds

Before skyscrapers and smokestacks rose across the eastern U.S., elk, bison, wolves, and cougars roamed. Typically imagined as icons of the West, these large mammals are in fact native to what was once a kind of Eden—towering forests in the Northeast, rolling prairies in the Midwest, and cypress swamps in the Deep South. But, in mere decades, industrialization and unregulated hunting brought these emblems of the East to the precipice of extinction; by the 1950s, squirrels were one of the few wild mammals an easterner was likely to encounter.

Now, even as the climate and biodiversity crises loom, eastern wildlife are staging an unlikely comeback. Herds of bison graze on Illinois prairies, red wolves lurk in North Carolina’s coastal marshes, and abandoned coal mines in Kentucky are now home to thousands of elk. Such rewilding promises to restore balance to eastern ecosystems and return one of the most biodiverse regions in the world to its former luster—but not without controversy.

In The Beasts of the East, we follow environmental writer and James Beard Award finalist Andrew Moore as he meets conservationists, hunters, biologists, and nature lovers as they confront herculean challenges: How can we enable wildlife migration in the midst of suburban sprawl? Are these success stories viable in the long-term? When humans and wildlife come in close contact, how do we define wilderness? Amazon

The Housewives Underground: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the JFK Assassination Our Most Enduring Mystery by Kaitlin Tiffany

“Kaitlyn Tiffany masterfully unspools a hidden history of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath.”—Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls and The Sisterhood

In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. A scattered group of Americans had pointed to major problems with the report prepared by President Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government’s work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one.

Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as “scavengers” and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in The Housewives Underground, Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin, and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory. Field hosted screenings of the Zapruder film and raised money to pursue new leads. Martin traveled frequently to Dallas, enlisted her children to help interview witnesses, and irritated J. Edgar Hoover with her “antagonistic” attitude toward the FBI.

And at the center of the story is Sylvia Meagher—a born-and-raised New Yorker who was devoted to the ballet and the Mets, cultivated fierce friendships and firm grudges, and dedicated twenty-five years to her conviction that the whole truth of JFK’s assassination had not been told.

Painstakingly researched and engrossing, The Housewives Underground takes readers back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s—a time when Americans’ belief in their government was eroding—introducing readers to the so-called housewives who asked the first, hardest questions about one of the most shocking events in American history. BookBub & Amazon

Notes on Being a Man by Scott Galloway

Bestselling author, NYU professor, and cohost of the Pivot podcast Scott Galloway offers a path forward for men and parents of boys.

Boys and men are in crisis. Rarely has a cohort fallen further and faster than young men living in Western democracies. Boys are less likely to graduate from high school or college than girls. One in seven men reports having no friends, and men account for three of every four deaths of despair in America. Even worse, the lack of attention to these problems has created a vacuum filled by voices espousing misogyny, the demonization of others, and a toxic vision of masculinity. But this is not just a male issue: Women and children can’t flourish if men aren’t doing well. And as we know from spates of violence, there is nothing more dangerous than a lonely, broke young man.

Scott Galloway has been sounding the alarm on this issue for years. In Notes on Being a Man, Galloway explores what it means to be a man in modern America. He promotes the importance of healthy masculinity and mental strength. He shares his own story from boyhood to manhood, exploring his parents’ difficult divorce, his issues with anger and depression, his attempts to earn money, and his life raising two boys. He shares the sometimes funny, often painful lessons he learned along the way, some of which include:

• Get out of the house. Action absorbs anxiety.

• Take risks and be willing to feel like an imposter. Don’t let rejection stop you.

• Be kind. That’s the secret to success in relationships.

• Find what you’re good at; follow your talent.

• Acknowledge your blessings—and create opportunities for others. Be of surplus value.

• Being a good dad means being good to the mother of your children.

• Life isn’t about what happens to you—it’s about how you respond to it.

With unflinching honesty, Scott Galloway maps out an enriching, inspiring operator’s manual for being a man today. Amazon & The Week 6/

Safe Passage: The Untold Story of Diplomatic Intrigue, Betrayal, and the Exchange of Americans and Japanese Civilians by Sea During World War II by Evelyn Iritani

An untold story of idealism, betrayal, and behind-the-scenes American–Japanese contacts in World War II.

In the fall of 1943, during some of the Pacific theater’s bloodiest battles, the United States and Japan pulled off a diplomatic coup―the exchange of civilians caught on the wrong side of the battlefield after Pearl Harbor. Nearly fifteen hundred Allied civilians trapped in Asia, mostly Americans, sailed through dangerous waters to an Indian port city where they were traded for an equivalent number of Japanese immigrants and their families sent from the Americas. The fate of the more than ten thousand Americans left behind rested on the success of this endeavor.

In Safe Passage, the award-winning journalist Evelyn Iritani reveals the herculean efforts of the American diplomat James Keeley to engineer these wartime exchanges despite great resistance from within and outside his government; the shipboard conflicts among passengers, including missionaries, revelers, and sharp-tongued journalists; and the moral compromises involved in securing their safe passage. Faced with too few bodies to trade and desperate to free Americans from perilous conditions, the United States uprooted and repatriated Japanese citizens of Latin America, sometimes against their will, while Japanese imprisoned in camps, many of them American citizens, were forced to choose between expulsion to a war zone or an uncertain future behind barbed wire. The result is a revelatory account of the hurdles to pursuing humanitarian action in wartime. Amazon

This is Also A Love Story by Sally Hayden

An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds.

We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the incredible goodness of regular people.

In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.

What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us? This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and—as a result—to question what might be needed to create a better world. BookBrowse & BookHub

The Wreck of the Mentor by Eric Jay Dolin

An astonishing true story―one of the most gripping maritime sagas of the nineteenth century―told by our era’s “expert literary steersman” (Washington Post).

From the best–selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters comes the story of the American whaleship Mentor, wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck in unfamiliar territory but also the profound uncertainty of contact with the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau, who within days approach the deserted men brandishing axes, clubs, and spears. In this gripping saga of cultural collision, tribal wars, and dashed hopes, award–winning historian Eric Jay Dolin vividly reconstructs the Mentor’s doomed voyage, the years of perilous captivity, and the delicate negotiations and fraught naval rescue mission that followed.

Illustrated by more than 100 images and maps, The Wreck of the Mentor is at once a powerful story of survival and a revealing window into the great Age of Sail a time when maritime ambition collided with local sovereignty, and when the outcome of one voyage rippled across oceans and empires. BookBub & Amazon

Yahoo Boys: Love, Deception and the Real Lives of Nigerian Romance Scammers by Carlos Barragan

An astonishing work of immersion journalism about four young romance scammers in Lagos, Nigeria, exploring how and why they scam, and the moral dilemmas they face

When his mother started emailing with a handsome American soldier who promised to send gold bars to her Madrid apartment, the journalist Carlos Barragán came face to face with the human toll of online romance fraud. After tracing the emails to an IP address in Nigeria, he set off on a journey to Lagos to find his mother’s scammer, where he stumbled on a much bigger story. There, in a crowded and impoverished neighborhood in the midst of Africa’s largest city, he encountered thousands of young men engaged in romance scamming. They call themselves “Yahoo Boys,” and each year they catfish millions of dollars from lonely victims overseas, building a dizzying local economy from their phones.

In this astonishing work of immersion journalism, Barragán takes us inside the lives of four of the Yahoo Boys of Lagos. We meet Biggy and Chibuike, each struggling with the temptations of fast money; Azeez, a tailor’s apprentice caught between the lure of crime and Nigeria’s economic crisis; and Richie, who is convinced that he’s responsible for the death of a woman in Kentucky he manipulated online for years. Some Yahoo Boys attain the status of folk heroes, buying houses and cars with the money they make, while others become dependent on drugs and “cash out”―successfully scam a victim―only to lose it all.

Through the Yahoo Boys’ twisting fortunes, Barragán discovers the psychological tactics they perfect, the brutal economic realities that drive them, and the moral dilemmas they confront. A work of radical empathy, this book reveals the human face behind a global phenomenon, and shows how loneliness in the West and poverty in Nigeria are two sides of the same screen.Bookbub & Amazon

https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/popular-nonfiction/2026/6

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, BookBrowse,, BookBub, Lit Hub, NPR, The Week or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2026 Spring Books to Read

Sep7

Season Book Pick for Spring

Chang and Eng by Darin Strauss

This stunning novel combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history’s most famous conjoined twins.

Born in Siam in 1811—on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River—Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world’s stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.

Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss’s narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers, and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the King of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century’s most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

Please note that in Fiction the book selection Foursome by Kline ( the wives’ story of chang and Eng)

Fiction

A Far Flung Life by M.L. Stedman

When we do something that can’t be undone or mended, how do we go on living? How do we find our North Star when there is no right answer? These are the questions at the center of M. L. Stedman’s unforgettable and magisterial new novel, A Far-flung Life. From the author of the beloved and bestselling The Light Between Oceans, this is a sweeping and epic story of a family, a tragedy, and the aftermath that reverberates for decades.

Remote Western Australia, 1958: here, for generations, the MacBrides have lived on a vast sheep station, Meredith Downs. It is a million acres, an ocean of arid land. On an ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered. And then, tragedy revisits when a twist of consequences claims the life of one sibling, and leads another to give up everything for the sake of an innocent child. Matt, the youngest MacBride, is plunged into a moral and emotional journey for which there is no map, no guide. The secrets at the heart of this gutting and beautiful story force him to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and happiness.

A Far-flung Life is a tale about family and belonging, fate and time. It is about people trying to do their best, and each, for private reasons, seeking shelter from the storm of life.

Can a fleeting moment unravel a whole life, mar it indelibly and irrevocably? Can compassion, resilience and forgiveness allow us to come to terms with our human imperfections? These are the questions Stedman asks in A Far-flung Life, her profoundly moving, uplifting, and luminous new novel about what the heart can endure for the sake of love. Amazon

Astral Library by Kate Quinn

Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives…inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy—Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself? BookBrowse & Amazon

The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann

The Beheading Game begins in the hours after Anne Boleyn’s beheading, when she wakes to find herself unceremoniously laid to rest in a makeshift coffin, her head wrapped in linen at her knees. Discarded by King Henry VIII for being unable to give him a male heir and reviled by Cromwell for being too smart for her own good, she was ultimately executed based on trumped-up charges of adultery, incest, and high treason.

Anne escapes the Tower of London, sews her head back on, then sets out on a quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry her own lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour. The stakes are high—if Jane gives birth to a rival heir, Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, will lose her claim to the throne. Traveling the streets of London in the guise of a commoner, with the help of a prostitute who becomes a trusted friend (and perhaps something more), Anne soon realizes how little she knew about life in the real world.

A fantastical journey through the wilds of England and Tudor history, filled with danger and magic and steeped in Arthurian legend, The Beheading Game is a prescient reminder that “mouthy” women have always been punished. Now, thanks to debut novelist Rebecca Lehmann, nearly five hundred years after Anne Boleyn’s death, one of history’s most maligned women finally has the chance to tell her story. Amazon & BookBrowse

This Book Made Me Think of You by Libby Page

Twelve books. Twelve months. One chance to heal her heart…

When Tilly Nightingale receives a call telling her there’s a birthday gift from her husband waiting for her at her local bookshop, it couldn’t come as more of a shock. Partly because she can’t remember the last time she read a book for pleasure. But mainly because Joe died five months ago….

When she goes to pick up the present, Alfie, the bookshop owner with kind eyes, explains the gift—twelve carefully chosen books with handwritten letters from Joe, one for each month, to help her turn the page on her first year without him.

At first Tilly can’t imagine sinking into a fictional world, but Joe’s tender words convince her to try, and something remarkable happens—Tilly becomes immersed in the pages, and a new chapter begins to unfold in her own life. Monthly trips to the bookstore—and heartfelt conversations with Alfie—give Tilly the comfort she craves and the courage to set out on a series of reading-inspired adventures that take her around the world. But as she begins to share her journey with others, her story—like a book—becomes more than her own. Book Browse

Brawler by Lauren Groff

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region — from New England to Florida to California — these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans’ dark and light angels.

“In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death,” one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples’ good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive. Book Browse

Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Minnesota Star Tribune, New York Post, Chicago Public Library

LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

That, as he saw it now, was his life’s work: trying to make right what he’d gotten wrong. Wasn’t that a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes?

In the jubilant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, shares a single, life-altering moment with Margaret Salt, a woman determined to outrun her past. Cal is married to Becky, whose spiritual gifts help the living speak to the dead, while Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving at sea, believed to be safe—until a telegram suggests otherwise.

What begins as a fleeting transgression becomes a complex secret that irrevocably binds all four of them in unexpected ways. As their small Ohio town remakes itself in the postwar boom, the Salt and Jenkins families remain in each other’s orbit, and the consequences of choices made long ago begin to emerge, reshaping their lives in ways that will forever impact the next generation.

Sweeping yet intimate, resplendent with moments of deep emotion and unforgettable characters, Buckeye is a transportive story of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness. BookBrowse

City Of Night Birds by Juhea Kim

A once-famous ballerina faces a final choice—to return to the world of Russian dance that nearly broke her, or to walk away forever—in this incandescent novel of redemption and love

On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident that stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past.

She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall.

One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours.

Painting a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics, and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope. Mysterious and alluring, passionate and virtuosic, Juhea Kim’s second novel is an affecting meditation on love, forgiveness, and the making of an artist in a turbulent world. BookBrowse

Departures by Julian Barnes

Shortly after our narrator, a writer named Julian, begins this compact book by discussing the workings of involuntary memory, he interrupts himself with a bulletin to the reader: “There will be a story—or a story within the story—but not just yet.”

Of course, whether Departure(s) is mostly fiction or not, there is a lot of its author in it, including Barnes’s reckoning with the blood disorder he has been living with since he was diagnosed in 2020, his long preoccupation with dying and grief, and his mordant sense of the indignities and lost opportunities we’re prey to in love. The story he promises to deliver is a love story, that of two friends he met at university in the 1960s, that time of touted but rarely experienced sexual freedom. Julian played matchmaker to Stephen (tall, gangling, uncertain) and Jean (tart and attractive); as the third wheel he was deeply invested in the success of their love and insulted when they broke up. Time is swift, and forty years later, he tries again, watching as their rekindled affair produces joys, betrayals, and disappointments of a different order.

“Life and memory can be so . . . quixotic, don’t you find?” Barnes uses both his novelistic memory and his (real?) personal diary entries to examine not just the quixotic relationship of Jean and Stephen but his writer’s eye upon it, and how his efforts in their behalf add up in the end. Having promised them he’d never write about them, he breaks the promise to fulfill one, amply, to his readers, in this delightful and poignant novelist’s game that only Julian Barnes knows how to play. BookBrowse & Amazon

Dreamt I found You by Jimin Han

From the critically acclaimed author of The Apology comes a contemporary retelling of Korea’s Romeo & Juliet, as the cousin of the star-crossed lovers helps them avoid a tragic fate.

When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of her debt-ridden relative. Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s parallel Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent’s suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed end.

For fans of Hello Beautiful, Dreamt I Found You is a wondrous, tender retelling of Korea’s most classic love story, steeped in the travails of a rigid class system, the power of premonition, and shot through with Korean folklore and magic. The Week & Amazon

Eradication: a Fable by Jonathan Miles

Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schoolteacher Adi answers a job listing offering a chance to save the world. The assignment: spend five weeks alone on the tiny Pacific island of Santa Flora, restoring an ecological balance gone dangerously awry by an invasive population of goats. Though he has no experience in wildlife management, he is hired anyway. Armed with little more than survival gear and uneasy resolve, he sets out to remove what doesn’t belong.

But the mission is not what it seems. The threats to the once-Edenic island aren’t what his employers claim. Complicating things further, he discovers he’s not alone on the island. Fearful for his own life, and for the fate of the island’s, Adi spends his sun-drenched days rooting out the true threat to Santa Flora and by extension, to the world it occupies. As isolation deepens and doubt takes hold, he finds the boundaries between duty and redemption, preservation and harm, growing harder to define.

A desert-island meditation on love, grief, and solitude, as well as a jolt to your emotional core, Eradication is an unforgettable reading experience and a bold work of imagination. With this fourth novel, Jonathan Miles, “a fluid, confident, and profoundly talented writer” (Dave Eggers), delivers his most compelling work yet. Amazon

Feast by Cather Kurtz

In nineteenth-century France, a young woman with a magical sense of taste saves a duc from poison, and her new role as poison taster thrusts her into the world of the nobility, where secrets and danger lurk around every corner.

Minha is born on the backstreets of late nineteenth-century London, the daughter of an Indian spice merchant and an English prostitute. She has a remarkable gift: an incredible sense of taste. She can taste the earth in which potatoes were grown or the tree on which fruits have ripened. She can smell each ingredient—and identify a single false note. But Minha’s gift and her mixed-race heritage provoke mistrust and rejection, even within her own family. Escaping alone to France, Minha chances upon work in the Château de Bellefalaise, where for the first time her strange abilities are lauded.

As official poison taster for Duc Nicolas, Minha must taste every morsel of food that will pass his lips. Others in the household are hostile to her, but when she discovers a man hiding in the stables, their unexpected meeting turns into the first true connection she’s felt since arriving in France.

But mystery and paranoia continue to swirl around the château, with the Duc’s poisoner unidentified and antagonism toward Minha growing. She knows it’s only a matter of time before fingers begin pointing her way. Will she run again, or is this the time to stand and fight?

A thoroughly addictive novel about food, possession, race, love, and a young woman fighting to build a fulfilling life against all odds, this is a gorgeously written debut by author Catherine Kurtz. Book Browse

The Final Score by Don Winslow

The trademark literary style, trenchant wit, and incisive characterization that have made Don Winslow a repeat New York Times bestselling author and “America’s greatest living crime writer” (Providence Journal) are on brilliant display in this new book sure to delight Winslow’s most devoted fans and first-time readers.

The multi-million-dollar casino heist is impossible—it can’t be done. That’s what makes it irresistible to a legendary robber facing the rest of his life in prison for his “Final Score.” An ambitious, hard-working college-bound teenager has a side job delivering illegal booze to “The Sunday List” until a crooked cop, a seductive customer, and a fake guru threaten to end his dreams. Two wise guys tell each other a “True Story” over breakfast at a diner. It’s all bullshit and laughs until someone else has to pick up the check. An otherwise honest patrolman has to make an excruciating choice between his loyalty to the job and his love for a ne’er-do-well cousin in “The North Wing.” The entitled, substance-addicted movie star that surfer/PI Boone Daniels and his crew are hired to babysit in “The Lunch Break” is a problem. She also has a problem—someone wants her dead. Finally, the one terrible, momentary mistake that a devoted family man makes sends him to prison and on a “Collision” course between the man he wants to be and the killer he’s forced to become to survive.

With a foreword written by award-winning crime author Reed Farrel Coleman, The Final Score is a propulsive, perceptive, and deeply immersive book of crime writing — the ultimate testament to Don Winslow’s prowess as a living legend of the genre. Amazon & The Week 4/17/26,p 23

The Foursome by Christina Baker Kline

When Eng and Chang Bunker arrive in Wilkes County in 1839, they’re not just a curiosity—they’re a sensation. Everyone is eager to learn whether the salacious rumors about them are true. Within months, the twins have opened a general store, bought land, and begun building a plantation. Now, word has it, they’re looking for wives—and in a place that thrives on gossip and legacy, their ambitions set the community on edge.

Sarah and Adelaide Yates, daughters of a once-prominent local family brought low by scandal, are drawn into their orbit. Bold, beautiful Adelaide sees in the twins’ fame a chance to reclaim her future. Sarah, quiet and observant, isn’t so sure. When the twins’ lives become entangled with theirs, they must navigate loyalty, longing, and identity in a world where everything—including race, class, and gender—is rigidly defined.

Spanning five decades and unfolding against the backdrop of a fractured nation hurtling toward war, The Foursome is both intimate and epic: a story of love and constraint, identity and reinvention. With piercing insight and emotional precision, Kline brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history and the complex, boundary-defying marriages at its center. Real Simple & Amazon

The Enchanting Life of Others by Can Xue

A celebration of the beguiling power of literature, from one of the world’s greatest storytellers

At the Pigeon Book Club, a circle of readers gathers for exhilarating meetings to discuss literature. The only requirements for entry are an all-encompassing love of books and the intuition that to read is to love and to love is to read. Xiao Sang, a department store clerk, wonders if life can ever be as captivating as a novel. Newlyweds Fei and Han Ma struggle to build a marriage as Han Ma discovers a surprising gift for storytelling. Xiao Ma, a hopeful dreamer, explores the possibility of romance with an older man. Bound by a shared passion for fiction, each book club member seeks to understand the relationship between the stories they read and the lives they lead, reveling in both the quotidian details and the ecstasy of aesthetics.

This is the most accessible work yet from the celebrated writer Can Xue: a utopian comedy and a work of profound joy, a love song to literary inspiration and the remarkable beauty of the ordinary. The Enchanting Lives of Others explores what it means to know and be known to others through the transformative power of reading. The New Yorker & Amazon

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The Keeper By Tana French

On a cold night in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty, a girl goes missing. Sweet, loving Rachel Holohan was about to be engaged to the son of the local big shot. Instead, she’s dead in the river.

In a close-knit small town, a death like this isn’t simple. It comes wrapped in generations-old grudges and power struggles, and it splits the townland in two. Retired Chicago detective Cal Hooper has friends here now, and he owes them loyalty, but his fiancée Lena wants nothing to do with Ardnakelty’s tangles. As the feud becomes more vicious, their settled peace starts to crack apart. And when they uncover a scheme that casts a new light on Rachel’s death and threatens the whole village, they find themselves in the firing line.

“One of the greatest crime novelists writing today” (Vox) crafts a masterwork of atmospheric suspense that brings the story of one of her most beloved characters to a spellbinding conclusion. Amazon & The Week, 4/17/26, p22

Lady Tremaine by Rachel Hochhauser

A breathtaking reimagining of Cinderella, as told through the eyes of its iconic “evil” stepmother, revealing a propulsive love story about the lengths a mother will go to for her children.

Twice-widowed, Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband’s title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters’ future through marriage.

When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters―only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the wellbeing of the stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.

As if Bridgerton met Circe, and exhilarating to its core, Lady Tremaine reimagines the myth of the evil stepmother at the heart of the world’s most famous fairy tale. It is a battle cry for a mother’s love for her daughters, and a celebration of women everywhere who make their own fortunes. BookBrowse

Lazar by Nelio Biedermann

At the turn of the 20th century, the Lázárs welcome their newest member in their rural summer estate, surrounded by a menacingly dark, enchanting forest. Lajos von Lázár is a baby boy with translucent skin and light-blue eyes who looks nothing like the rest of his family. Sándor, the imposing patriarch, is ashamed of his son’s peculiarity. Ilona finds her baby brother quite ugly. Mária is terrified that her son’s uncanny resemblance to the stagehand who died a couple weeks earlier might spell disaster. While Imre, Sándor’s brother whose otherworldly foresight is often confused for insanity, is struck by visions of a great catastrophe.

Lajos’s birth is emblematic of the many secrets, affairs, and peculiar otherworldly happenings that plague the Lázárs. As the decades go by, they will continue to fall prey to their desires, leading grand lives, and experiencing even greater tragedies as they’re swept by the tides of war and revolution that befall their country. But time and again, in the lighter years, extraordinary love and hope shine through.

Masterfully written and deeply haunting, Lázár is a magisterial novel that presents the sweeping history of a nation through the lives of one extraordinary family. Amazon

The News From Dublin by Col Toibin

From Colm Tóibín, “one of the world’s best living literary writers” (The Boston Globe), comes a brilliant collection of nine short stories, many never-before-published, set across Ireland, Spain, and America—about the complexities of family, longing, loss, and love.

Celebrated as “his generation’s most gifted writer of love’s complicated, contradictory power” (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is a master of short fiction as well as the novel, able to summon an extraordinary intensity of emotion in a brief tale. The eleven stories transport readers across continents and eras.

In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.

Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.

The News from Dublin is an exquisite introduction to Tóibín’s short fiction for new readers who may have discovered Tóibín with the publication of Long Island, and a glorious new collection for longtime fans of this “achingly beautiful writer…with infinite compassion” (The Miami Herald). Amazon

The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees his light and some of his fellow offenders, including a tender-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen desperate for a role model. Buoyed by them and by his mother’s enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible. Can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves? Amazon

The Secret of Snow by Tina Harnesk

This lyrical runaway Swedish hit follows a reclusive, elderly couple who cross paths with a pair of twentysomething newcomers in a small mountain town, revealing an unexpected, shared history and the reclamation of a nearly extinct culture.

Meet Máriddja: eccentric, eighty-five years old, and facing a cancer diagnosis. She’s determined to keep the truth about her illness from her husband Biera, while also finding someone who can take care of him once she’s gone.

Meet Kaj: a new transplant to the village, recently engaged to Mimmi, and mourning the death of his mother. One day, when Kaj unexpectedly finds a box of Sámi—the indigenous people of Scandinavia—handicrafts belonging to his mother, he unlocks something he never anticipated, something that will change his life for years to come.

A “brilliant debut” (Aftonbladet Söndag, Sweden) full of humor and heartbreak, The Secrets of Snow movingly grapples with grief, love, and the power of history. BookBub & Amazon

Sister of Yellow by Mieko Kawakami

Hana has nothing – she’s fifteen years old and living in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears.

Kimiko is older, a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly Hana has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible.

But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana’s hope, her optimism, and her drive will be pushed to the limit . . .

A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation. Amazon

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?

And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.

https://www.realsimple.com/new-books-everyone-will-be-talking-about-this-spring-11951502

Transcription by Ben Lerner

From “the most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times Magazine), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store―or to erase―our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record. The Week, 4/17/26 & Amazon

Upward Bound by Woody Brown

It will change the way you look at the world.”—Angie Kim

“This captivating work illuminates a world too often ignored.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A Most Anticipated Book: The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Marie Claire, Alta Journal, Publishers Weekly, Literary Hub, Publishers Lunch

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles’s disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister, Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center’s pool who feels out of her depth. Then there’s Dave, Upward Bound’s director, who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center’s irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won’t soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center’s doors. The Week 4/17/26 & Amazon

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.

Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood. Bookbrowse & Amazon

Non Fiction:

A Marraige at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck By Sophie Elmhirst

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?

Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But in June 1972, Maurice and Maralyn set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.

What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.

Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.

Family Of Spies:A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor by Christine Kuehn

It began with a letter from a screenwriter, asking about a story. Your family. World War II. Nazi spies. Christine Kuehn was shocked and confused. When she asked her seventy-year-old father, Eberhard, what this could possibly be about, he stalled, deflected, demurred, and then wept. He knew this day would come.

The Kuehns, a prominent Berlin family, saw the rise of the Nazis as a way out of the hard times that had befallen them. When the daughter of the family, Eberhard’s sister, Ruth, met Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels at a party, the two hit it off, and they had an affair. But Ruth had a secret—she was half Jewish—and Goebbels found out. Rather than having Ruth killed, Goebbels instead sent the entire Kuehn family to Hawaii, to work as spies half a world away. There, Ruth and her parents established an intricate spy operation from their home, just a few miles down the road from Pearl Harbor, shielding Eberhard from the truth. They passed secrets to the Japanese, leading to the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. After Eberhard’s father was arrested and tried for his involvement in planning the assault, Eberhard learned the harsh truth about his family and faced a decision that would change the path of the Kuehn family forever.

Jumping back and forth between Christine discovering her family’s secret and the untold past of the spies in Germany, Japan, and Hawaii, Family of Spies is fast-paced history at its finest and will rewrite the narrative of December 7, 1941. Amazon & The Week 1/30/26, p 22

The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds By James H. McCommons

“A definitive history of bird conservation in America.” (Kirkus Reviews, starred)

From the time the country was founded, early Americans assumed that the land’s natural resources were infinite, including its birds, which were zealously hunted for food, game, and fashion. With the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon―a bird once so numerous that its flocks darkened the sky in flight―many realized actions needed to be taken if other birds were to be saved. What followed was both a spiritual awakening and a great crusade to save birds and their habitat. The campaign took place on many battlefields: society teas in Boston, hunt clubs on the East Coast, the mangroves in the Everglades, and in the editorial pages of newspapers and periodicals. From many corners of the country the bird protection movement was born and brought together a remarkable coalition of people and organizations to save America’s birds.

The Feather Wars is an entertaining and expansive work of American history, an incredible story about how disparate characters―progressive politicians, free-thinking society belles, nature writers and artists, bird-loving U.S. presidents, gunmakers, business titans, and brave game wardens―came together to save hundreds of species of birds. Heroes, martyrs, villains, and conflicted do-gooders―the early bird conservation movement had them all. Together they transformed how Americans thought and cared about birds, forever altering the American landscape. Amazon

In Sickness and in Health by Laura Mauldin

When twenty-seven-year-old Laura Mauldin moved to New York for graduate school, she fell headlong into love. But just months into the relationship, her partner’s leukemia returned—and in a country without adequate systems for long-term care, Laura found herself quietly and devastatingly transformed from romantic partner to unpaid, full-time caregiver, fighting to keep the woman she loved alive in a system designed to let them both fall through the cracks.

Now a sociologist and professor of disability studies, Dr. Mauldin turns her private pain into a searing public investigation. To better understand her own experience, she speaks with couples across the country navigating the brutal, lonely fallout of chronic illness and disability. These are heartbreaking stories of love under strain—relationships full of extraordinary intimacy and resilience, but pushed to the edge by an ableist society that would rather look away from its most vulnerable citizens. At the heart of this investigation is a profound series of questions: What if love isn’t enough? What if our most cherished romantic ideals—commitment, sacrifice, “in sickness and in health”—have been weaponized to excuse the state from its responsibilities? And what happens to love when we ask it to do the work of an entire broken system?

Urgent, unflinching, and full of grace, In Sickness and In Health is a rallying cry for a radical reimagining of care—not as an individual act of devotion, but as a collective responsibility. In connecting the care crisis to the politics of love and intimacy, Mauldin reframes the conversation, urging us to build a world where no one is left to do the work of love alone. BookBrowse

London Falling:A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the bestselling, prizewinning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface

In the early morning of November 29th, 2019, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s spy agency, captured video of a young man pacing back and forth on a high balcony of Riverwalk, a luxury tower on the bank of the river Thames. At 2:24 a.m., he jumped into the river.

In a quiet London neighborhood several miles away, Rachelle Brettler was worried about her son. Zac had told her that he had gone to stay with a friend for the weekend, but then he did not come home. Days later, a police car pulled up and two officers relayed the dreadful news: Her son was dead.

In their unbearable grief, Rachelle and her husband, Matthew, struggled to understand what had happened to Zac. He had had his troubles, but in no way seemed suicidal. As they would soon discover, however, there was a lot they did not know about their son. Only after his death did they learn that he had adopted a fictitious alter ego: Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch and heir to a great fortune. Under this guise, Zac had become entangled with a slippery London businessman named Akbar Shamji and a murderous gangster known as Indian Dave. As the Brettlers set about investigating their son’s death, they were pulled into a different and more dangerous London than the one they’d always known, and came to believe that something much more nefarious than a suicide had claimed Zac’s life. But to their immense frustration, Scotland Yard seemed unable—or unwilling—to bring the perpetrators to justice.

In a bravura feat of reporting and writing, Patrick Radden Keefe chronicles the Brettlers’ quest, peeling back layers of mystery and exposing the seedy truths behind the glamorous London of posh mansions and private nightclubs, a city in which everything is for sale, and aspirational fantasies are underwritten by dirty money and corruption. London Falling is a mesmerizing investigation of an inexplicable death and a powerful narrative driven by suspense and staggering revelations. But it is also an intimate and deeply poignant inquiry into the nature of parental love and the challenges of being a parent today, a portrait of a family trying to solve the riddle not just of how their son died, but of who he really was in life. Book Browse, Amazon & NPR

Making the Best of What is Left: When We’re Too Old to Get the Chairs Reupholstered by Judith Viorst

In a career that has spanned more than fifty years, Judith Viorst has captivated readers with her bestselling children’s books and collections of poetry reflecting on each decade of life. Now in her nineties, Viorst writes about life’s “Final Fifth,” those who are eighty to one hundred years old. Her signature blend of humor and vulnerability infuses personal anecdotes and observations, drawing you into her world of memories and candid conversations.

She confesses, “I never ever send a text while driving, and not just because I don’t know how to text.” She discusses the afterlife (She doesn’t believe in it, but if it exists, she hopes her sister-in-law isn’t there). She complains to her dead husband (“I need you fixing our damn circuit breakers. I need you! Could you please stop being dead?”). And she explores the late-life meanings of wisdom and happiness and second chances and home.

With a wit that defies age, Viorst navigates the terrain of loss. It’s a poignant dance between grief and levity that will resonate with those in their Final Fifth as well as anyone who has parents, relatives, or friends in their eighties and beyond. This is Judith Viorst at her best. Amazon

The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts

Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the “colorline.” Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn’t just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages—a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life.

As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy’s father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s—studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality.

Decades later, while sorting through her father’s papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father’s research didn’t begin with her parents’ love story—it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father’s intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own.

Though grounded in her parents’ research, it’s Roberts’ captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents’ interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today’s most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love. Amazon & (the week p23 2/27/26

Scale Boy: An African Childhood by Patrice Nganang,

An extraordinary chronicle of youth that evokes the paradoxes of modern Africa―complex, contradictory, and full of conflict, tragedy, and joy.

Patrice Nganang, the acclaimed author of Dog Days, Mount Pleasant, and, most recently, A Trail of Crab Tracks, which was a 2022 New Yorker Book of the Year, writes about his vibrant, animated youth in Cameroon, a period of upheaval and change in the country’s history and in his life.

Scale Boy is a memoir that brings great brightness and joy to the tumultuous years of discovering oneself and one’s community; though there are moments of danger and confusion in his story, Nganang aims to present a new vision of a young Black African man’s coming-of-age. Book Browse & Amazon

The Sea Captain’s WIfe: A True Story of Mutiny. Love, & Adventures from the Bottom of the World by Tilar J. Mazzeo

The true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica’s deadly waters, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow Clicquot

Summer, 1856 Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband, Joshua, were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win the race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit―into the most treacherous waters in the world.

As their ship, Neptune’s Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. The treacherous first mate, confined to the brig for insubordination, was agitating for mutiny. With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. Determined to save the ship, the crew, and their future, she faces down the deadly waters of Drake’s Passage.

Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, The Sea Captain’s Wife finally gives Mary Ann Patten―the first woman to command a merchant vessel as captain ― her due. Mazzeo draws on new archival research from nineteenth-century women’s maritime journals and on her own expedition to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in search of Mary Ann’s route. Thrilling, harrowing, and heroic, The Sea Captain’s Wife is the story of one woman who, for love, would do what was necessary to survive. The Week1/16/26 p.22 & Amazon

Things in Nature merely Grow by Yiyun Li

One of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Yiyun Li’s remarkable, defiant work of radical acceptance as she considers the loss of her son James.

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged . . . My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this―because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a time line.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: doing “things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is ‘to be.’ Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later; only now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. Amazon

Women Who Talk to the Dead: The True Story of 200 Forgotten Murder Victims and the Relentless Pursuit of Justice by an FBI Agent and a Detroit Police Detective by Katherine Schweit

Two women lead the largest FBI exhumation in history to give voice to 200 forgotten murder victims.

True crime fans of Mindhunter, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, and We Keep the Dead Close, will love how Schweit blends her expertise in law enforcement with her gift for storytelling, to bring readers this gripping true-crime story of social justice.

In the shadows of Detroit’s abandoned buildings and beneath the soil of county cemeteries lay hundreds of murder victims-buried anonymously, their killers uncharged, their families not knowing why they disappeared. For decades, only decaying police files hinted at what happened to these forgotten cold cases murders.

Until two women decided to listen to the dead.

In the spirit of award-winning writers Amber Hunt and Jana Monroe, Women Who Talk to the Dead chronicles the remarkable journey of Detroit Police Detective Shannon Jones and FBI Special Agent Leslie Larsen who assemble a team led by female forensic anthropologists, scientists, and investigators who methodically unearthed Detroit’s painful past. Surrounded by skepticism and bureaucratic roadblocks, follow them through rain-soaked cemetery digs, crumbling case files, and bone-filled body bags to identify the nameless dead and bring closure to families who had spent decades wondering what happened to their loved ones.

Katherine Schweit takes readers inside this unprecedented cold case investigation, revealing:

The scientific breakthroughs that allow forensic experts to “hear” what bones can tell us decades after death
The emotional toll of searching for answers when everyone else has moved on
The bitter reality of which murders are solved and which victims society deems disposable
How a small team of dedicated women changed a system that has too often allowed killers to escape justice simply because their victims were poor, marginalized, or forgotten

Part forensic procedural, part social justice narrative, this book exposes the tragic consequences when the criminal justice system fails those most vulnerable. It also celebrates the resilience and determination of the law enforcement officers who refuse to let these forgotten victims remain nameless.

Some of Detroit’s dead have finally reclaimed their identities-but hundreds more still whisper from unmarked graves, waiting for someone to listen. Amazon & The Nerve

Unread: Amemori of Learning (and Loving) to Read by Oliver James

As a result of childhood learning disabilities and educational neglect, Oliver James graduated from high school and became one of approximately 45 million functionally illiterate Americans. However, at age 32, with big dreams and few tools to actualize them, he dedicated himself to learning the key skill that had evaded him his entire life: reading.

Oliver has become a TikTok/BookTok sensation for the way he’s candidly documented his decision to learn to read as an adult, and his struggles and triumphs along the way. Here, he tells the full story behind his journey for the first time through the 21 key books that shaped and informed his experience. His story reveals the ways in which reading can teach each of us how to be better, more empathetic people.

In just 365 days, Oliver went from barely being able to read a restaurant menu to closing in on his goal of finishing 100 books in a year. Unread is a moving reminder to all of us that words and stories have power, and that, no matter our past, it’s never too late to grow. Amazon

Young Adult

Her Hidden Fire by Cliodhna O’Sullivan

In a world where dragons soar through the skies and magical abilities are an elite privilege, the ruling family of Ailm’s Keep is on a knife-edge: Can their son Ionáin prove that he can channel magic, or will his entire family be cast out in disgrace?

Éadha, a servant girl who loves Ionáin, is shocked to discover shortly before the test that she can wield magic herself. It’s extremely rare for a girl to have this talent, especially outside the few great Families. At Ionáin’s moment of truth, when it’s clear he is about to fail, Éadha makes a desperate gamble to save him from humiliation by pretending her magic is his, forfeiting her own claim to power.

Her decision sends them both to an academy of magic, where she must shield her secret from every grim Master and scheming apprentice—especially the handsome but enigmatic Gry. As Éadha enters this whirlwind of patriarchy, class, heartache, and jealousy, she also learns about magic’s terrible cost—the human price that Channellers willingly pay to maintain their power. BookBrowse & Amazon

Thank you for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, BookBrowse,, Book Riot, GoodReads, Lit Hub, NPR, Real Simple, The Wall Street Journal, The Week or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2025 Spring Books to Read

Dec17

Book Pick for The Spring Season

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years • A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post–9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.

At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel that is “dazzling…funny and defiant, and simultaneously so wise.” —San Francisco Chronicle & Amazon

Please see her new novel in Fiction below: “ Dream Count**

Fiction:

Audition: A Novel by Katie Kitamura

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately. Amazon & https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5341339/new-books-spring-2025

Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

A debut novel from Hal Ebbott, this book follows a pair of families that have been friends for decades. Like with any long-term relationship there are petty jealousies and long-simmering resentments, but all of that stuff gets overshadowed by an act of betrayal so severe that it up-ends both families. Plot aside, Ebbott’s voice and language set the book apart from other family dramas.

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/02/nx-s1-5341339/new-books-spring-2025

** Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations of the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape

https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/books/dream-count-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie

Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are. Amazon

Dream State By Eric Puchner

“The story of relationships built and broken, mistakes inherited and repeated, and the beauty of trying again….already one of the year’s best.” –People

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents’ story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence. Amazon & BookHub

The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo

In a shabby house, on a shabby street, in the new capital of Madrid, Luzia Cotado uses scraps of magic to get through her days of endless toil as a scullion. But when her scheming mistress discovers the lump of a servant cowering in the kitchen is actually hiding a talent for little miracles, she demands Luzia use those gifts to improve the family’s social position.

What begins as simple amusement for the nobility takes a perilous turn when Luzia garners the notice of Antonio Pérez, the disgraced secretary to Spain’s king. Still reeling from the defeat of his armada, the king is desperate for any advantage in the war against England’s heretic queen―and Pérez will stop at nothing to regain the king’s favor.

Determined to seize this one chance to better her fortunes, Luzia plunges into a world of seers and alchemists, holy men and hucksters, where the lines between magic, science, and fraud are never certain. But as her notoriety grows, so does the danger that her Jewish blood will doom her to the Inquisition’s wrath. She will have to use every bit of her wit and will to survive―even if that means enlisting the help of Guillén Santángel, an embittered immortal familiar whose own secrets could prove deadly for them both. Amazon & NPR

Favorite Daughter by Morgan Dick

Mickey and Arlo are half sisters. But they’ve never spoken and never met. Arlo adored her father—but always lived in the shadow of his magnetic personality and burdensome vices. Meanwhile, their father abandoned Mickey and her mother years ago, and Mickey has hated him since. When she receives news of her father’s passing, Mickey is shocked to learn that he’s left her his not-inconsiderable fortune. The catch: Mickey must attend a series of therapy sessions before the money can be released.

Unbeknownst to either woman, the psychologist Mickey’s father has ensured she meets with is her half sister, Arlo. Having cared for her beloved father on his sickbed, Arlo is devastated to discover he’s cut her out of his will. She resolves to learn where the money went and why.

Working together as therapist and patient—with no idea that they’re in fact sisters—Arlo and Mickey soon get under each other’s skin. Arlo, eager to outrun a mistake in her professional past, is keen to redeem herself with her new client. But Mickey is far from the model patient. As Mickey’s personal and professional lives spiral out of control and Arlo uncovers the truth about who her new patient really is, the sisters find themselves on a crash course that will break—or save—them both. Amazon

Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa & translated by Polly Barton

A literary phenomenon in Japan, Hunchback is an extraordinary and thrilling debut novel about sex, disability, and power.”—International Booker Prize Judges

“Unforgettable . . . a thriller of the body . . . [a] miracle.”—The New York Times Book Review

Born with a congenital muscle disorder, Shaka spends her days in her room in a care home outside Tokyo, relying on an electric wheelchair to get around and a ventilator to breathe. But if Shaka’s physical life is limited, her quick, mischievous mind has no boundaries: She takes e-learning courses on her iPad, publishes explicit fantasies on websites, and anonymously troll-tweets to see if anyone is paying attention (“In another life, I’d like to work as a high-class prostitute”). One day, she tweets into the void an offer of an enormous sum of money for a sperm donor. To Shaka’s surprise, her new nurse accepts the dare, unleashing a series of events that will forever change Shaka’s sense of herself as a woman in the world.

Hunchback has shaken Japanese literary culture with its skillful depiction of the physical body and its unrepentant humor. Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, it’s a feminist story about the dignity of an individual who insists on her right to make choices for herself, no matter the consequences. Formally creative and refreshingly unsentimental, Hunchback depicts the joy, anger, and desires of a woman demanding autonomy in a world that doesn’t always grant it to people like her. Full of wit, bite, and heart, this unforgettable novel reminds us all of the full potential of our lives, regardless of the limitations we experience. Book Browse & Amazon

https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/4979/hunchback

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024 • A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

**New York Times Book Review Book Club Pick**

Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the 2024 Climate Fiction Prize

One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024

A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours

“Ravishingly beautiful.” — Joshua Ferris, New York Times

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos and talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet. Their experiences of sixteen sunrises and sunsets and the bright, blinking constellations of the galaxy are at once breathtakingly awesome and surprisingly intimate.

Profound and contemplative, Orbital is a moving elegy to our environment and planet. Amazon & Book Passage & Book Depot, MV, CA

Presumed Gulity by Scott Turow

Rusty is a retired judge attempting a third act in life with a loving soon-to-be wife, Bea, with whom he shares both a restful home on an idyllic lake in the rural Midwest and a plaintive hope that this marriage will be his best, and his last. But the peace that’s taken Rusty so long to find evaporates when Bea’s young adult son, Aaron, living under their supervision while on probation for drug possession, disappears. If Aaron doesn’t return soon, he will be sent back to jail.

Aaron eventually turns up with a vague story about a camping trip with his troubled girlfriend, Mae, that ended in a fight and a long hitchhike home. Days later, when she still hasn’t returned, suspicion falls on Aaron, and when Mae is subsequently discovered dead, Aaron is arrested and set for trial on charges of first-degree murder.

Faced with few choices and even fewer hopes, Bea begs Rusty to return to court one last time, to defend her son and to save their last best hope for happiness. For Rusty, the question is not whether to defend Aaron, or whether the boy is in fact innocent—it’s whether the system to which he has devoted his life can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty. Amazon

The Pretender by Jo Harkin

In 1480 John Collan’s greatest anxiety is how to circumvent the village’s devil goat on his way to collect water. But the arrival of a well-dressed stranger from London upends his life forever: John is not John Collan, not the son of Will Collan but Lambert Simnel, the son of the long-deceased Duke of Clarence, and has been hidden in the countryside after a brotherly rift over the crown—and because Richard III has a habit of disappearing his nephews.

Removed from his humble origins and sent to Oxford to be educated in a manner befitting the throne’s rightful heir, Lambert is put into play by his masters. He learns the rules of etiquette in Burgundy and the machinations of the court in Ireland, where he encounters the intractable Joan, the delightfully strong-willed and manipulative daughter of his Irish patrons, a girl imbued with both extraordinary political savvy and occasional murderous tendencies. Joan has two paths available to her—marry or become a nun. Lambert’s choices are similarly stark: he will either become king or die in battle. Together they form an alliance that will change the fate of the English monarchy.

Inspired by a footnote to history—the true story of the little-known Simnel, who was a figurehead of the 1487 Yorkist rebellion and ended up working as a spy in the court of King Henry VII—The Pretender is historical fiction at its finest, a gripping, exuberant, rollicking portrait of British monarchy and life within the court, with a cast of unforgettable heroes and villains drawn from fifteenth-century England. A masterful new work from a major new author. Book Browse & Amazon

The SafeKeep by Yael van der Wouden

“Remarkable…Compelling…Fine and taut…Indelible.” —The New York Times • “Moving, unnerving, and deeply sexy.” —Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl with the Pearl Earring • “A brilliant debut, as multi-faceted as a gem.” —Kirkus Reviews

A house is a precious thing…

It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Mysterious, sophisticated, sensual, and infused with intrigue, atmosphere, and sex, The Safekeep is “a brave and thrilling debut about facing up to the truth of history, and to one’s own desires” (The Guardian). Amazon

The Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi & translated Lin King

WINNER OF THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.

Soon a Taiwanese woman―who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name―is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.

Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships. Amazon

The Turning by Tim Winton

In these extraordinary tales about ordinary people from ordinary places, Tim Winton describes turnings of all kinds: second thoughts, changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, abrupt transitions. The seventeen stories overlap to paint a convincing and cohesive picture of a world where people struggle against the terrible weight of their past and challenge the lives they have made for themselves.

In The Turning Tim Winton gives us seventeen exquisite overlapping tales of second thoughts and mid-life regret – extraordinary stories of ordinary people from ordinary places. Here are turnings of all kinds – changes of heart, nasty surprises, slow awakenings, sudden detours – where people struggle against the terrible weight of the past and challenge the lives they’ve made for themselves. Amazon

The Twist by Colum McCann

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • An “urgent [and] ingenious” (The New York Times Book Review) novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean—from the New York Times bestselling author of Apeirogon and Let the Great World Spin

“The spirit of Joseph Conrad hovers over the text, but here the heart of darkness lies at the bottom of the ocean.”—Salman Rushdie

“Everything gets fixed, and we all stay broken.”

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

Fennell’s journey brings him to the west coast of Africa, where he uncovers a story about the raw human labor behind the dazzling veneer of the technological world. He meets a fellow Irishman, John Conway, the chief of mission on a cable repair ship. The mysterious Conway is a skilled engineer and a freediver capable of reaching extraordinary depths. He is also in love with a South African actress, Zanele, who must leave to go on her own literary adventure to London.

When the ship is sent up the coast to repair a series of major underwater breaks, both men learn that the very cables they seek to fix carry the news that may cause their lives to unravel. At sea, they are forced to confront the most elemental questions of life, love, absence, belonging, and the perils of our severed connections. Can we, in our fractured world, reweave ourselves out of the thin, broken threads of our pasts? Can the ruptured things awaken us from our despair?

Resoundingly simple and turbulent at the same time, Twist is a meditation on the nature of narrative and truth from one of the great storytellers of our times. Amazon

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

An often hilarious, surprisingly moving portrait of a long-married couple, seen through the eyes of their wickedly observant daughter—for fans of A Man Called Ove and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of food dating back to 1983.

Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”

This wry, propulsive story about a singularly eccentric family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue. Book Browse & Amazon & NPR

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers, but with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants. Until, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman mysteriously washes ashore.

Isolation has taken its toll on the Salts, but as they nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, it begins to feel like she might just be what they need. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting herself, starts imagining a future where she could belong to someone again.

But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late–and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

A novel of breathtaking twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us disappears. Bookbub. Amazon

Non Fiction & Memoirs

A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odessey of Fanny & Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri

He was an ambitious but drifting writer from a prominent Scottish family. She was a tough Nevada silver miner’s wife, with children, when they met. Who could have predicted that Fanny Van de Grift and Robert Louis Stevenson would go on to create one of history’s great literary marriages?

From their first encounter in France in 1876, Fanny and Louis’s partnership transcended societal expectations to become a literary union that was progressive, eccentric, and tempestuous, but always animated by a profound mutual respect. Seeking creative freedom, inspiration, and better health for Louis, who battled chronic illness, they embarked on a whirlwind journey around the world, from the bohemian enclaves of Europe to the shores of Samoa, where they lived and joined the native islanders’ fight for independence from imperialist powers. Amid the currents of their stormy yet deeply loving relationship, Fanny wrote colorful accounts of her life, contributed to Louis’s work and kept him alive to pen classic novels such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that would go on to resonate with generations of readers.

A portrait of two extraordinary people and a testament to the power of love to foster the human spirit, A Wilder Shore unfolds with all the richness and complexity of a timeless epic, capturing the resilience, courage, and devotion that sparked some of our most celebrated and enduring literary masterpieces. Amazon & BookBrowse

Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson

To trace the history of the twenty-first century so far is to trace a history of unaffordability and shortage. After years of refusing to build sufficient housing, America has a national housing crisis. After years of limiting immigration, we don’t have enough workers. Despite decades of being warned about the consequences of climate change, we haven’t built anything close to the clean-energy infrastructure we need. Ambitious public projects are finished late and over budget—if they are ever finished at all. The crisis that’s clicking into focus now has been building for decades—because we haven’t been building enough.

Abundance explains that our problems today are not the results of yesteryear’s villains. Rather, one generation’s solutions have become the next generation’s problems. Rules and regulations designed to solve the problems of the 1970s often prevent urban-density and green-energy projects that would help solve the problems of the 2020s. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. In the last few decades, our capacity to see problems has sharpened while our ability to solve them has diminished.

Progress requires facing up to the institutions in life that are not working as they need to. It means, for liberals, recognizing when the government is failing. It means, for conservatives, recognizing when the government is needed. In a book exploring how we can move from a liberalism that not only protects and preserves but also builds, Klein and Thompson trace the political, economic, and cultural barriers to progress and propose a path toward a politics of abundance. At a time when movements of scarcity are gaining power in country after country, this is an answer that meets the challenges of the moment while grappling honestly with the fury so many rightfully feel. Amazon & Bookbub

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

John Green, the #1 bestselling author of The Anthropocene Reviewed and a passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis. Book Browse & Amazon

https://www.bookbub.com/books/everything-is-tuberculosis-by-john-green

How to Share an Egg by Bonnie Reichert

When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.

Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty: her colorful childhood in the restaurant business, the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef, and that life-altering visit to Poland. Whether it’s the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her baba Sarah’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.

How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman’s search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother, and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer. Bookworthy & Amazonhttps://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/book-club-picks/2025/2

The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue by Mike Tidwell

In 2023, author and activist Mike Tidwell decided to keep a record for a full year of the growing impacts of climate change on his one urban block right on the border with Washington, DC. A love letter to the magnificent oaks and other trees dying from record heat waves and bizarre rain, Tidwell’s story depicts the neighborhood’s battle to save the trees and combat climate change: The midwife who builds a geothermal energy system on the block, the Congressman who battles cancer and climate change at the same time, and the Chinese-American climate scientist who wants to bury billions of the world’s dying trees to store their carbon and help stabilize the atmosphere.

The story goes beyond ailing trees as Tidwell chronicles people on his block coping with Lyme disease, a church with solar panels on its roof and floodwater in its basement, and young people anguishing over whether to have kids –all in the same neighborhood and all against the backdrop of 2023’s record global temperatures and raging wildfires and hurricanes. Then there’s Tidwell himself who explores the ethical and scientific questions surrounding the idea of “geoengineering” as a last-ditch way to save the world’s trees – and human communities everywhere – by reflecting sunlight away from the planet.

No book has told the story of climate change this way: hyper-local, full of surprises, full of true stories of life and death in one neighborhood. The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue is a harrowing and hopeful proxy for every street in America and every place on Earth.

https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/popular-nonfiction/2025/4

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

“A rich account of marriage and mourning.” —Washington Post

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life. Book Browse & Amazon

Patriot: A Memoir by Alexei Navalny
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic Russian penal colony in February. But even in death, he continues his fight against President Vladimir Putin. This posthumous memoir has two sections: The first half is a traditional narrative, beginning with a true crime story when Navalny is poisoned with a nerve agent on a flight from Siberia in 2020. Halfway through, the book pivots to become his prison diary. Through even the darkest episodes, Navalny’s sunniness and humor shine through – whether he’s describing an episode of Rick and Morty that he left unfinished when he collapsed on that flight, or taking joy in the indulgence of bread and butter that he only ate on Sunday mornings behind bars. — Ari Shapiro, host, All Things Considered, NPR & https://www.npr.org/books/

Pieces I will Never Get Back: A Memoir Of Unlikely Survival by Samina Ali

At 29, as a young writer working on her first novel, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. Miraculously, she survived the unchecked eclampsia that had endangered her pregnancy, instead sustaining major brain injury and falling into a coma as she gave birth. When she woke up, only her deepest memories were intact. Her husband was a stranger to her, she didn’t remember having a baby, and any language other than her native Urdu was foreign. Medical consensus was she would never recover—much less write—again.

Advised to think of her brain as a shattered puzzle, Ali began the long and difficult journey of piecing herself back together: learning to walk, speak, and accomplish basic human tasks alongside her newborn. She attempted to reckon with her past identity as a writer and a wife, and her new identity as a mother. Despite her miraculous survival, the disconnect between the old and the new self was devastating. It would be three years before she felt remotely normal, and seven before she was mended and could fully connect with her son.

Ali pairs the story of her “death” and recovery with the parallel narrative of her relationship to her Islamic upbringing and her fluctuating connection to her faith, incorporating meditations on religious narratives of death, the afterlife, resurrection, and reincarnation. Both deeply personal and steeped in religious thought, Pieces You’ll Never Get Back is a uniquely propulsive, searching, and ultimately, inspiring work of memoir. Amazon

Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery & Murder by Matthew Pearl

On December 10, 1887, a shark fishing boat disappeared. On board the doomed vessel were the Walkers—the ship’s captain Frederick, his wife Elizabeth, their three teenage sons, and their dog—along with the ship’s crew. The family had spotted a promising fishing location when a terrible storm arose, splitting their vessel in two and leaving those onboard adrift on the perilous sea.

When the castaways awoke the next morning, they discovered they had been washed ashore—on an island inhabited by a large but ragged and emaciated man who introduced himself as Hans. Hans appeared to have been there for a while and could quickly educate the Walkers and their crew on the island’s resources. But Hans had a secret . . . and as the Walker family gradually came to learn more, what seemed like a stroke of luck to have the mysterious man’s assistance became something ominous, something darker.

Like David Grann and Stacy Schiff, Matthew Pearl unveils one of the most incredible yet little-known historical true stories, and the only known instance in history of an actual family of castaways. Save Our Souls asks us to consider who we might become if we found ourselves trapped on a deserted island. Amazon & The Week, January 25, 2025 p22

The Secret History of the Rape Kit by Kennedy

In 1972, Martha “Marty” Goddard volunteered at a crisis hotline, counseling girls who had been molested by their fathers, their teachers, their uncles. Soon, Marty was on a mission to answer a question: Why were so many sexual predators getting away with these crimes? By the end of the decade, she had launched a campaign pushing hospitals and police departments to collect evidence of sexual assault and treat survivors with dignity. She designed a new kind of forensics tool—the rape kit—and new practices around evidence collection that spread across the country. Yet even as Marty fought for women’s rights, she allowed a man to take credit for her work.

When journalist Pagan Kennedy went looking for this forgotten pioneer, she discovered that even Marty Goddard’s closest friends had lost track of her. As Pagan followed a trail of clues to solve the mystery of Marty, she also delved into the problematic history of forensics in America. The Secret History of the Rape Kit chronicles one journalist’s mission to understand a crucial innovation in forensics and the woman who championed it. As Pagan Kennedy hunts for answers, she reflects on her own experiences with sexual assault and her own desire for justice. Amazon

Story of a Murder: The Wives , the Mistress & Dr Crippen by Hallie Rubenhold

In this epic examination of one of the most infamous murders of the twentieth century, bestselling author of The Five, Hallie Rubenhold, gives voice to those who were never properly heard–the women.

On February 1, 1910, the vivacious, diamond-adorned music hall performer Belle Elmore suddenly vanished from her home, causing alarm among her friends, the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. Their demands for an investigation would lead to the unearthing of a gruesome secret and trigger a fevered international manhunt for Belle’s husband, medical fraudster Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.

Ethel Le Neve, Crippen’s typist and lover, who fled with Crippen in disguise, has always hidden in the shadows of this tale–was she really just “an innocent young girl” in thrall to a powerful older man? And was there an equally sinister story behind the death of Crippen’s first wife, Charlotte?

Brimming with twists and featuring a carnival cast of eccentric entertainers, star lawyers, zealous detectives, medics and liars, Story of a Murder offers an electrifying snapshot of Britain and America at the dawn of the modern era. Amazon

The Tell by Amy Griffin

OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • An astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our stories

“A beautiful account of the journey of courage it takes to face the truth of one’s past.”—Bessel van der Kolk, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something—a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. “You’re here, but you’re not here,” her daughter said to her one night. “Where are you, Mom?” So began Amy’s quest to solve a mystery trapped in the deep recesses of her own memory—a journey that would take her into the burgeoning field of psychedelic therapy, to the limits of the judicial system, and ultimately, home to the Texas panhandle, where her story began.

In her search for the truth, to understand and begin to recover from buried childhood trauma, Griffin interrogates the pursuit of perfectionism, control, and maintaining appearances that drives so many women, asking, when, in our path from girlhood to womanhood, did we learn to look outside ourselves for validation? What kind of freedom is possible if we accept the whole story and embrace who we really are? With hope, heart, and relentless honesty, she points a way forward for all of us, revealing the power of radical truth-telling to deepen our connections—with others and ourselves.

https://www.bookbub.com/readworthy/top-nonfiction-picks/2025/3 & Amazon

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, Book Browse, Book Passage, Book Riot, Bookbub,, Lit Hub, NPR, Time, The Week, or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2025 Summer Reading

Dec17

Before you begin reviewing the books below,

I hope you know that I don’t read all the books I recommend.

Each quarter I review what is being published that is new in fiction, non fiction, young adults, and graphics.

I use to read everything but it became impossible to read 30 plus books every three months and keep up with work, family and life. The list is composed of the books I have read and the ones I want to read..

Lastly, I will be adding a new feature to my seasonal book lists. Each quarter I will highlight one to two books that I have read, might not be recently published but is a GREAT READ!

Thank you for all of your years of interest and support.

Tracy aka “Busy Tracy”

Remember: Survive & Thrive!

Book Pick for the Summer Season:

Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long Distant Swimmer by Lynne Cox

International Swimming Hall of Famer and Alex Award-winner Lynne Cox’s classic sports memoir Swimming to Antarctica is “a portrait of rare and relentless drive” (Sports Illustrated).

Here is the acclaimed life story of a woman whose determination inspires everyone she touches. Lynne Cox started swimming almost as soon as she could walk. By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic.Lynne writes the same way she swims, with indefatigable spirit and joy, and shares the beauty of her time in the water with a poet’s eye for detail. And this paperback edition of Swimming to Antarctica expands upon the detail of her extraordinary atheleticism with exclusive photos and maps throughout. Astonishing story. Lynne Cox also has written other stories ..check it out. Amazon.

Fiction

Abscond: A Short Story by Abraham Verghese

It’s a New Jersey summer in 1967, and thirteen-year-old Ravi Ramanathan has the makings of a tennis prodigy. His surgeon father encourages his ambition, while his mother dreams of their only child following his father’s path. Surrounded by his parents’ love, Ravi chafes a bit at their daily routines and little traditions. Then one unexpected day, everything changes. Realizing how much he took for granted, Ravi must grow up overnight and find a new role in the life of his family. Amazon

Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle

A food story to binge.…A ghost story to devour.….A love story to savor.

Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can’t exactly see the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he’s never eaten will flood his mouth,a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these aftertastes a secret for most of his life, but one night, he decides to act on what he’s tasting. And everything changes.

Kostya discovers that he can reunite people with their deceased loved ones—at least for the length of time it takes them to eat a dish that he’s prepared. He thinks his life’s purpose might be to offer closure to grieving strangers, and sets out to learn all he can by entering a particularly fiery ring of Hell: the New York culinary scene. But as his kitchen skills catch up with his ambitions, Kostya is too blind to see the catastrophe looming in the Afterlife. And the one person who knows Kostya must be stopped also happens to be falling in love with him.

Set in the bustling world of New York restaurants and teeming with mouthwatering food writing, Aftertaste is a whirlwind romance, a heart-wrenching look at love and loss, and a ghost story about all the ways we hunger—and how far we’d go to find satisfaction. Amazon & Barnes & Noble

Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

Author Grady Green is having the worst best day of his life.

Grady calls his wife to share some exciting news as she is driving home. He hears Abby slam on the brakes, get out of the car, then nothing. When he eventually finds her car by the cliff edge the headlights are on, the driver door is open, her phone is still there. . . but his wife has disappeared.

A year later, Grady is still overcome with grief and desperate to know what happened to Abby. He can’t sleep, and he can’t write, so he travels to a tiny Scottish island to try to get his life back on track. Then he sees the impossible – a woman who looks exactly like his missing wife. Amazon

The Compound by Aisling Rawle

Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends. BookBrowse

The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong

The hardest thing in the world is to live only once…

One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to transform Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community on the brink.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance. Amazon & Bookbub

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/new-books-favorite-authors-recommended?position=2&source=multicontent&target=title

Endling by Maria Reva

Ukraine, 2022. Yeva is a loner and a maverick scientist who lives out of her mobile lab, trying and failing to breed rare snails while her relatives urge her to give up and start a family. What they don’t know: Yeva already dates plenty of men—not for love, but to fund her work—entertaining Westerners who come to Ukraine on guided romance tours believing they’ll find docile brides untainted by feminism and modernity.

Nastia and her sister, Solomiya, are also entangled in the booming marriage industry, posing as a hopeful bride and her translator while secretly searching for their missing mother—a flamboyant protestor who vanished after years of fierce activism against the romance tours.

So begins a journey of a lifetime across hundreds of miles: three angry women, a truckful of kidnapped bachelors, and Lefty, a last-of-his-kind snail with one final shot at perpetuating his species.

But their plans come to a screeching halt as Russia invades. In a stunningly ambitious metafictional spiral, Endling brilliantly balances horror and comedy, drawing on Reva’s own experiences tracking her family’s delicate dance of survival behind enemy lines. As fiction and reality collide on the page, Reva probes the hard truths of war: What stories must we tell ourselves to survive? To carry on with the routines of life under military occupation? And for those of us watching from overseas: can our sense of normalcy and security ever be restored, or have they always been a fragile illusion?

Endling is a tour de force from an author on the cutting edge of fiction, weaving a story of love, loss, humor, and devastation that only she can tell. Book Browse & Amazon

Heart Lamp; Stories by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Heart Lamp hurls you into southwest India, where Muslim women survive in a world of casual cruelty, one of rules made for – and by – men. In one story, a woman despairs in marital abandonment but finds strength in her daughter. Another woman is ignored as she begs for help for her daughter, later describing her relief at her baby’s death. Banu Mushtaq’s book isn’t a simplistic takedown of Islam. These women are evocative and fully formed. They are inspired by Mushtaq’s own experiences as a lawyer representing women in her own Kannada-speaking community. When the book won the International Booker Prize, Mushtaq described it as “like a thousand fireflies lighting up a single sky.” That’s how I felt reading this book. — Diaa Hadid, correspondent, International Desk. NPR & Amazon

Homeseeking by Karissa Chen

From WWII to 2008, this deeply moving story follows one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland.

Haiwen is buying bananas at a 99 Ranch Market in Los Angeles when he looks up and sees Suchi, his Suchi, for the first time in sixty years. To recently widowed Haiwen it feels like a second chance, but Suchi has only survived by refusing to look back.

Suchi was seven when she first met Haiwen in their Shanghai neighborhood, drawn by the sound of his violin. Their childhood friendship blossomed into soul-deep love, but when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 to save his brother from the draft, she was left with just his violin and a note: Forgive me.

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California, telling Haiwen’s story from the present to the past while tracing Suchi’s from her childhood to the present, meeting in the crucible of their lives. Throughout, Haiwen holds his memories close while Suchi forces herself to look only forward, neither losing sight of the home they hold in their hearts.

At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time. Amazon & Bookbub

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/new-books-favorite-authors-recommended?position=2&source=multicontent&target=title

King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family―and the family business―together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.

Roman, a financial whiz with a head for numbers and a talent for making his clients rich, has some money to help buy his brother out of trouble. But in his work with wannabe tough guys, he’s forgotten that there are real gangsters out there. As his bargaining chips go up in smoke, Roman realizes that he has only one thing left to offer to save his brother: himself, and his own particular set of skills.

Roman begins his work for the criminals while Neveah tries to uncover the long-ago mystery of what happened to their mother, who disappeared when they were teenagers. But Roman is far less of a pushover than the gangsters realize. He is willing to do anything to save his family. Anything.

Because everything burns. “A fast-paced thriller that will have readers asking whether the ends justify the means if there is no end in sight. . . Reminiscent of the great tragedies, this is Cosby at his best.” Amazon

My Friends by Fredrik Backman

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers find refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days on an abandoned pier, telling silly jokes, sharing secrets, and committing small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into eighteen-year-old Louisa’s care. She embarks on a surprise-filled cross-country journey to learn how the painting came to be and to decide what to do with it. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes about what she’ll find. Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect in this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art. Amazon & NPR https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5356144/fiction-books-summer-2025?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/npr

North Woods by Daniel Mason

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone? Amazon

Pearl By Sian Hughes

Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood.

As time passes, Marianne finds it difficult to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Yet, in one of her mother’s dusty old books, she discovers a medieval poem called Pearl, and, trusting in the promise of its consolation, it seems as if her life begins to parallel the poem’s course.

But questions remain. Marianne is ever more tormented by the unmarked gravestone in the abandoned chapel and the tidal pull of the river, and as her childhood home begins to crumble, the past leads her down a path of self-destruction. Can Marianne ever come to understand her mother’s choices? And will her own future as a mother help her find her peace?

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, “Pearl” follows an English woman in the decades following her mother’s disappearance. As she reckons with its effects on her adolescence and experience of motherhood, she finds comfort in a 14th-century poem. Amazon

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5356144/fiction-books-summer-2025?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/npr

The Names by Florence Knapp

The extraordinary novel that asks: Can a name change the course of a life?

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she’d like to call the child, Cora hesitates…

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora’s and her young son’s lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the “one . . . precious life” we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic. Amazon & Jenna Picks & The Week 5/23/25

The Oligarch”s Daughter by Joseph Finder

Paul Brightman is a successful hedge fund manager in New York City who finds himself working instead for his father-in-law, a Russian oligarch. When his coworkers vanish without explanation, Paul is an easy recruitment target for the FBI — and soon finds himself fleeing for his life with a thumb drive full of evidence, but without his wife. Years later, Paul has built a new existence for himself in small-town New Hampshire. But when he fights off a Russian assassin, it’s time to use the survival skills he learned from his father to stay one step ahead of both his former family and the feds. Bookbub

Pretenders by Jo Harkin

Original, vivid, and witty. [The Pretender is] Glorious Exploits meets Wolf Hall—and I completely loved it.”—Joanna Quinn, New York Times bestselling-author of The Whalebone Theatre

Piglet by Lottie Hazell

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up-and-coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancé, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what she knows she deserves, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, undone, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s often complicated relationship with food and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.

Piglet begins 98 days before a wedding. The book’s timeline ping-pongs between the days, weeks and hours leading up to the big day. Piglet, our bride to be, is an ambitious cookbook editor with blue-collar roots. Her fiancé, Kit, is handsome and comes from family money. In meeting Kit, Piglet has jumped a socioeconomic rung and is still adjusting to the growing pains. Thirteen days before the wedding, Kit confesses to Piglet that he has done something awful, an unimaginable betrayal that the reader is never let in on. Despite this, Piglet decides to go on with the wedding, leading to one of the wildest meltdowns I’ve ever read in fiction. Piglet has a lot to say about expectations, feminism, friendship, class mobility and what happens when you surrender to insatiable hunger….NPR & Amazon

https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#year=2024&book=184

Rental House by Weike Wang

Keru and Nate are college sweethearts who marry despite their family differences: Keru’s strict, Chinese, immigrant parents demand perfection (“To use a dishwasher is to admit defeat,” says her father), while Nate’s rural, white, working-class family distrusts his intellectual ambitions and his “foreign” wife.

Some years into their marriage, the couple invites their families on vacation. At a Cape Cod beach house, and later at a luxury Catskills bungalow, Keru, Nate, and their giant sheepdog navigate visits from in-laws and unexpected guests, all while wondering if they have what it takes to answer the big questions: How do you cope when your spouse and your family of origin clash? How many people (and dogs) make a family? And when the pack starts to disintegrate, what can you do to shepherd everyone back together?

With her “wry, wise, and simply spectacular” style (People) and “hilarious deadpan that recalls Gish Jen and Nora Ephron” (O, The Oprah Magazine), Weike Wang offers a portrait of family that is equally witty, incisive, and tender.

Silent Retreat by Sally Quinn

When prize-winning reporter Sybilla Sumner checks into a monastery for a silent retreat, romance is the last thing on her mind. She plans to spend five meditative days surrounded by the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley—and apart from her famous husband and their crumbling marriage.

James Fitzmaurice-Kelly isn’t looking for romance either. He’s the Archbishop of Dublin, and has maintained a vow of celibacy for decades—even as he’s publicly questioned the church’s teachings. But as Sybilla and Fitz continue silently crossing paths, an undeniable charge builds between them, one that could see them abandoning their vows.

In this sophisticated, sexy, and soulful love story, novelist Sally Quinn explores the boundary between flesh and spirit, restraint and ecstasy, and asks what we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of passion. Amazon

There are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

From the Booker Prize finalist, author of The Island of Missing Trees, an enchanting new tale about three characters living along two great rivers, all connected by a single drop of water. • “Make place for Elif Shafak on your bookshelf [and] in your heart. You won’t regret it.”—Arundhati Roy, winner of the Booker Prize

In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.

In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.

In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.

A dazzling feat of storytelling, There Are Rivers in the Sky entwines these outsiders with a single drop of water, which remanifests across the centuries. A source of life and harbinger of death, rivers—the Tigris and the Thames—transcend history, transcend fate: “Water remembers. It is humans who forget.” Amazon & NPR & Book Browse

Non Fiction

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental illness by Jonathan Haidt

“[An] important new book… The shift in kids’ energy and attention from the physical world to the virtual one, Haidt shows, has been catastrophic, especially for girls.” —Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life. Amazon

Brave the Wild River:The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon By Melissa L. Sevigny

A Booklist Top of the List Winner for Nonfiction in 2023
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023

“Thrilling, expertly paced, warmhearted.” ―Peter Fish, San Francisco Chronicle

The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon.

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.

Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon’s secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river’s most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter’s plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem.

Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever. Book Riot

Everest 1922: the Epic Story of the First Attempt of the World’s Highest Mountain by Mick Conefrey

The first attempt on Everest in 1922 by George Leigh Mallory and a British team is an extraordinary story full of controversy, drama, and incident, populated by a set of larger-than-life characters straight out of an adventure novel.

The expedition ended in tragedy when, on their third bid for the top, Mallory’s party was hit by an avalanche that left seven men dead. Using diaries, letters, and unpublished accounts, Mick Conefrey creates a rich, character-driven narrative that explores the motivations and private dramas of the key individuals—detailing their backroom politics and bitter rivalries—who masterminded this epic adventure. Amazon & Book Riot

The Gunfighters: How Texas made the West Wild by Bryan Burrough

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Big Rich and Forget the Alamo comes an epic reconsideration of the time and place that spawned America’s most legendary gunfighters, from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Butch and Sundance

The “Wild West” gunfighter is such a stock figure in our popular culture that some dismiss it all as a corny myth, more a product of dime novels and B movies than a genuinely important American history. In fact, as Bryan Burrough shows us in his dazzling and fast-paced new book, there’s much more below the surface. For three decades at the end of the 1800s, a big swath of the American West was a crucible of change, with the highest murder rate per capita in American history. The reasons behind this boil down to one word: Texas.

Texas was born in violence, on two fronts, with Mexico to the south and the Comanche to the north. The Colt revolver first caught on with the Texas Rangers. Southern dueling culture transformed into something wilder and less organized in the Lone Star State. The collapse of the Confederacy and the presence of a thin veneer of Northern occupiers turned the heat up further. And the explosion in the cattle business after the war took that violence and pumped it out from Texas across the whole of the West. The stampede of longhorn cattle brought with it an assortment of rustlers, hustlers, gamblers, and freelance lawmen who carried a trigger-happy honor culture into a widening gyre, a veritable blood meridian. When the first newspapermen and audiences discovered what good copy this all was, the flywheel of mythmaking started spinning. It’s never stopped.

The Gunfighters brilliantly sifts the lies from the truth, giving both elements their due. And the truth is sufficiently wild for any but the most unhinged tastes. All the legendary figures are here, and their escapades are told with great flair—good, bad, and ugly. Like all great stories, this one has a rousing end—as the railroads and the settlers close off the open spaces for good, the last of the breed, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, really do get on a boat for South America, ending their era in a blaze of glory. Burrough knits these histories together into something much deeper and more provocative than simply the sum of its parts. To understand the truth of the Wild West is to understand a crucial dimension of the American story. Amazon

Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House by Jared Cohen

The American presidency is viewed as the most powerful position in the world. What happens when the job ends? History is often surprising. Not everyone found the role to be the most fulfilling one they ever had. Jared Cohen looks at some fascinating case studies that back that up. John Quincy Adams and William Howard Taft found greater joy in other branches of government: Congress and the Supreme Court. George Bush enjoys his private life and art studio. Life after power can be much more rewarding. — Edith Chapin, senior vice president and editor in chie

https://www.npr.org/2024/12/11/nx-s1-5196280/best-biography-memoir-2024

The Mango Tree: A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony by Annabelle Tometich

When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn’t expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn’t prepared to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, “Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes.” They immediately understood. Answering the questions of the breaking-news reporter—at the same newspaper where Annabelle worked as a restaurant critic––proved more difficult. Annabelle decided to go with a variation of the truth: it was complicated.

So begins The Mango Tree, a poignant and deceptively entertaining memoir of growing up as a mixed-race Filipina “nobody” in suburban Florida as Annabelle traces the roots of her upbringing—all the while reckoning with her erratic father’s untimely death in a Fort Myers motel, her fiery mother’s bitter yearning for the country she left behind, and her own journey in the pursuit of belonging.

With clear-eyed compassion and piercing honesty, The Mango Tree is a family saga that navigates the tangled branches of Annabelle’s life, from her childhood days in an overflowing house flooded by balikbayan boxes, vegetation, and juicy mangoes, to her winding path from medical school hopeful to restaurant critic. It is a love letter to her fellow Filipino Americans, her lost younger self, and the beloved fruit tree at the heart of her family. But above all, it is an ode to Annabelle’s hot-blooded, whip-smart mother Josefina, a woman who made a life and a home of her own, and without whom Annabelle would not have herself. Amazon

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain

Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.

In this richly nuanced portrait of Mark Twain, acclaimed biographer Ron Chernow brings his considerable powers to bear on a man who shamelessly sought fame and fortune, and crafted his persona with meticulous care. After establishing himself as a journalist, satirist, and lecturer, he eventually settled in Hartford with his wife and three daughters, where he went on to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He threw himself into the hurly-burly of American culture, and emerged as the nation’s most notable political pundit. At the same time, his madcap business ventures eventually bankrupted him; to economize, Twain and his family spent nine eventful years in exile in Europe. He suffered the death of his wife and two daughters, and the last stage of his life was marked by heartache, political crusades, and eccentric behavior that sometimes obscured darker forces at play.

Drawing on Twain’s bountiful archives, including thousands of letters and hundreds of unpublished manuscripts, Chernow masterfully captures the man whose career reflected the country’s westward expansion, industrialization, and foreign wars, and who was the most important white author of his generation to grapple so fully with the legacy of slavery. Today, more than one hundred years after his death, Twain’s writing continues to be read, debated, and quoted. In this brilliant work of scholarship, a moving tribute to the writer’s talent and humanity, Chernow reveals the magnificent and often maddening life of one of the most original characters in American history. Amazon

My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr

Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat pairings: Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten, and was languishing in a shelter when Caleb met her. She had hissed and fought off all previous carers and potential adopters, but somehow, she chose Caleb as her savior.

For the seventeen years that followed, Caleb and Masha were inseparable. Masha ruled the house and the extensive, dangerous surrounding fields and forests. When she was hurt, only Caleb could help her. When he suffered long-standing physical ailments, Masha knew what to do. Caleb’s life-long study of the literature of cat behavior, and his years of experience with previous cats, helped him decode much of Masha’s inner life. But their bond went far beyond academic studies and experience. The story of Caleb and Masha is an inspiring and life-affirming relationship for readers of all backgrounds and interests—a love story like no other.

This unusual and beautiful “meow-moir” by The Alienist author and military historian Caleb Carr – the last book he wrote before dying of cancer at age 68 this year – explores the author’s lifelong affinity for cats and his particular relationship with one enormous, fluffy Siberian named Masha. Masha and the writer enjoyed 17 years of adventures together, mostly in and around their rugged rural home in upstate New York. The book chronicles their mutual zest for life and their struggles through illness and financial woes. Even though this is a book for cat lovers, it’s really for everyone: It explores, with somber pathos and wry humor, how we form attachments in life and how they keep us going through it all. — Chloe Veltman, correspondent, Culture Desk.. Book Riot, Amazon

The Power of Parting by Eamon Dolan

A myth-shattering, inspiring book that combines research, reportage, and memoir to explore the growing phenomenon of estrangement from toxic relatives—showing it not as a tragedy, but as an empowering and effective solution to the heartbreak of family abuse.

After decades of enduring his mother’s physical and psychological torment, after years of trying in vain to set boundaries, Eamon Dolan took a radical step: he cut his mother out of his life. No more phone calls, no more visits, no more contact. Parting with his abuser gave him immediate relief and set him on a path toward freedom, confidence, and joy like none he had ever felt before.

In The Power of Parting, Dolan has written the book he wishes he’d had when he was struggling to free himself from his mother’s abuse. In the process, he discovered how widespread estrangement really is. At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a parent, sibling, or other family member. He also learned why so much stigma surrounds this common—and often lifesaving—phenomenon. Even among therapists—the professionals who would seem most attuned to the pain relatives can inflict—there’s a bias toward reconciliation, when millions of their patients need instead to escape their abusers’ grip. Estrangement, Dolan realized, should be understood and embraced, not shrouded in shame.

Drawing on his own suffering and healing, as well as experts’ advice and the testimony of other courageous survivors, Dolan first explains why abuse is much different and more prevalent than we may think, how it harms us in childhood and beyond, and why limiting or eliminating contact might be our best possible choice. Then, he walks readers through the steps of a successful, positive estrangement: how to take crucial time for yourself; how to make sure no one can gaslight you into minimizing or forgetting; how to set rules for your abuser and—if they can’t or won’t respect your limits—how to end a toxic relationship. He also offers valuable counsel on how to ease the guilt and grief that often accompany parting, and how to break the cycle of abuse that was likely passed down to you through many generations.

With a convincing blend of clarity and empathy, Dolan encourages others to do what he ultimately did for himself: determine whether the people in your life treat you with the care and concern you deserve—and part ways with them if they don’t. Amazon

The Spinach King by John Seabrook

The riveting saga of the Seabrook Family, by one of The New Yorker’s most acclaimed storytellers.

“Having left this material for his writer son, my father must have wanted the story told, even if he couldn’t bear to tell it himself.” So begins the story of a forgotten American dynasty, a farming family from the bean fields of southern New Jersey who became as wealthy and powerful as aristocrats―only to implode in a storm of lies.

The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the “Henry Ford of Agriculture.” His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called “the biggest vegetable factory on earth.” But the carefully cultivated facade―glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends―hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business.

At the heart of the narrative is a multi-generational succession battle. It’s a tale of family secrets and Swiss bank accounts, of half-truths, of hatred and passion―and lots and lots of liquor. The Seabrooks’ colorful legal and moral failings took place amid the trappings of extraordinary privilege. But the story of where that money came from is not so pretty

They say behind every great fortune there is a great crime. At Seabrook Farms, the troubling American histories of race, immigration, and exploitation arise like weeds from the soil. Great Migration Black laborers struck against the company for better wages in the 1930s, and Japanese Americans helped found a “global village” on the farm after World War II. Revealing both C. F. and Jack Seabrook’s corruption, The Spinach King undermines the “great man” theory of industrial progress. It also shows how American farms evolved from Jeffersonian smallholdings to gigantic agribusinesses, and what such enormous firms do to the families whose fate is bound up in the land.

A compulsively readable story of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge―three decades in the making―The Spinach King explores the author’s complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li

“There is no good way to say this,” Yiyun Li writes at the beginning of this book.

“There is no good way to state these facts, which must be acknowledged. My husband and I had two children and lost them both: Vincent in 2017, at sixteen, James in 2024, at nineteen. Both chose suicide, and both died not far from home.”

There is no good way to say this―because words fall short. It takes only an instant for death to become fact, “a single point in a timeline.” Living now on this single point, Li turns to thinking and reasoning and searching for words that might hold a place for James. Li does what she can: “doing the things that work,” including not just writing but gardening, reading Camus and Wittgenstein, learning the piano, and living thinkingly alongside death.

This is a book for James, but it is not a book about grieving or mourning. As Li writes, “The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” Things in Nature Merely Grow is a testament to Li’s indomitable spirit. Amazon Book Browse

Warhols Muses by Laurence Leamer

From the New York Times bestselling author of Capote’s Women comes an astonishing account of the revolutionary artist Andy Warhol and his scandalous relationships with the ten women he deemed his “Superstars”.

“Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil,” Andy Warhol confessed, “of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them.” Obsessed with celebrity, the silver-wigged artistic icon created an ever-evolving entourage of stunning women he dubbed his “Superstars”—Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Nico, Ultra Violet, Viva, Brigid Berlin, Ingrid Superstar, International Velvet, Mary Woronov, and Candy Darling. He gave several of them new names and manipulated their beauty and talent for his art and social status with no regard for their safety, their dignity, or their lives.

In Warhol’s Muses, bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer shines a spotlight on the complex women who inspired and starred in Warhol’s legendary underground films—The Chelsea Girls, The Nude Restaurant, and Blue Movie, among others. Drawn by the siren call of Manhattan life in the sixties, they each left their protected enclaves and ventured to a new world, Warhol’s famed Factory, having no sense that they would never be able to return to their old homes and familiar ways again. Sex was casual, drugs were ubiquitous, parties were wild, and to Warhol, everyone was transient, temporary, and replaceable. It was a dangerous game he played with the women around him, and on a warm June day in 1968, someone entered the Factory and shot him, changing his life forever.

Warhol’s Muses explores the lives of ten endlessly intriguing women, transports us to a turbulent and transformative era, and uncovers the life and work of one of the most legendary artists of all time. Amazon & Book Riot

Wild Thing: a Life of Paul Gaugin by Sue Prideaux

Paul Gauguin’s legend as a transgressive genius arises as much from his biography as his aesthetically daring Polynesian paintings. Gauguin is chiefly known for his pictures that eschewed convention, to celebrate the beauty of an indigenous people and their culture. In this gorgeously illustrated, myth-busting work, Sue Prideaux reveals that while Gauguin was a complicated man, his scandalous reputation is largely undeserved.

Self-taught, Gauguin became a towering artist in his brief life, not just in painting but in ceramics and graphics. He fled the bustle of Paris for the beauty of Tahiti, where he lived simply and worked consistently to expose the tragic results of French Colonialism. Gauguin fought for the rights of Indigenous people, exposing French injustices and corruption in the local newspaper and acting as advocate for the Tahitian people in the French colonial courts. His unconventional career and bold, breathtaking art influenced not only Vincent van Gogh, but Matisse and Picasso.

Wild Thing upends much of what we thought we knew about Gauguin through new primary research, including the resurfaced manuscript of Gauguin’s most important writing, the untranslated memoir of Gauguin’s son, and a sample of Gauguin’s teeth that disproves the pernicious myth of his syphilis. In the first full biography of Paul Gauguin in thirty years, Sue Prideaux illuminates the extraordinary oeuvre of a visionary artist vital to the French avant-garde. The result is “a brilliantly readable and compassionate study of Gauguin―not just as a painter, sculptor, carver and potter, but as a human soul perpetually searching for what is always just out of reach” (Artemis Cooper, Spectator). Book Riot & Amazon

Young Adult

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch’s name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He’s torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who’s nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he’s been set up to fail. But there’s something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena. Amazon

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, Book Browse, Book Passage, Book Riot, Bookbub, NPR, Woman’s world, The Week, or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2025 Fall Reading

Dec17

Fall Season Pick:

The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama

The daughter of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Gail Tsukiyama’s The Samurai’s Garden uses the Japanese invasion of China during the late 1930s as a somber backdrop for this extraordinary story.

A 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family’s summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu’s secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight.

Matsu is a samurai of the soul, a man devoted to doing good and finding beauty in a cruel and arbitrary world, and Stephen is a noble student, learning to appreciate Matsu’s generous and nurturing way of life and to love Matsu’s soulmate, gentle Sachi, a woman afflicted with leprosy. Amazon

Fiction

All Things Under the Moon by Ann Yu-Kyung Choi

Women need other women to survive.”
In 1924, Korea is an occupied country. In Seoul’s secret, underground networks and throughout the countryside, rebellion against the Japanese Empire simmers, threatening to boil over. Kim Na-Young lives a simple life in the rural village of Daegeori, where she watches the moon rise and set over the pine-wooded mountains, tends to her household alongside her best friend, Yeon-Soo, and cares for her sick mother.

But the occupation touches every Korean life—even Na-Young’s. In the wake of a tragedy that stuns the village, Na-Young’s father arranges her marriage to a man she’s never met, and Na-Young and Yeon-Soo decide to flee, taking their fate into their own hands. That decision sets them on their own collision course with the occupying forces, resulting in a violent encounter that will alter both of their lives forever—in shockingly different ways.

Taking us from a small village to the bustling corridors of Seoul, where women and girls can learn to read and write in multiple languages and members of the revolution pass coded messages through the back rooms of teahouses, Ann Y. K. Choi weaves a masterful tale of a woman taking command not only of her own identity but her own destiny.

A sweeping journey through historical Korea and an utterly compelling portrait of one woman’s remarkable life, All Things Under the Moon is both a stunning literary achievement and a beautifully written tribute to the sacrifices women make for each other. BookBrowse

The Ascent by Adam Plantinga

Kurt Argento, an ex-Detroit street cop who can’t let injustice go—and who has the fighting skills to back up his idealism.

If he sees a young girl being dragged into an alley, he’s going to rescue her and cause some damage. When he does just that in a small corrupt Missouri town, he’s brutally beaten and thrown into a maximum-security prison.

Julie Wakefield, a grad student who happens to be the governor’s daughter, is about to take a tour of the prison. But when a malfunction in the security system releases a horde of prisoners, a fierce struggle for survival ensues.

Argento must help a small band of staff and civilians, including Julie and her two state trooper handlers, make their way from the bottom floor to the roof to safety.

All that stands in their way are six floors of the most dangerous convicts in Missouri. BookBrowse & Amazon

At Last by Marisa Silver

Set in midcentury America, At Last explores a rich family saga centered on two fierce and competitive matriarchs whose intertwined lives reflect the complexities of family, tradition, and personal ambition. “Whole lives course down the decades, and every minute is conveyed with Silver’s signature combination of toughness and grace,” (Laird Hunt).

Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner are two formidable women whose paths cross when their children marry. Both women are sharp, cunning, and unwavering in their conflicting beliefs about marriage, responsibility, and family and, most pressingly, their efforts to vie for the love of their shared granddaughter.

At Last paints a vivid portrait of the American Midwest, capturing the essence of a time and place where societal norms and personal aspirations often clashed. Marisa Silver’s narrative weaves together the lives of Helene and Evelyn, from their vastly different childhoods through the pivotal events that define them. Both intimate and expansive, and capturing the complexities of ambition and love with humor and insight, At Last is a testament to what happens when an unintended, even unwanted relationship turns out to be a central one that defines a life. BookBrowse & Amazon

Bridges of Sighs by Richand Russo

Louis Charles Lynch is sixty years old and has spent his entire life in Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for forty of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, “Lucy” is an optimist, though he’s had plenty of reasons not to be—chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive. Yet it was her shrewdness, combined with that Lynch optimism, that had propelled them years ago to the right side of the tracks and created an “empire” of convenience stores about to be passed on to the next generation.

Lucy and Sarah are also preparing for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Italy, where his oldest friend, a renowned painter, has exiled himself. Once a rival for Sarah’s affection, Noonan leads a life in Venice far removed from Thomaston. In fact, the exact nature of their friendship is one of the many mysteries Lucy hopes to untangle in the “history” he’s writing of his hometown and family. And with his story interspersed with that of Noonan, the native son who’d fled so long ago, the destinies building up around both of them (and Sarah, too) are relentless, constantly surprising, and utterly revealing. Amazon

The Elements by John Boyne

In The Elements, acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne has created an epic saga that weaves together four interconnected narratives, each representing a different perspective on crime: the enabler, the accomplice, the perpetrator, and the victim.

The narrative follows a mother on the run from her past, a young soccer star facing a trial, a successful surgeon grappling with childhood trauma, and a father on a transformative journey with his son. Each is somehow connected to the next, and as the story unfolds, their lives intersect in unimaginable ways.

Boyne’s most ambitious work yet, The Elements is both an engrossing drama and a moving investigation of why and how we allow crime to occur. With masterful, spellbinding prose, he navigates this complex subject with extraordinary empathy and unflinching honesty. The story resonates on a deeply emotional level, challenging readers to confront their own conceptions of guilt and innocence at every step. Amid the wildly engrossing storytelling, the book ultimately asks: What would you do when faced with the unthinkable? Book Browse

Fire Exit by Morgan Talty

This novel, from the author of “Night of the Living Rez,” is told from the perspective of a man who was expelled from Maine’s Penobscot Reservation when he was a young adult, and must decide how much of his history to reveal to his daughter.

From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.

From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.

Now, it’s been weeks since he’s seen Elizabeth, and Charles is worried. As he attempts to hold on to and care for what he can―his home and property; his alcoholic and bighearted friend Bobby; and his mother, Louise, who is slipping deeper into dementia―he becomes increasingly haunted by his past. Forced to confront a lost childhood on the reservation, a love affair cut short, and the death of his beloved stepfather, Fredrick, Charles contends with questions he’s long been afraid to ask. Is his secret about Elizabeth his to share? And would his daughter want to know the truth, even if it could cost her everything she’s ever known? Amazon

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

“A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.” —The Guardian

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humorist, and a true poet of the human heart. Amazon

The Loneliness of Sonia & Sunny by Kiran Desal

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.

Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists. Amazon & The Week 9/26/25

Penitence: by Kristin Koval

For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with literary insight that compels readers to consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us.

When a shocking murder occurs in the home of Angie and David Sheehan, their lives are shattered. Desperate to defend their family, they turn to small-town lawyer Martine Dumont for help, but Martine isn’t just legal counsel―she’s also the mother of Angie’s first love, Julian, a now-successful New York City criminal defense attorney. As Julian and Angie confront their shared past and long-buried guilt from a tragic accident years ago, they must navigate their own culpability and the unresolved feelings between them.

Spanning decades, from the ski slopes of rural Colorado to the streets of pre-9/11 New York City and back again, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness. Amazon

Whatever happened to Lori Lovely by Sarah McCoy

From New York Times bestselling author Sarah McCoy—a spellbinding novel based on a true story: a beautiful young movie star of Hollywood’s Golden Age gives up her bright career to become a nun.

In 1969, twenty-three-year-old starlet Lori Lovely, the apple of Hollywood’s eye, shocks the world by ditching a promising film career to take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Benedictine nun. Gossip columnists and scandal sheets can’t get enough of the story. Why would such a beautiful girl take the veil? Was she hiding from someone? Did it have anything to do with the tragic death of her costar, heartthrob singer Lucas Wesley?

In 1990, Lu Tibbott is under the gun to complete her senior thesis in modern American history. Instead of spending weeks in dusty archives, Lu decides to dig into a true twentieth-century mystery and write about her aunt Lori, now the Mother Abbess at a cloistered convent in rural New England. Biographers, bloggers, and media types have long speculated about her aunt Lori’s sudden departure from Hollywood. Mother Lori, however, has refused all requests for interviews—until Lu arrives at the abbey with a tape recorder in hand. To her delight, Mother Lori announces she’s finally ready to talk…but only if Lu is truly ready to listen.

Lu is shocked to discover that the story of Lori Lovely’s rise in Hollywood was far more tumultuous than she’d ever expected, a fairy tale twisting with ambition, unforeseen alliances, forbidden love, and secrets. What began as a history thesis now threatens to upend all their lives with its unexpected truths, especially as the media gets wind of Lu’s project and begins to ask…
Whatever happened to Lori Lovely? Book Browse

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan

2014: At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honors his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.

2119: Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’. How wild and full of risk their lives were, thinks Thomas, as he pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the elusive poem’s discovery, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a brutal crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece, a fictional tour de force, a love story about both people and the words they leave behind, a literary detective story which reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost. BookBrowse

Non Fiction

A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco

She did it to my dad, though. They used the silent treatment on each other, she explained, because they didn’t want to say something they’d regret.

What does she want to say now that she’d regret?

Jeannie Vanasco’s mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie’s home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother’s childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered, complicated portrait of a mother and daughter looking, failing, and―in big and small ways―succeeding to understand each other. In the margins of her research, at her kitchen table with her partner, in phone calls to friends, and in delightful hey google queries, Vanasco explores the loneliness and isolation of silence as punishment, both in her own life and beyond it, and confronts her greatest fear: that her mother will never speak to her again.

From the acclaimed author of Things We Didn’t Talk About When I was a Girl and The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco’s A Silent Treatment is a searingly honest and lasting testament to the power of all things left unsaid. Book Browse

The Acid Queen by Sannah Cahalan

The untold story of the woman who played a critical role in bringing psychedelics into the mainstream—until her audacious exploits forced her into the shadows—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire

Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time.

Long overlooked by those who have venerated her husband, Rosemary spent her life on the forefront of the counterculture, working with Leary on his books and speeches, sewing his clothing, and shaping—for better and for worse—the media’s narrative about LSD. Ultimately, Rosemary sacrificed everything for the safety of her fellow psychedelic pioneers and the preservation of her husband’s legacy.

Drawing from a wealth of interviews, diaries, archives, and unpublished sources, Susannah Cahalan writes the definitive portrait of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, reclaiming her narrative and her voice from those who dismissed her. Page-turning, revelatory, and utterly compelling, The Acid Queen shines an overdue spotlight on a pioneering psychedelic seeker. Amazon

Born Lucky A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism by Leland Vittert

This is a John Novick recommendation:

In a world quick to label, judge, and box in people, one father and son stood firm and refused to be defined by an autism diagnosis.

If you’re channel surfing and happen upon Leland Vittert during his nightly national cable show on NewsNation, he comes off as a poised journalist prying nuggets from guests. If you watched him for years as an anchor at Fox News Channel, you saw him on the battlefields of the Middle East, the anchor desk, and the White House North Lawn. No one, including friends and co-workers, has ever known his full life story and how miraculous it was to get to that point.

Leland was a socially awkward boy who didn’t speak for years, and when he finally did, teachers and leaders declared him “weird.” His unique behavior and inability to connect with his peers made him a frequent target for bullying and exclusion. In one particularly harsh moment, a school principal bluntly told his parents, “The people here think Leland is pretty weird. I guess I do, too.” Those words felt like being shot with an arrow, as his parents sat in stunned silence, grappling with their own fears and uncertainties for their son’s future.

From a young age, Leland showed signs of being Autistic, a term rarely used at the time, struggling with social cues, communication, and behavioral norms that came naturally to other kids. The diagnosis didn’t deter his father, Mark. He knew the world wouldn’t change for Leland, so he quit his job and began changing Leland for the world. He became a full-time parent-coach, training Leland and teaching him the skills he needed to navigate in society. Simple concepts like eye contact, understanding humor, and instilling motivations had to be taught painstakingly. From hundreds of pushups at age 7 to toughen him against bullies, to coaching him through complex social interactions, Mark’s relentless dedication changed the trajectory of Leland’s life.

Born Lucky offers an intimate look into their inspiring journey. Leland lays bare his experiences of the crushing bullying during middle and high school, the sting of rejection continuing into college, and his ultimate transformation into an esteemed journalist. But above all, this book is a love letter from a grateful son, who despite his diagnosis, trusted his father and defied all odds.

It offers hope to every parent and every child who is grappling with their own unique challenges, to be inspired to break labels, tear down the walls that society builds, and create a better future. Amazon

The Devil Reached toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb by Garrett Graff

On the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Pulitzer Prize finalist whose work is “oral history at its finest” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) delivers an epic narrative of the atomic bomb’s creation and deployment, woven from the voices of hundreds of scientists, generals, soldiers, and civilians.

The building of the atomic bomb is the most audacious undertaking in human history: a rush by a small group of scientists and engineers in complete secrecy to unlock the most fundamental power of the universe. Even today, the Manhattan Project evokes boldness, daring, and the grandest of dreams: bringing an end to World War II in the Pacific. As Marines, soldiers, sailors, and airmen fight overseas, men and women strive to discover the atom’s secrets in places like Chicago, Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos. On August 6, 1945, the world discovers what the end of the war—and the new global age—will look like.

The road to the first atomic bomb ends in Hiroshima, Japan, but it begins in Hitler’s Europe, where brilliant physicists are forced to flee fascism and antisemitism—bringing to America their determination to harness atomic power before it falls into the Führer’s arsenal. The Devil Reached Toward the Sky traces the breakthroughs and the breakneck pace of atomic development in the years leading up to 1945, then takes us inside the B-29 bombers carrying Little Boy and Fat Man and finally to ground zero at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Garrett M. Graff, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is the panoramic narrative of how ordinary people grapple with extraordinary wartime risks, sacrifices, and choices that will transform the course of history. Engineers experiment with forces of terrifying power, knowing each passing day costs soldiers’ lives—but fearing too the consequences of their creation. Hundreds of thousands of workers toil around the clock to produce uranium and plutonium in an endeavor so classified that most people involved learn the reality of their effort only when it is announced on the radio by President Truman. The 509th Composite Group trains for a mission whose details are kept a mystery until shortly before takeoff, when the Enola Gay and Bockscar are loaded with bombs the crew has never seen. And the civilians of two Japanese cities that have been spared American attacks—preserved for the sake of judging the bomb’s power—escape their pulverized homes into a greater hellscape.

Drawing from dozens of oral history archives and hundreds of books, reports, letters, and diaries from across the US, Japan, and Europe, Graff masterfully blends the memories and perspectives from the known and unknown—key figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, and President Truman; the crews of the B-29 bombers; and the haunting stories of the Hibakusha—the “bomb-affected people.” Both a testament to human ingenuity and resilience and a compelling drama told by the participants who lived it, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is a singular, profound, and searing book about the inception of our most powerful weapon and its haunting legacy. Amazon & The Week, 8/825, p23

How to Kill a Witch: The Patriarchy’s Guide to Silencing Women by Zoe Venditozzi & Claire Mitchell

Nothing brings people together like a common enemy, and witches were the greatest enemy of all.

Scotland, 1563: Crops failed. People starved. And the Devil’s influence was stronger than ever―at least, that’s what everyone believed. If you were a woman living in Scotland during this turbulent time, there was a very good chance that you, or someone you knew, would be tried as a witch.

During the chaos of the Reformation, violence against women was codified for the first time in the Witchcraft Act―a tool of theocratic control with one chilling goal: to root out witches and rid the land of evil. What followed was a dark and misogynistic chapter in history that fanned the flames of witch hunts across the globe, including in the United States and beyond.

In How to Kill a Witch, Zoe Venditozzi and Claire Mitchell, hosts of the popular Witches of Scotland podcast, unravel the grim yet absurdly bureaucratic process of identifying, accusing, trying, and executing women as witches. With sharp wit and keen feminist insight, they reveal the inner workings of a patriarchal system designed to weaponize fear and oppress women.

This captivating (and often infuriating) account, which weaves a rich tapestry of trial transcripts, witness accounts, and the documents that set the legal grounds for the witch hunts, exposes how this violent period of history mirrors today’s struggles for justice and equality. How to Kill a Witch is a powerful, darkly humorous reminder of the dangers of superstition, bias, and ignorance, and a warning to never forget the past… while raising the question of whether it could ever happen again. BookBrowse & Amazon

Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant

An exuberant, hilarious, and profound memoir by a mailman in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, who found that working for the post office saved his life, taught him who he was, gave him purpose, and educated him deeply about a country he loves but had lost touch with.

Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown.

Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. He transported chicken feed to grandmothers living alone in the mountains and forded a creek with a refrigerator on his back. But while he carried the mail, he also carried a whole lot more than just the mail, including a family legacy of rage and the anxiety of having lost his identity along with his corporate job.

And yet, slowly, surrounded by a ragtag but devoted band of letter carriers, working this different kind of job, Grant found himself becoming a different kind of person. He became a lifeline for lonely people, providing fleeting moments of human contact and the assurance that our government still cares. He embraced the thrill of tackling new challenges, the pride of contributing to something greater than himself, the joy of camaraderie, and the purpose found in working hard for his family and doing a small, good thing for his community. He even kindled a newfound faith.

A brash and loving portrait of an all-American institution, Mailman offers a deeply felt portrait of both rural America and the dedicated (and eccentric) letter carriers who keep our lives running smoothly day to day. One hell of a raconteur, Steve Grant has written an irreverent, heartfelt, and often hilarious tribute to the simple heroism of daily service, the dignity and struggle of blue-collar work, the challenge and pleasure of coming home again after twenty-five years away, and the delight of going the extra mile for your neighbors, every day.

No Ordinary Bird by Artis Henderson

Artis was five when a plane crash killed her beloved father. For years, it was simply called “the accident.”

But many things weren’t getting discussed. Like Lamar himself—a swashbuckling, larger-than-life pilot, a doting father and husband, and the most popular farmer in Georgia. Or that the IRS had immediately taken everything: the chickens, the airplanes, the islands in the Bahamas… . Afterwards, Artis and her mother broke contact with everyone and fled, rebuilding from the bottom up as if Lamar’s big, wild life had never happened.

Years later, a friend tells Artis Lamar’s plane was sabotaged: her father had been one of the biggest drug smugglers in Miami in the 1970s. At the time of his death, he was about to testify in a trial that had swept up everyone from the Prime Minister of the Bahamas, to a US district attorney, to the Colombian drug cartels. But the deeper Artis digs, the more unexpected the story becomes.

Beyond the dramatic betrayals, dangerous drug lords, and geopolitical intrigue is the beating heart of this riveting memoir: a daughter’s grappling with a dark legacy and her memories of the father who had been the light of her life. Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, and is there a difference at all? BookBrowse

Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard

Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined ones. We know that he was tried, convicted, and executed for “corrupting the youth,” but freely assign Socratic dialogues to today’s youths, to introduce them to philosophy. We’ve lost sight of what made him so dangerous. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates’ thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.

Callard draws our attention to Socrates’ startling discovery that we don’t know how to ask ourselves the most important questions―about how we should live, and how we might change. Before a person even has a chance to reflect, their bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on their behalf. To ask the most important questions, we need help. Callard argues that the true ambition of the famous “Socratic method” is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways―for survival, for pleasure, for comfort―but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your questions and challenge your answers.

Callard shows that Socrates’ method allows us to make progress in thinking about how to manage romantic love, how to confront one’s own death, and how to approach politics. In the process, she gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by. Book Browse

The Quiet Ear by Raymond Antrobus

“A spellbinding account of [Antrobus’s] youth as a deaf, mixed-race child in East London . . . an unforgettable account of finding one’s voice. It’s masterful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 New Memoirs and Biographies of the Fall • One of The Washington Post and Vulture’s Most Anticipated Books

I live with the aid of deafness. Like poetry, it has given me an art, a history, a culture and a tradition to live through. This book charts that art in the hopes of offering a map, a mirror, a small part of a larger story.

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds—bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus’s upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Antrobus explores the shame of miscommunication, the joy of finding community, and shines a light on deaf education.

Throughout, Antrobus sets his story alongside those of other D/deaf cultural figures—from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers—the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity he did not have growing up. A singular, remarkable work, The Quiet Ear is a much-needed examination of deafness in the world. Amazon

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon

An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access

Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords. In an effort to better understand this essential yet extralegal billion dollar global industry, internationally recognized anthropologist and expert Jason De León embedded with a group of smugglers moving migrants across Mexico over the course of seven years.

The result of this unique and extraordinary access is SOLDIERS AND KINGS: the first ever in-depth, character-driven look at human smuggling. It is a heart-wrenching and intimate narrative that revolves around the life and death of one coyote who falls in love and tries to leave smuggling behind. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail. SOLDIERS AND KINGS is not only a ground-breaking up-close glimpse of a difficult-to-access world, it is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.BookBrowse & Amazon

Somebody is walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez

Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books.

Mariana Enriquez—called by The New York Times a “sorceress of horror”—has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.”

But when the body of a friend’s mother who was disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.

In this rich book of essays—“excursions through death,” she calls them—Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead.

Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez’s passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. Fascinating, spooky, and unlike anything else, Enriquez’s first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which she’s become so beloved and admired. BookBrowse & Amazon

Spies, Lies and Cybercrime: Cybersecurity Tactics to Outsmart Hackers, & Disarm Scammers by Eric O’Neill

National security strategist and former FBI counterintelligence operative Eric O’Neill exposes how nefarious cybercriminals relentlessly attempt to access your data and wallet, and arms you with his proven tactics for spotting and neutralizing cyberthreats to protect yourself, your family, and your business.

Cybercriminals, domestic and foreign, are launching attacks day and night using malware, phishing scams, deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and other unscrupulous schemes designed to steal your data and hold it hostage. When they win, it costs nations, businesses, and individuals trillions of dollars annually.

It’s possible to fight back, but it’ll take more than a strong password. Drawing on his years of experience as an FBI spy hunter and national security strategist, Eric O’Neill casts light on these malicious actors’ tactics for stealing personal data and exploiting victims. Armed with this knowledge, O’Neill shares his method—called PAID—that you can use to defend yourself and stop attackers in their tracks:

Prepare: Pinpoint your most critical data, identify where it resides and who can access it, and build your defenses around it.
Assess: Continuously reassess your security and apply counterintelligence tactics to identify scams and cyberattacks..
Investigate: Stay educated and hunt the threat before the threat hunts you.
Decide: Using your new aptitude, make smart, rapid decisions under pressure..

Written by a top expert in the field, Spies, Lies, and Cybercrime offers easy-to-follow steps for staving off cyberattacks, securing data, and keeping private information safe in an increasingly digital and dizzying world. Amazon

Tracker by Alexis Wright

“How do you tell an impossible story, one that is almost too big to contain in a single book?”

In Tracker, Alexis Wright tells the story of charismatic Aboriginal Australian leader Tracker Tilmouth, who died in Darwin in 2015 at the age of 62. Taken from his family as a child and brought up in a mission on Croker Island, Tracker worked tirelessly for Aboriginal self-determination, creating opportunities for land use and economic development in his many roles, including Director of the Central Land Council of the Northern Territory.

Tracker was a visionary and a strategist renowned for his irreverent humour and his determination to tell things the way he saw them. Having known him for many years, Alexis Wright interviewed Tracker, along with family, friends, colleagues, and the politicians he influenced, weaving their stories together in a manner reminiscent of Nobel Prize–winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time. The book is as much a testament to the powerful role played by storytelling in contemporary Aboriginal life as it is to the legacy of an extraordinary man. BookBrowse

Wild For Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Janeby Devoney Looser

Incisive, funny, and deeply-researched insights into the life, writing, and legacy of Jane Austen, by the preeminent scholar Devoney Looser.

Thieves! Spies! Abolitionists! Ghosts! If we ever truly believed Jane Austen to be a quiet spinster, scholar Devoney Looser puts that myth to rest at last in Wild for Austen. These, and many other events and characters, come to life throughout this rollicking book. Austen, we learn, was far wilder in her time than we’ve given her credit for, and Looser traces the fascinating and fantastical journey her legacy has taken over the past 250 years.

All six of Austen’s completed novels are examined here, and Looser uncovers striking new gems therein, as well as in Austen’s juvenilia, unfinished fiction, and even essays and poetry. Looser also takes on entirely new scholarship, writing about Austen’s relationship to the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage. In examining the legacy of Austen’s works, Looser reveals the film adaptations that might have changed Hollywood history had they come to fruition, and tells extraordinary stories of ghost-sightings, Austen novels cited in courts of law, and the eclectic members of the Austen extended family whose own outrageous lives seem wilder than fiction.

Written with warmth, humor, and remarkable details never before published, Wild for Austen is the ultimate tribute to Jane Austen. Book Browse & Amazon

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, BookBrowse,, Book Riot, GoodReads, Lit Hub, The Wall Street Journal, The Week or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2026 Books to Read This Winter

Dec15

Before you begin reviewing the books below,

I hope you know that I don’t read all the books I recommend.

Each season I review what is being published that is new in fiction, non fiction, young adults, and graphics.

Lastly, I thought it was time to re-explain the seasonal book pick. Each season I will highlight one to two books that I have read, might not be recently published but is a GREAT READ!

Thank you for all of your years of interest and support.

Tracy

Remember: Survive & Thrive!

Book Pick for the Winter Season

Foster by Claire Keegan

AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 BEST IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

This book is a treasure…..

It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care. But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is. Amazon

Fiction:

Antidote by Karen Russell

A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 from Lit Hub, Marie Claire, TIME, Vulture, Esquire, People, The Chicago Review of Books, and BookPage

The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a “Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell’s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be. NPR & Amazon

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/25/nx-s1-5356144/fiction-books-summer-2025?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=user/npr

Cupability by Bruce Holsinger

“If you want an engaging novel sure to spark great discussion about that thorny [AI] future, this is it.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A gripping, impossibly timely thriller.” —one of NPR’s “Books We Love”

A suspenseful family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them all in the tragic accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI. Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative. Amazon

The Definitions by Matt Greene

Nestled in an idyllic locale beside the sea, the Center is a place of rehabilitation for those afflicted by a strange illness that has swept through the population, erasing their memories and any sense of identity. Students arrive at the Center nameless―none of them know who they are or how they got there.

Each day, they attend classes that will help them relearn the right ways to speak and live; they practice the roles they hope to assume once they graduate and return to society. In their free time, they negotiate a burgeoning social hierarchy and watch old videos together, stories of characters whose names they adopt: Maria, Chino, Ross, Chandler, Gunther . . . But as flashes of memories―of pets, lovers, errands, and beloved music―emerge, some students start to question the Center’s strict instruction and begin to explore different ways in which they might define themselves.

A stunning, intimately told story about what makes us who we are, The Definitions examines the limits of language, the power of connection, and how the human spirit can flourish even under the most oppressive conditions.

This short, taut novel takes place at The Center, a rehabilitation facility for those affected by an illness that erases their memories and sense of self. But as residents relearn how to live in society, they start to question The Center’s lessons. Amazon

https://apple.news/Az_n0hSQvSNm9648vsDxINg

Fox by Joyce Carol Oates

Who is Francis Fox? A charming English teacher new to the idyllic Langhorne Academy, Fox beguiles many of his students, their parents, and his colleagues at the elite boarding school, while leaving others wondering where he came from and why his biography is so enigmatic. When two brothers discover Fox’s car half-submerged in a pond in a local nature preserve and parts of an unidentified body strewn about the nearby woods, the entire community, including Detective Horace Zwender and his deputy, begins to ask disturbing questions about Francis Fox and who he might really be.

A hypnotic, galloping tale of crime and complicity, revenge and restitution, victim vs. predator, Joyce Carol Oates’s Fox illuminates the darkest corners of the human psyche while asking profound moral questions about justice and the response evil demands. A character as magnetically diabolical as Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, Francis Fox enchants and manipulates nearly everyone around him, until at last he meets someone he can’t outfox. Written in Oates’s trademark intimate, sweeping style, and interweaving multiple points of view, Fox is a triumph of craftsmanship and artistry, a novel as profound as it is propulsive, as moving as it is full of mystery. Amazon

Heart The Lover by Lily King

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan’s youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today. BookBrowse

Life, Death & Giants by Ron Rindo

A young, unmarried Amish woman, attended by the country veterinarian, delivers an enormous baby, and no one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of the boy. Raised by his brother on a struggling farm, Gabriel Fisher walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and possesses extraordinary athletic abilities. When his brother dies, Gabriel is taken in by devout Amish grandparents, and for a time, he disappears into the anonymity of Amish life. But at age seventeen, and nearly eight feet tall, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach, and his life changes.

In Life, and Death, and Giants, Gabriel’s remarkable story is told by those whose lives are transformed by him: Thomas Kennedy, the veterinarian who delivers him and becomes his mentor; Hannah Fisher, Gabriel’s Amish grandmother, who is troubled by deep gaps in her faith; Billy Walton, the salty bar owner and bridge between the Amish and English communities in Lakota; and Trey Beathard, the football coach, who tries to counsel Gabriel as his fame explodes―with consequences that no-one can predict.

Threaded through with the poems of Emily Dickinson, Life, and Death, and Giants weaves together an unforgettable story of faith, family, buried secrets, and everyday miracles. BookBrowse & Amazon

North Sun: Or Voyage of the Whaleshipe Esther by Ethan Rutherford

FINALIST FOR THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION

Setting out from New Bedford in 1878, the crew of the Esther is confident the sea will be theirs: in addition to cruising the Pacific for whale, they intend to hunt the teeming northern grounds before the ice closes. But as they sail to their final destination in the Chukchi Sea, where their captain Arnold Lovejoy has an urgent directive of his own to attend to, their encounters with the natural world become more brutal, harrowing, ghostly, and strange.

With one foot firmly planted in the traditional sea-voyage narrative, and another in a blazing mythos of its own, this debut novel looks unsparingly at the cost of environmental exploitation and predation, and in doing so feverishly sings not only of the past, but to the present and future as well. Amazon https://www.bookbub.com/blog/national-book-awards-2025?position=seemore&source=multicontent&target=title

Palaver by Bryan Washington

National Book Award Finalist 2025

A decade of silence ends when a mother arrives unannounced at her son’s Tokyo apartment, forcing them to confront the distance — emotional and otherwise — that has grown between them. Over uneasy meals, quiet confessions, and a journey through Japan, they face old wounds with new understanding and discover that love doesn’t always look like forgiveness. In a starred review, Library Journal says, “Tender and endearing… Count on Washington for stylish tales with emotional depth and, always, delicious-sounding food.”

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/national-book-awards-2025?position=seemore&source=multicontent&target=title

Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.

As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms. Amazon & BookBub

Queen Esther by John Irving

After forty years, John Irving returns to the world of his bestselling classic novel and Academy Award–winning film, The Cider House Rules, revisiting the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, Maine, where Dr. Wilbur Larch takes in Esther—a Viennese-born Jew whose life is shaped by anti-Semitism.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board the ship to Portland, Maine; her mother is murdered by anti-Semites in Portland. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther; in fact, he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her.

When Esther is fourteen, soon to be a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic New England family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism. Esther’s gratitude for the Winslows is unending; even as she retraces her roots back to Vienna, she never stops loving and protecting the Winslows. In the final chapter, set in Jerusalem in 1981, Esther Nacht is seventy-six.

John Irving’s sixteenth novel is a testament to his enduring ability to weave complex characters and intricate narratives that challenge and captivate. Queen Esther is not just a story of survival but a profound exploration of identity, belonging, and the enduring impact of history on our personal lives showcasing why Irving remains one of the world’s most beloved, provocative, and entertaining authors—a storyteller of our time and for all time. Amazon

The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje

Soldier Noon lost his memory while serving in World War I. So when Juliette arrives to claim him as her spouse, a photographer named Amand, he has no way of confirming her story. But she takes him home, where they slowly build a new relationship amid Juliette’s stories of his previous life and Noon’s uncertainty. New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus says, “I’ve never encountered a novel so intensely realistic yet so dreamily rendered. The Remembered Soldier is absolutely singular and utterly bewitching. I could have read it forever.”

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/national-book-awards-2025?position=seemore&source=multicontent&target=title

The River is Waiting by Wally Lamb

Ruth by Kate Riley

Ruth is raised in a snow globe of Christian communism, a world without private property, television, or tolerance for idle questions. Every morning she braids her hair and wears the same costume, sings the same breakfast song in a family room identical to every other family room in the community; every one of these moments is meant to be a prayer, but to Ruth they remain puzzles. Her life is seen in glimpses through childhood, marriage, and motherhood, as she tries to manage her own perilous curiosity in a community built on holy mystery. Is she happy? Might this in fact be happiness? Ruth immerses us in an experience that challenges our most fervent beliefs.

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-10-best-books-of-2025-2875f7c3

Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer

Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They’ve raised two children in their sleepy Connecticut town and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long life spent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it’s time to gather loved ones and prepare for the inevitable.

Over the years of Claire’s illness, Eliot has willingly—lovingly—shifted into the role of caregiver, appreciating the intimacy and tenderness that comes with a role even more layered and complex than the one he performed as a devoted husband. But as he focuses on settling into what will be their last days and weeks together, Claire makes an unexpected request that leaves him reeling. In a moment, his carefully constructed world is shattered.

What if your partner’s dying wish broke your heart? How well do we know the deepest desires of those we love dearly? As Eliot is confronted with this profound turning point in his marriage and his life, he grapples with the man and husband he’s been, and with the great unknowns of Claire’s last days.

Ann Packer makes a triumphant return with this powerful novel that is tender and raw, visceral and unexpected. Emotionally vibrant and complex, Some Bright Nowhere explores the profound gifts and unexpected costs of truly loving someone, and the fears and desires we experience as the end of life draws near. Amazon, BookBub

The Time Hop Coffee Shop by Phaedra Patrick

Welcome to the Time Hop Coffee Shop, where wishes can come true…

Greta Perks was once the shining star of the iconic Maple Gold coffee commercials, the quintessential TV wife and mom. Now fame has faded, her marriage is on the rocks, her teenage daughter has become distant and Greta’s once-glittering career feels like a distant memory.

When Greta stumbles upon a mysterious coffee shop serving a magical brew, she wishes for the perfect life in those past Maple Gold commercials. Next thing she knows, Greta wakes in the idyllic make-believe town of Mapleville, where the sun always shines and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee and second chances fill the air. Given the opportunity to live the life she dreamed, Greta is determined to rewrite her own script. But can life ever be like a coffee commercial? And what will happen when Greta has to choose between perfection and real life, with no turning back? Amazon

The Unveiling by Quan Barry

Striker isn’t entirely sure she should be on this luxury Antarctic cruise. A Black film scout, her mission is to photograph potential locations for a big-budget movie about Ernest Shackleton’s doomed expedition. Along the way, she finds private if cautious amusement in the behavior of both the native wildlife and the group of wealthy, mostly white tourists who have chosen to spend Christmas on the Weddell Sea.

But when a kayaking excursion goes horribly wrong, Striker and a group of survivors become stranded on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula, a desolate setting complete with boiling geothermal vents and vicious birds. Soon the hostile environment will show each survivor their true face, and as the polar ice thaws in the unseasonable warmth, the group’s secrets, prejudices, and inner demons will also emerge, including revelations from Striker’s past that could irrevocably shatter her world.

With her signature lyricism and humor, Quan Barry offers neither comfort nor closure as she questions the limits of the human bonds that connect us to one another, affirming there are no such things as haunted places, only haunted people. Gripping, lucid, and imaginative, The Unveiling is an astonishing ghost story about the masks we wear and the truths we hide even from ourselves. BookBrowse

The Wayfinder by Adam Johnson

A historical epic about a girl from a remote Tongan island who becomes her people’s queen.

Talking corpses, poetic parrots, and a fan that wafts the breath of life—this is the world young Kōrero finds herself thrust into when a mysterious visitor lands on her island, a place so remote its inhabitants have forgotten the word for stranger. Her people are desperate and on the brink of starvation, and the wayward stranger offers them an impossible choice: they can remain in the only home they’ve ever known and await the uncertainty to come, or Kōrero can join him and venture into unfamiliar waters, guided by only the night sky and his assurance of a bountiful future in the Kingdom of Tonga. What Kōrero and her people don’t know is that the promised refuge is no utopia—instead, Tonga is an empire at war and on the verge of collapse, a place where brains are regularly liberated from skulls and souls get trapped in coconuts with some frequency.

The perils of Tonga are compounded by a royal feud: loyalties are shifting, graves are being opened, and everyone lives in fear of a jellyfish tattoo. Here, survival can rest on a perfectly performed dance or the acceptance of a cup of kava. Together, the stranger and Kōrero embark upon an epic voyage—one that will deliver them either to salvation or to the depths of the Pacific.

Evoking the grandeur of Wolf Hall and the splendor of Shōgun, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Adam Johnson conjures oral history, restores the natural world, and locates what’s best in humanity. Toweringly ambitious and breathtakingly immersive, The Wayfinder is an instant, timeless classic. Amazon & https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-10-best-books-of-2025-2875f7c3

Non Fiction

Bad, Bad Girl by Gish Jen

Gish’s mother—Loo Shu-hsin—is born in 1925 to a wealthy Shanghai family where girls are expected to behave and be quiet. Every act of disobedience prompts the same reprimand: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” She gets sent to Catholic school, where she is baptized, re-named for St. Agnes, and, unusually for a girl, given an internationally minded education. Still, her father would say, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Aggie finds solace in books, reading every night with a flashlight and an English-Chinese dictionary, before announcing her intention to pursue a Ph.D. in America. It is 1947, and with the forces of Communist revolution on the horizon, she leaves—never to return.

Lonely and adrift in Manhattan, Aggie begins dating Chao-Pei, an engineering student also from Shanghai. While news of their country and their families grows increasingly dire, they set out to make a new life together: marriage, a number one son, a small house in the suburbs. By the time Gish is born, her parents’ marriage is unraveling, and her mother, struggling to understand her strong-willed American daughter, is repeating the refrain that punctuated her own childhood: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”

Bad Bad Girl is a novel about a mother and a daughter forced to reckon with each other across decades of curiosity and ambition, elation and disappointment, intense intimacy and misunderstanding. Spanning continents and generations, this is a rich, heartbreaking portrait of two fierce women locked in a complicated lifelong embrace. Book Browse, The Week

Bird School: A Beginner of the Wood by Adam Nicolson

Poets and scientists, saints and naturalists, stalk through these pages. Neighboring cock robins duel almost to the death. Tawny owl widows are seen looking for tawny owl widowers to set up shop with. Blackbirds are found singing phrases from late Beethoven quartets, both in a garden in southern England (where they have been listening to records played through the open window of a drawing room) and in Bonn, where Beethoven himself first heard them and where they are still singing to the same rhythms two hundred fifty years later.

Bird School describes and follows Adam Nicolson’s progress over two or three years in trying to learn about, and eventually to create an environment friendly to, the birds of the farm where he lives in Sussex. In simple language that evinces his careful observational prowess, Nicolson aims to cross the boundary between the scientific and the prescientific understanding of birds, looking into why and how they sing, how they fly and breed, how they survive and migrate, how they have suffered at our hands, how we have loved them and damaged them, and how we might create, or re-create, a refuge for them. Here is a set of lessons for someone who knows little but cares a lot about the living world that is in such dire crisis. Here is life in the “rough grounds,” on the edge of culture and nature. Amazon

Motherland by Julia Ioffe

Acclaimed journalist Julia Ioffe tells the story of modern Russia through the history of its women, from revolution to utopia to autocracy.
In 1990, seven-year-old Julia Ioffe and her family fled the Soviet Union. Nearly twenty years later, Ioffe returned to Moscow—only to discover just how much Russian society had changed while she had been living in America. The Soviet women she had known growing up—doctors, engineers, scientists—seemed to have been replaced by women desperate to marry rich and become stay-at-home moms. How had Russia gone from portraying itself as the vanguard of world feminism to becoming a bastion of conservative Christian values?
In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin.
Part memoir, part journalistic exploration, part history, Motherland paints a portrait of modern Russia through the women who shaped it. With deep emotion, Ioffe reveals what it means to live through the cataclysms of revolution, war, idealism, and heartbreak—and how the story of Russia today is inextricably tied to the sacrifices of its women. Amazon

Queens at War : Englands’ Medieval Queens, Book 4 by Alison Weir

The fifteenth century was a violent age. In Queens at War, Alison Weir chronicles the five queens who got caught up in wars that changed the courses of their lives: the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and the Wars of the Roses between the royal Houses of Lancaster and York.

Against this tempestuous backdrop, Weir describes the lives of five Plantagenet queens, who occupied the consort’s throne from 1403 to 1485. Joan of Navarre was happily married to King Henry IV but was accused of witchcraft by Henry’s heir and imprisoned. Paris-born Katherine of Valois’s political marriage to Henry V was meant to bring peace between England and France. It didn’t, and Henry died during the Hundred Years’ War without ever seeing his newborn heir, Henry VI, who was wed to another French princess, Margaret of Anjou, in 1445. In the Wars of the Roses, Margaret staunchly supported her husband and son. Henry’s successor, Edward IV, became embroiled in scandal after he fell in love with and married Elizabeth Widville, mother of the tragic Princes in the Tower. The notorious Richard III usurped Edward’s throne and married Anne Neville, who died after losing her only child, forsaken by her husband. Amazon

Booklist says, “No matter who the royal subject, no matter if it is fiction or nonfiction, Alison Weir can always be counted on to tell a superb story.” And in Queens at War, Weir brings the final volume of her Medieval Queens series to life by tracing the dramatic fates of the last five Plantagenet queens amid the Hundred Years’ War and the Wars of the Roses. From political marriages and scandal to betrayal, loss, and resilience, she vividly details how these women managed the violent upheavals that transformed England and paved the way for the Tudor era.https://www.bookbub.com/blog/best-books-winter-2026?position=seemore&source=multicontent&target=title

Sad Tiger by Niege Sinno

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE, FINALIST

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was seven years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece. Winner of the Le Monde Literary Prize, 2023, Winner of the European Strega Prize, 2024 Winner of the Prix Femina, 2023 Amazon & National Book Awards Finalist

Storyteller: the Life of Robert Louis Stevenson by Leo Damrosch

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) is famed for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but he published many other novels and stories before his death at forty-four. Despite lifelong ill health, he had immense vitality; Mark Twain said his eyes burned with “smoldering rich fire.” Born in Edinburgh to a family of lighthouse engineers, Stevenson set many stories in Scotland but sought travel and adventure in a life as romantic as his novels. “I loved a ship,” he wrote, “as a man loves burgundy or daybreak.” The adventures were shared with his free-spirited American wife, Fanny, with whom he moved to the South Pacific.

Samoan friends named Stevenson “Storyteller.” Reading, he said, “should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.” His own books have been translated into dozens of languages. Jorge Luis Borges called his stories “one of the forms of happiness,” and other modernist masters as various as Proust, Nabokov, and Calvino have paid tribute to his greatness as a literary artist.

In Storyteller, Leo Damrosch brings to life an unforgettable personality, illuminated by many who knew Stevenson well and drawing from thousands of the writer’s letters in his many voices and moods―playful, imaginative, at times tragic. Amazon, WSJ

The Undiscovered Country: Triump, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West by Paul Andrew Hutton

Paul Andrew Hutton has written a history of the American West like no other, weaving together the biographies of seven figures: Daniel Boone, the Kentucky settler; Red Eagle, the Creek chief; Davy Crockett, the Tennessee folk hero; Mangas Coloradas, the Apache chief; Kit Carson, the California pioneer; Sitting Bull, the Lakota leader; and the soldier and showman William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, who turned the facts into legend. Wall Street Journal

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-10-best-books-of-2025-2875f7c3

Valley of Forgetting: Alzheimers Families and the Search for a Cure by Jennie Erin Smith

In the 1980s, a neurologist named Francisco Lopera traveled on horseback into the mountains seeking families with symptoms of dementia. For centuries, residents of certain villages near Medellín had suffered memory loss as they reached middle age, going on to die in their fifties. Lopera discovered that a unique genetic mutation was causing their rare hereditary form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Over the next forty years of working with the “paisa mutation” kindred, he went on to build a world-class research program in a region beset by violence and poverty.

In Valley of Forgetting, Jennie Erin Smith brings readers into the clinic, the laboratories, and the Medellín trial center where Lopera’s patients receive an experimental drug to see if Alzheimer’s can be averted. She chronicles the lives of people who care for sick parents, spouses, and siblings, all while struggling to keep their own dreams afloat. These Colombian families have donated hundreds of their loved ones’ brains to science and subjected themselves to invasive testing to help uncover how Alzheimer’s develops and whether it can be stopped. Findings from this unprecedented effort could hold the key to understanding and treating the disease, though it is unclear what, if anything, the families will receive in return.

Smith’s immersive storytelling brings this complex drama to life, inviting readers on a scientific journey that is as deeply moving as it is engrossing. Amazon & https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/the-10-best-books-of-2025-2875f7c3

When it All Burns by Jordan Thomas

National Book Award Finalist

Eighteen of California’s largest wildfires on record have burned in the past two decades. Scientists recently invented the term “megafire” to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been nearly impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction.

In When It All Burns, wildland firefighter and anthropologist Jordan Thomas recounts a single, brutal six-month fire season with the Los Padres Hotshots—the special forces of America’s firefighters. Being a hotshot is among the most difficult jobs on earth. Thomas viscerally renders his crew’s attempts to battle flames that are often too destructive to contain. He uncovers the hidden cultural history of megafires, revealing how humanity’s symbiotic relationship with wildfire became a war—and what can be done to change it back.

Thomas weaves ecology and the history of Indigenous peoples’ oppression, federal forestry, and the growth of the fire industrial complex into a riveting narrative about a new phase in the climate crisis. It’s an immersive story of community in the most perilous of circumstances, told with humor, humility, and affection. Amazon & https://www.nationalbook.org/2025-national-book-awards-finalists-announced/

Fantasy & Young Adult

Katabasis by R.F.Kuang The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams….

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don’t even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn’t always the answer, and there’s something in Alice and Peter’s past that could forge them into the perfect allies…or lead to their doom. Amazon & Good Reads

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, BookBrowse, BookBub, GoodReads, The Wall Street Journal, The Week or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2025 Winter Reading

Dec15

Book Pick for the Winter Season:

Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

In pursuit of the wild, solitary, predatory octopus, popular naturalist Sy Montgomery has practiced true immersion journalism. From New England aquarium tanks to the reefs of French Polynesia and the Gulf of Mexico, she has befriended octopuses with strikingly different personalities—gentle Athena, assertive Octavia, curious Kali, and joyful Karma. Each creature shows her cleverness in myriad ways: escaping enclosures like an orangutan; jetting water to bounce balls; and endlessly tricking companions with multiple “sleights of hand” to get food.

Scientists have only recently accepted the intelligence of dogs, birds, and chimpanzees but now are watching octopuses solve problems and are trying to decipher the meaning of the animal’s color-changing techniques. With her “joyful passion for these intelligent and fascinating creatures” (Library Journal Editors’ Spring Pick), Montgomery chronicles the growing appreciation of this mollusk as she tells a unique love story. By turns funny, entertaining, touching, and profound, The Soul of an Octopus reveals what octopuses can teach us about the meeting of two very different minds. Amazon

Sorry if this is a repeat pick but I adore Sy Montgomery…& this is one of my favorite books. Please note that in non fiction Sy Montgomery has a new book:
What the Chicken Knows!….check it out.

Fiction:

Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars. Amazon

All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker

1975 is a time of change in America. The Vietnam War is ending. Muhammad Ali is fighting Joe Frazier. And in the smalltown of Monta Clare, Missouri, girls are disappearing.

When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope. Amazon

Clear: A Novel by Carys Davies

It’s the 1840s, the last and most brutal years of The Clearances, when Scottish landowners began replacing unprofitable tenants with sheep. Based on that real history, Clear is a novel about a minister, John, who has been dispatched to clear a remote island of its last remaining inhabitant, Ivar. Except just after he arrives, John slips and falls off a cliff. Ivar finds John, nurses him back to health, and invites him into his life; Ivar begins to teach John the many words that all mean some variation of “rough seas” in Norn (a real language), and the pair learn to communicate roughly, but with an unexpected depth. What follows is perhaps the most tender, beautiful story about the connection between two people and what they must overcome to find each other — in every sense of the word. — Samantha Balaban,producer, Weekend Edition https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

The Fox Wife: A Novel by Yangsze Choo

Manchuria, 1908. In the last years of the dying Qing Empire, a courtesan is found frozen in a doorway. Her death is clouded by rumors of foxes, which are believed to lure people by transforming themselves into beautiful women and handsome men. Bao, a detective with an uncanny ability to sniff out the truth, is hired to uncover the dead woman’s identity. Since childhood, Bao has been intrigued by the fox gods, yet they’ve remained tantalizingly out of reach―until, perhaps, now.

Meanwhile, a family who owns a famous Chinese medicine shop can cure ailments but can’t escape the curse that afflicts them―their eldest sons die before their twenty-fourth birthdays. When a disruptively winsome servant named Snow enters their household, the family’s luck seems to change―or does it?

Snow is a creature of many secrets, but most of all she’s a mother seeking vengeance for her lost child. Hunting a murderer, she will follow the trail from northern China to Japan, while Bao follows doggedly behind. Navigating the myths and misconceptions of fox spirits, both Snow and Bao will encounter old friends and new foes, even as more deaths occur.

New York Times bestselling author Yangsze Choo brilliantly explores a world of mortals and spirits, humans and beasts, and their dazzling intersection. Epic in scope and full of singular, unforgettable characters, The Fox Wife is a stunning novel about old loves and second chances, the depths of maternal love, and ancient folktales that may very well be true. Amazon

There’s a little bit of mystery and mysticism on every page of this book. Set in China in the early 1900s, the books centers around two characters in separate, but connecting narratives. A fox masquerading as a young woman that’s set out to avenge her daughter’s death and a detective with an affinity for foxes who is working a murder case. It’s clever and observant, with twists and turns and just the perfect amount of folklore to keep you asking: What is real and what is imagined? — Elissa Nadworny, correspondent NPR

Amazon & NPR https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

The Glass Maker by Tracy Chevalier

It is 1486 and Venice is a wealthy, opulent center for trade. Orsola Rosso is the eldest daughter in a family of glassblowers on Murano, the island revered for the craft. As a woman, she is not meant to work with glass—but she has the hands for it, the heart, and a vision. When her father dies, she teaches herself to make glass beads in secret, and her work supports the Rosso family fortunes.

Skipping like a stone through the centuries, in a Venice where time moves as slowly as molten glass, we follow Orsola and her family as they live through creative triumph and heartbreaking loss, from a plague devastating Venice to Continental soldiers stripping its palazzos bare, from the domination of Murano and its maestros to the transformation of the city of trade into a city of tourists. In every era, the Rosso women ensure that their work, and their bonds, endure.

Chevalier is a master of her own craft, and The Glassmaker is as inventive as it is spellbinding: a mesmerizing portrait of a woman, a family, and a city as everlasting as their glass. Amazon

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

Amazon & NPR https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

The Husbands by Holly Gramazio

When Lauren returns home to her flat in London late one night, she is greeted at the door by her husband, Michael. There’s only one problem—she’s not married. She’s never seen this man before in her life. But according to her friends, her much-improved decor, and the photos on her phone, they’ve been together for years.

As Lauren tries to puzzle out how she could be married to someone she can’t remember meeting, Michael goes to the attic to change a lightbulb and abruptly disappears. In his place, a new man emerges, and a new, slightly altered life re-forms around her. Realizing that her attic is creating an infinite supply of husbands, Lauren confronts the question: If swapping lives is as easy as changing a lightbulb, how do you know you’ve taken the right path? When do you stop trying to do better and start actually living? Amazon & Book Riot

Isola by Allegra Goodman

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian’s servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.

Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed.

Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival. Amazon & Time https://time.com/7202423/most-anticipated-books-2025/

The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali

In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation.

Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions of becoming “lion women.”

But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.

Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.Amazon, Bookbub

https://www.bookbub.com/blog/best-book-of-2024-readers-share?position=0&source=multicontent&target=title

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others. Book Riot & Amazon

Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles

Set in a foreboding Gothic mansion and infused with the heightened paranoia and creeping horror of novels like Catherine House and Crimson Peak, a spine-chilling debut historical thriller from a fresh voice in the genre that will leave you questioning who, or what, you can trust . . . including your own sanity.

England, 1840. Orabella Mumthrope spies an unexpected visitor in her uncle’s parlor. Scruffy in appearance yet claiming to be the scion of a fabulously wealthy family, Elias Blakersby declares a deep desire to make Orabella his wife. The orphaned daughter of a white man and a Black woman—an outsider with no fortune or connections—Orabella never expected to marry. But her uncle has many debts, and Orabella, curious about the seeming devotion Elias bestows upon her, agrees.

The new bride is quickly whisked away to Korringhill Manor, the Blakersby family estate, and far from everything she knows. Expecting splendor, Orabella is shocked to find decay, skittish servants, and curt elders. But her kind new husband’s loving touch, promises of a happy life together, and his assurances she’ll never want for anything soothe her concerns.

Yet there is a darkness deep within this house. Rooms are locked or hidden away, and the walls seem to thrum with secrets. Orabella can never venture outside unattended; she spends her days having tea with a catatonic sister-in-law and evenings at Elias’s side, dutifully hosting lavish dinners. The darkness soon begins to engulf her, too. Becoming dizzy and drowsy after dinner, she falls into a fitful sleep filled with macabre dreams, and is awakened by blood-curdling screams in the night. In the morning she rises from her bed covered in mysterious bruises. Confused and terrified, she begins to question where her dreams end and reality begins. The longer Orabella stays in this place, the more she loses parts of herself . . . how long until she no longer exists?

Midnight Rooms is a sweeping saga with supernatural undertones set in Victorian England. Vibrating with tension, richly atmospheric—haunted by ghosts, guilt, and familial bonds—it is an electrifying story that will linger in your dreams. Amazon, Time

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
You’d think a novel about the bureaucracy of a time travel government agency might be kinda, boring? But from the moment you meet the book’s enigmatic protagonist — as she starts a new job in the U.K.’s top secret new time travel agency — to the introduction of the dashing Graham Gore, an 1847 Arctic explorer plucked through time, you’ll be hooked. Come for the romance, stay for the unraveling of a mystery, the nuanced, genre-bending treatises on race and identity, and the long-lingering ideas on colonialism, empires and the mutability of history. — Christina Cala, senior producer, Code Switch https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra

Nightwatching begins with a scene straight out of a nightmare: A woman is at home with two sleeping children when she hears the footsteps of an intruder on the stairs. The story that follows is by turns suspenseful, uncomfortable and enraging. Tracy Sierra skillfully uses the home invasion to explore the terrifying responsibility of motherhood and to expose the pure horror of being a woman in a society that does not always choose to believe women. — Julie Rogers, historian and curator, NPR Research, Archives & Data strategyhttps://www.npr.org/2024/06/11/nx-s1-5002183/fiction-books-summer-2024

The Story of the Forest by Linda Grant

It’s 1913 when Mina, the young and carefree daughter of a Jewish merchant, roams into a forest on the edge of the Baltic Sea looking for mushrooms. Instead, she encounters a gang of unruly, charismatic Bolsheviks―an adventure that will become the stuff of familial lore for generations to come. Intending to save her from further corruption, and in an act that forever changes the trajectory of their family’s life, Mina and her eldest brother, Jossel, board a ship to England.

There the threat of a different war looms large. When WWI hits, Jossel is sent to the front, where he keeps a severely wounded soldier in his unit alive ‘til morning by telling him tales―including that his sister Mina will marry him if he survives. The soldier lives and asks for Mina’s hand, their marriage uniting two growing trade dynasties. But over time Mina and Jossel will learn that not everyone in their family has survived the wars and pogroms, even as they and their offspring struggle to build new lives in Liverpool in the midst of ever-shifting discriminations.

Based on the author’s own family history and legends, The Story of the Forest is a remarkable record of family lore; a meditation on the power of stories to ground us, particularly in the face of life’s inevitable losses, told with a keen wit and a sharp eye to the charms and the foibles of family by masterful British novelist Linda Grant. Amazon & Parade

https://parade.com/books/best-reads/best-new-book-releases-november-2024?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/books

Table for Two by Amor Towles

The first half of this jaunty short-story collection takes place in New York. Among the memorable characters are a Russian immigrant whose chief role in life is to stand in lines; a young antiquarian bookstore employee who gets more than he bargains for in his desire for life experience; and a seemingly straight-laced family man with a big Wall Street job, whose secret pastime, once discovered, upends his and his loved ones’ lives. The second half, devoted entirely to the novella “Eve in Hollywood,” is set in Los Angeles during Tinseltown’s Golden Age. The pithy, film noir-ish thriller picks up where the author’s 2011 novel Rules of Civility left off — with the plucky, scar-faced adventuress, Evelyn Ross, deftly saving the honor of a host of Hollywood starlets. — Chloe Veltman, correspondent, Culture Desk https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

Three Days in June by Ann Tyler

Nothing seems to be going right for Gail Baines at the start of Pulitzer Prize winner Anne Tyler’s 25th novel, Three Days in June. The day before her daughter’s wedding, Gail loses her job, discovers she didn’t get an invite to festivities organized by the groom’s mom, and gets stuck rooming with her ex-husband and a depressed cat. But that’s not the worst of it: her daughter just discovered a shocking secret about the man she is about to marry, putting their big day in jeopardy. In this charming marriage story, the revelation throws Gail back to the unresolved issues surrounding her divorce—and she’s finally forced to reckon with its repercussions.https://time.com/7202423/most-anticipated-books-2025/

Time of the Child by Niall Williams

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams’ beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time. Amazon & NPR

We Do Not Part by Han King

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be. Amazon

Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, newly translated from the original Korean by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, delves into a tragic chapter of modern Korean history. After an injury lands Inseon in the hospital, she asks her friend Kyungha to do what seems like a simple favor: go to her home on Jeju Island and care for her beloved pet bird. But once Kyungha gets there, she is forced to grapple with the devastating effects of the Jeju Uprising on her country and its people. Kang’s novel is a haunting exploration of friendship amid historical trauma. https://time.com/7202423/most-anticipated-books-2025/

Non Fiction

A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery by Lawrence Ingrassia

In 1968, when journalist Lawrence Ingrassia was 15, his mother died of breast cancer at age 42. “It was tragic, but what was there to say?” he writes. Ingrassia couldn’t know then that in the decades to come, his three siblings would each die from a different kind of cancer and that a nephew would too. In A Fatal Inheritance, Ingrassia movingly intertwines his family’s oncological experiences with the winding story of how researchers worked to uncover the roles that heritable genetic mutations play in cancer risk. — Kristin Martin,book critic https://www.npr.org/2024/12/02/nx-s1-5163778/best-novels-2024

Carson the Magnificent by Bill Zehme with Mike Thomas

In 2002, Bill Zehme landed one of the most coveted assignments for a magazine writer: an interview with Johnny Carson—the only one he’d granted since retiring from hosting The Tonight Show a decade earlier. Zehme was tapped for the Esquire feature story thanks to his years of legendary celebrity profiles, and the resulting piece portrayed Carson as more human being than showbiz legend. Shortly after Carson’s death in 2005 and urged on by many of those closest to Carson, Zehme signed a contract to do an expansive biography. He toiled on the book for nearly a decade—interviewing dozens of Carson’s colleagues and friends and filling up a storage locker with his voluminous research—before a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatments halted his progress. When he died in 2023 his obituaries mentioned the Carson book, with New York Times comedy critic Jason Zinoman calling it “one of the great unfinished biographies.”

Yet the hundreds of pages Zehme managed to complete are astounding both for the caliber of their writing and how they illuminate one of the most inscrutable figures in entertainment history: A man who brought so much joy and laughter to so many millions but was himself exceedingly shy and private. Zehme traces Carson’s rise from a magic-obsessed Nebraska boy to a Navy ensign in World War II to a burgeoning radio and TV personality to, eventually, host of The Tonight Show—which he transformed, along with the entirety of American popular culture, over the next three decades. Without Carson, there would be no late-night television as we know it. On a much more intimate level, Zehme also captures the turmoil and anguish that accompanied the success: four marriages, troubles with alcohol, and the devastating loss of a child.

In one passage, Zehme notes that when asked by an interviewer in the mid-80s for the secret to his success, Carson replied simply, “Be yourself and tell the truth.” Completed with help from journalist and Zehme’s former research assistant Mike Thomas, Carson the Magnificent offers just that: an honest assessment of who Johnny Carson really was. Amazon

Challenger by Adam Higginbotham

On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of the crew, which included New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th-century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told.

Based on extensive archival research and meticulous, original reporting, Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space follows a handful of central protagonists—including each of the seven members of the doomed crew—through the years leading up to the accident, and offers a detailed account of the tragedy itself and the investigation afterward. It’s a compelling tale of ambition and ingenuity undermined by political cynicism and cost-cutting in the interests of burnishing national prestige; of hubris and heroism; and of an investigation driven by leakers and whistleblowers determined to bring the truth to light. Throughout, there are the ominous warning signs of a tragedy to come, recognized but then ignored, and later hidden from the public.

Higginbotham reveals the history of the shuttle program and the lives of men and women whose stories have been overshadowed by the disaster, as well as the designers, engineers, and test pilots who struggled against the odds to get the first shuttle into space. A masterful blend of riveting human drama and fascinating and absorbing science, Challenger identifies a turning point in history—and brings to life an even more complex and astonishing story than we remember. Amazon

Dinner for Vampires by Bethany Joy Lenz

In the early 2000s, after years of hard work and determination to breakthrough as an actor, Bethany Joy Lenz was finally cast as one of the leads on the hit drama One Tree Hill. Her career was about to take off, but her personal life was slowly beginning to unravel. What none of the show’s millions of fans knew, hidden even from her costars, was her secret double life in a cult.

An only child who often had to fend for herself and always wanted a place to belong, Lenz found the safe haven she’d been searching for in a Bible study group with other Hollywood creatives. However, the group soon morphed into something more sinister—a slowly woven web of manipulation, abuse, and fear under the guise of a church covenant called The Big House Family. Piece by piece, Lenz began to give away her autonomy, ultimately relocating to the Family’s Pacific Northwest compound, overseen by a domineering minister who would convince Lenz to marry one of his sons and steadily drained millions of her TV income without her knowledge. Family “minders” assigned to her on set, “Maoist struggle session”–inspired meetings in the basement of a filthy house, and regular counseling with “Leadership” were just part of the tactics used to keep her loyal.

Only when she became a mother did Lenz find the courage to leave and spare her child from a similar fate. After nearly a decade (and with the unlikely help of a One Tree Hill superfan), she finally managed to escape the family’s grip and begin to heal from the deep trauma that forever altered her relationship with God and her understanding of faith.

Written with powerful honesty and dark humor, Dinner for Vampires is an inspiring story about the importance of identity and understanding what you believe. Amazon, The Week 11/22/24 p.23

Eden Undone : A True Story of Sex, Murder and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II by Abbott Kahler

At the height of the Great Depression, Los Angeles oil mogul George Allan Hancock and his crew of Smithsonian scientists came upon a gruesome scene: two bodies, mummified by the searing heat, on the shore of a remote Galápagos island. For the past four years Hancock and other American elites had traveled the South Seas to collect specimens for scientific research. On one trip to the Galápagos, Hancock was surprised to discover an equally exotic group of humans: European exiles who had fled political and economic unrest, hoping to create a utopian paradise. One was so devoted to a life of isolation that he’d had his teeth extracted and replaced with a set of steel dentures.

As Hancock and his fellow American explorers would witness, paradise had turned into chaos. The three sets of exiles—a Berlin doctor and his lover, a traumatized World War I veteran and his young family, and an Austrian baroness with two adoring paramours—were riven by conflict. Petty slights led to angry confrontations. The baroness, wielding a riding crop and pearl-handled revolver, staged physical fights between her two lovers and unabashedly seduced American tourists. The conclusion was deadly: with two exiles missing and two others dead, the survivors hurled accusations of murder.

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia—and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed. Amazon, The Week 9/27/24 page 23

The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger

The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 • TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 • New York Magazine’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction of 2024 • Smithsonian’s 10 Best Science Books of the Year • A Best Book of the Year: Boston Globe, New York Public Library, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly • An Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

Award-winning Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, “destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself.” (The New Yorker)

It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, store useful memories that inform their life cycle, and trick animals into behaving to their benefit, to name just a few remarkable talents.

The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild and awe-inspiring world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have perhaps formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to blend into the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its bloom to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it? Zoë Schlanger takes us across the globe, digging into her own memories and into the soil with the scientists who have spent their waking days studying these amazing entities up close.

What can we learn about life on Earth from the living things that thrive, adapt, consume, and accommodate simultaneously? More important, what do we owe these life forms once we come to understand their rich and varied abilities? Examining the latest epiphanies in botanical research, Schlanger spotlights the intellectual struggles among the researchers conceiving a wholly new view of their subject, offering a glimpse of a field in turmoil as plant scientists debate the tenets of ongoing discoveries and how they influence our understanding of what a plant is.

We need plants to survive. But what do they need us for—if at all? An eye-opening and informative look at the ecosystem we live in, this book challenges us to rethink the role of plants—and our own place—in the natural world. Bookbub & Amazon

The Lucky Ones by Zara Chowdhary

A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

In 2002, Zara Chowdhary is sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, one of India’s fastest-growing cities, when a gruesome train fire claims the lives of sixty Hindu right-wing volunteers and upends the life of five million Muslims. Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors, friends, and members of civil society transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens. The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, will later be accused of fomenting the massacre, and yet a decade later, will rise to become India’s prime minister, sending the “world’s largest democracy” hurtling toward cacophonous Hindu nationalism.

The Lucky Ones traces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India’s brave but bloody origins, a segregated city’s ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets. Symphonic interludes offer glimpses into the precious, ordinary lives of Muslims, all locked together in a crumbling apartment building in the city’s old quarters, with their ability to forgive and find laughter, to offer grace even as the world outside, and their place in it, falls apart.

The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, examines forgotten myths, prods a family’s secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. It is a warning thrown to the world by a young survivor, to democracies that fail to protect their vulnerable, and to homes that won’t listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms. Amazon & Book Riot & Time

Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Why is Miami…Miami? What does the heartbreaking fate of the cheetah tell us about the way we raise our children? Why do Ivy League schools care so much about sports? What is the Magic Third, and what does it mean for racial harmony? In this provocative new work, Malcolm Gladwell returns for the first time in twenty-five years to the subject of social epidemics and tipping points, this time with the aim of explaining the dark side of contagious phenomena.

Through a series of riveting stories, Gladwell traces the rise of a new and troubling form of social engineering. He takes us to the streets of Los Angeles to meet the world’s most successful bank robbers, rediscovers a forgotten television show from the 1970s that changed the world, visits the site of a historic experiment on a tiny cul-de-sac in northern California, and offers an alternate history of two of the biggest epidemics of our day: COVID and the opioid crisis. Revenge of the Tipping Point is Gladwell’s most personal book yet. With his characteristic mix of storytelling and social science, he offers a guide to making sense of the contagions of modern world. It’s time we took tipping points seriously. Amazon

Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world’s most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness. Time, Amazon, Book Browse

We Will Be Jaquars by Nemonte Nenquimo & Mitch Anderson

Born into the Waorani tribe of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest—one of the last to be contacted by missionaries in the 1950s—Nemonte Nenquimo had a singular upbringing.

She was taught about plant medicines, foraging, oral storytelling, and shamanism by her elders. At age fourteen, she left the forest for the first time to study with an evangelical missionary group in the city. Eventually, her ancestors began appearing in her dreams, pleading with her to return and embrace her own culture. She listened.

Two decades later, Nemonte has emerged as one of the most forceful voices in climate change activism. She has spearheaded the alliance of indigenous nations across the Upper Amazon and led her people to a landmark victory against Big Oil, protecting over a half million acres of primary rainforest. Her message is as sharp as a spear—honed by her experiences battling loggers, miners, oil companies and missionaries.

In We Will Be Jaguars, she partners with her husband, Mitch Anderson, founder of Amazon Frontlines, digging into generations of oral history, uprooting centuries of conquest, hacking away at racist notions of indigenous peoples, and ultimately revealing a life story as rich, harsh, and vital as the Amazon rainforest herself. Amazon & Book Passage

What the Chicken Knows: A New Appreciation of the World’s Most Familiar Bird by Sy Montgomery

For more than two decades, Sy Montgomery—whose The Soul of an Octopus was a National Book Award finalist—has kept a flock of chickens in her backyard. Each chicken has an individual personality (outgoing or shy, loud or quiet, reckless or cautious) and connects with Sy in her own way.

In this short, delightful book, Sy takes us inside the flock and reveals all the things that make chickens such remarkable creatures: only hours after leaving the egg, they are able to walk, run, and peck; relationships are important to them and the average chicken can recognize more than one hundred other chickens; they remember the past and anticipate the future; and they communicate specific information through at least twenty-four distinct calls. Visitors to her home are astonished by all this, but for Sy what’s more astonishing is how little most people know about chickens, especially considering there are about twenty percent more chickens on earth than people.

With a winning combination of personal narrative and science, What the Chicken Knows is exactly the kind of book that has made Sy Montgomery such a beloved and popular author. Amazon

Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

What does it mean to really belong? It’s the question at the center of Deborah Jackson Taffa’s stirring memoir, which explores the author’s relationship with her mixed-tribe Native identity. She tells stories of survival, from how her grandparents endured Indian boarding schools to her own tumultuous coming of age, living on and off a reservation. Whiskey Tender mines these intimate, personal experiences alongside a thorough analysis of Native history, exploring the often devastating consequences of inherited trauma. In following these threads, Taffa also makes an urgent call for intergenerational storytelling as a means of preserving both Native culture and power.

https://time.com/7200389/best-nonfiction-books-2024/

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, Book Browse, Book Passage, Book Riot, Bookbub, Lit Hub, NPR, Parade, Time, The Week, or me!

Tracy

tracys2cents@wordpress.com

2024 Winter Books

Feb19

Book Suggestion for the Season:

Language of Flowers by Diffenbaugh (fiction)

Amazing read for its insights into the Foster care system, the teens who time out of the state system and how they survive or not. Proceeds from the book goes to-

Camellia Network, whose mission is to create a national network that connects every youth aging out of foster care to the critical resources, opportunities, and the support they need to thrive in adulthood. I knew nothing about the use of flowers to convey expressions and messages.

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romantic expressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful in communicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go, Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with a mysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in her life. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from her past, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness. Amazon

Fiction

A Volga Tale by Guzel Yakhina & Polly Gannon ( Translator)

Named Best Foreign Book of 2021 in France
Finalist for the Prix Médicis 2021
Longlisted for the European Literature Prize 2021

The longest river in Europe, the Volga, divides the continent in two. On one side, mighty mountains, large Russian cities with white stone churches, translucent blue lakes of icy water, a cold wind blowing from the North Sea, and, in the early years of the twentieth century, the winds of momentous change blowing even harder, bringing with them revolution and ideologies that will shape the next two centuries of human history. On the other side, a world that belongs to the past, that is shored up by the vast Western Steppe, where small villages dot vast farmlands and life is perfumed by a hot, fragrant breeze that has its source in the Turkmen desert and the salty Caspian Sea.

Two worlds that could not be further apart. Two worlds that will be brought together when Jakob Bach is hired by Udo Grimm to give lessons to Grimm’s daughter, Klara. The love that grows between Jakob and Klara has unimaginable consequences. Expelled from Gnadenthal when their affair is discovered, they settle in a secluded hamlet hidden deep in the woods to live their lives in peace. But following a tragic episode, Jacob, psychically scarred, is forced to raise his daughter Anche alone. The fairy tales he invents and puts to paper in an effort to forge a bond with his daughter become widely known and slowly life in the German colonies along Volga begins to resemble the stories created by Bach.

In the 18th century, the Russian empress Catherine the Great invited Europeans to immigrate and become Russian citizens and farm Russian lands while maintaining their language and culture. The settlers came mainly from Germany, and following the Russian Revolution, the Volga German Soviet Republic was founded, lasting until 1941, when it was abolished after the Germans invaded the region. In September 1941 all Volga Germans were deported. Over half a million were sent into exile in Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Jacob Bach’s life reflects and foreshadows that of his native colony, Gnadenthal, in this sweeping epic set in the dying years of the 19th century through to the mid-twentieth century of personal tragedy and resilience. In telling a stirring family story, Yakhina also recounts the story of a people, a republic, a nation, a tale that begins in quietude, flows and grows mighty, crosses space and time, like the Volga River itself. Amazon

The Clinic by Cate Quinn

Meg works for a casino in LA, catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the remote rehab facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control.

There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can’t believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in herself―to investigate what really happened from the inside.

Battling her own addictions and figuring out the truth will be much more difficult than she imagined, far away from friends, family―and anyone who could help her. Amazon

The Future by Naomi Alderman

When Martha Einkorn fled her father’s isolated compound in Oregon, she never expected to find herself working for a powerful social media mogul hell-bent on controlling everything. Now, she’s surrounded by mega-rich companies designing private weather, predictive analytics, and covert weaponry, while spouting technological prophecy. Martha may have left the cult, but if the apocalyptic warnings in her father’s fox and rabbit sermon—once a parable to her—are starting to come true, how much future is actually left?

Across the world, in a mall in Singapore, Lai Zhen, an internet-famous survivalist, flees from an assassin. She’s cornered, desperate and—worst of all—might die without ever knowing what’s going on. Suddenly, a remarkable piece of software appears on her phone telling her exactly how to escape. Who made it? What is it really for? And if those behind it can save her from danger, what do they want from her, and what else do they know about the future?

Martha and Zhen’s worlds are about to collide. An explosive chain of events is set in motion. While a few billionaires assured of their own safety lead the world to destruction, Martha’s relentless drive and Zhen’s insatiable curiosity could lead to something beautiful or the cataclysmic end of civilization.

By turns thrilling, hilarious, tender, and always piercingly brilliant, The Future unfolds at a breakneck speed, highlighting how power corrupts the few who have it and what it means to stand up to them. The future is coming. The Future is here. Amazon

The History of Burning by Janika Oza

“Remarkable….a haunting, symphonic tale”— New York Times Book ReviewIn 1898, Pirbhai, a teenage boy looking for work, is taken from his village in India to labor for the British on the East African Railway. Far from home, Pirbhai commits a brutal act in the name of survival that will haunt him and his family for years to come.

So begins Janika Oza’s masterful, richly told epic, where the embers of this desperate act are fanned into flame over four generations, four continents, throughout the twentieth century. Pirbhai’s children are born in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule, and as the country moves toward independence, his granddaughters, three sisters, come of age in a divided nation. Latika is an aspiring journalist, who will put everything on the line for what she believes in; Mayuri’s ambitions will take her farther away from home than she ever imagined; and fearless Kiya will have to carry the weight of her family’s silence and secrets.

In 1972, the entire family is forced to flee under Idi Amin’s military dictatorship. Pirbhai’s grandchildren are now scattered across the world, struggling to find their way back to each other. One day a letter arrives with news that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure their own place in the world.

A History of Burning is an unforgettable tour de force, an intimate family saga of complicity and resistance, about the stories we share, the ones that remain unspoken, and the eternal search for home. Amazon

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, NPR, SLATE, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE WORK

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE

From the bestselling author of The Garden of Evening Mists, a spellbinding novel about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling and redemption.

The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.

Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings―and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley’s past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

A mesmerizingly beautiful novel based on real events, The House of Doors traces the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and power under empire, and dives deep into the complicated nature of love and friendship in its shadow. Amazon

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward

“Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.”

These Are the Best New Books to Read This Fall

The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis

Bret Easton Ellis’s masterful new novel is a story about the end of innocence, and the perilous passage from adolescence into adulthood, set in a vibrantly fictionalized Los Angeles in 1981 as a serial killer begins targeting teenagers throughout the city.

Seventeen-year-old Bret is a senior at the exclusive Buckley prep school when a new student arrives with a mysterious past. Robert Mallory is bright, handsome, charismatic, and shielding a secret from Bret and his friends even as he becomes a part of their tightly knit circle. Bret’s obsession with Mallory is equaled only by his increasingly unsettling preoccupation with the Trawler, a serial killer on the loose who seems to be drawing ever closer to Bret and his friends, taunting them—and Bret in particular—with grotesque threats and horrific, sharply local acts of violence. The coincidences are uncanny, but they are also filtered through the imagination of a teenager whose gifts for constructing narrative from the filaments of his own life are about to make him one of the most explosive literary sensations of his generation. Can he trust his friends—or his own mind—to make sense of the danger they appear to be in? Thwarted by the world and by his own innate desires, buffeted by unhealthy fixations, he spirals into paranoia and isolation as the relationship between the Trawler and Robert Mallory hurtles inexorably toward a collision.

Set against the intensely vivid and nostalgic backdrop of pre-Less Than Zero L.A., The Shards is a mesmerizing fusing of fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, that brilliantly explores the emotional fabric of Bret’s life at seventeen—sex and jealousy, obsession and murderous rage. Gripping, sly, suspenseful, deeply haunting, and often darkly funny, The Shards is Ellis at his inimitable best. Amazon

What We Kept to Ourselves by Nancy Jooyoun Kim

1999: The Kim family is struggling to move on after their mother, Sunny, vanished a year ago. Sixty-one-year-old John Kim feels more isolated from his grown children than ever before. But one evening, their fragile lives are further upended when John finds the body of a stranger in the backyard, carrying a letter to Sunny, leaving the family with more questions than ever.

1977: Sunny is pregnant and has just moved to Los Angeles from Korea with her aloof and often-absent husband. America is not turning out the way she had dreamed it to be, and the loneliness and isolation are broken only by a fateful encounter at a bus stop. The unexpected connection spans the decades and echoes into the family’s lives in the present as they uncover devastating secrets that put not only everything they thought they knew about their mother but their very lives at risk.

Both “an intricately crafted mystery and a heart-wrenching family saga” (Michelle Min Sterling, New York Times bestselling author), What We Kept to Ourselves masterfully explores what it means to dream in America. Amazon

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Beloved bestseller Kristin Hannah (The Nightingale, The Four Winds) turns her lens on the Vietnam War era in The Women. It’s 1966, and Frankie McGrath is a mild-mannered nursing student from a wealthy California family who’s always done what’s expected of her. When the brother she idolizes is deployed with the Navy, she impulsively decides to follow his example and joins the U.S. Army Nurse Corps. The gripping, powerful story that unfolds pays tribute to the women whose courage and sacrifice during one of America’s longest wars remain largely overlooked. https://www.realsimple.com/best-books-2024-8547071

Non Fiction:

Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America by James L. Swanson

In the tradition of the New York Times bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon comes a spellbinding account of a forgotten chapter in American history: the deadly confrontation between Indians and colonists in Massachusetts in 1704 and the tragic saga that unfolded, written by acclaimed historian James Swanson.

Once it was one of the most infamous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten.

In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little town in western Massachusetts there stands what once was the most revered relic from the history of early New England: the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre of 1704. This impregnable barricade—known to early Americans as “The Old Indian Door”—constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the tomahawk blades wielded by several attacking Native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from one of the most dramatic moments in colonial American history: In the leap year of 1704, on the cold, snowy night of February 29, hundreds of Indians and their French allies swept down on an isolated frontier outpost to slaughter or capture its inhabitants.

The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of survival, sacrifice, family, and faith ever told in North America. One hundred and twelve survivors, including their fearless minister, the Reverend John Williams, were captured and forced to march three hundred miles north into enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered or became too weak to continue the journey—including Williams’s own wife—fell under the tomahawk or war club.

Survivors of the march willed themselves to live and endured captivity. Ransomed by the royal governor of Massachusetts, the captives later returned home to Deerfield, rebuilt their town and, for the rest of their lives, told the incredible tale. The memoir of Rev. Williams, The Redeemed Captive, published soon after his liberation, became one of the first bestselling books in American history and remains a literary classic. The Old Indian Door is a touchstone that conjures up one of the most dramatic and inspiring stories of colonial America—and now, at last, this legendary event is brought to vivid life by popular historian James Swanson.

Good Girls : A Story and Study of Anorexia by Hadley Freeman

From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. Her doctors informed her that her body was cannibalizing her muscles and heart for nutrition, but they could tell her little else: why she had it, what it felt like, what recovery looked like. For the next twenty years, Freeman lived as a “functioning anorexic,” grappling with new forms of self-destructive behavior as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Anorexia is one of the most widely discussed but least understood mental illnesses. Through “sharp storytelling, solid research and gentle humor” (The Wall Street Journal), Freeman delivers an incisive and bracing work that details her experiences with anorexia—the shame, fear, loneliness, and rage—and how she overcame it. She interviews doctors to learn how treatment for the illness has changed since she was hospitalized and what new discoveries have been made about the illness, including its connection to autism, OCD, and metabolic rate. She learns why the illness always begins during adolescence and how this reveals the difficulties for girls to come of age. Freeman tracks down the women with whom she was hospitalized and reports on how their recovery has progressed over decades.

Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story of resilience that offers a message to the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from eating disorders: Life can be enjoyed, rather than merely endured. Amazon

Fear is just a Word: A Missing Daughter, A Violent Cartel and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance by Azam Ahmed

Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice.

Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice.

What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own. Amazon & Economist

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada’s oil industry and America’s biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event, but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world.

Fire has been a partner in our evolution for hundreds of millennia, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways.

With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillanttakes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America’s oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant’s urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun. Book Riot

In 2016, a wildfire ripped through the oil town of Fort McMurray, in Alberta, hot enough to vaporize toilets and bend a street light in half. It was the most expensive disaster in Canada’s history. This alarming account tracks the destruction, the role of fire in industry in the past hundred and fifty years, and the disregarded alarms about the environment raised by scientists, dating as far back as the eighteen-fifties. “Climate science came of age in tandem with the oil and automotive industries,” Vaillant writes, and their futures are as linked as their pasts. The number of places facing fates similar to Fort McMurray’s is rapidly increasing, even as “our reckoning with industrial CO2” moves painfully slowly. Amazon &

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How to be : Life Lessons from the Early Greeks by Adam Nicholson

What is the nature of things? What is justice? How can I be myself? How should we treat each other?

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life.

These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, “How can I be true to myself?” On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms.

The award-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels with us through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be is an expedition into early ideas. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? It is an enthralling, exhilarating journey. Amazon & The Week

Indigenous Continent: the Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen

New York Times Book Review • 100 Notable Books of 2022

Best Books of 2022 ― New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

“I can only wish that, when I was that lonely college junior and was finishing Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, I’d had Hämäläinen’s book at hand.” ―David Treuer, The New Yorker

“[T]he single best book I have ever read on Native American history.” ―Thomas E. Ricks, New York Times Book Review

A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States.

In the opening pages of this book, Hämäläinen, a historian at Oxford, maintains that the America we know was—in its borders, shape, and culture—far from inevitable. Throughout the work, which details the rise and fall of early empires and Native responses to European colonial forays, Hämäläinen stresses the kinetic nature of Indigenous power. Even after the so-called colonial era, tribal nations often played a determining role in American history. Instead of a foreordained story of decline and victimization, Hämäläinen wants us to see a parade of contingencies, with tribal nations regularly giving as good as they got, or even better. There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus “discovers” a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing “New World” as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction.

In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.

Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of “colonial America” is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an “Indigenous America” that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. Necessary listening for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history. Amazon & https://bookriot.com/2023-national-book-awards-longlists/

Judgment at Tokyo: WWII on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.

From the author of the acclaimed The Blood Telegram, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, this magnificent history is the product of a decade of research and writing. Judgment at Tokyo is a riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the Asian postwar era. Amazon

Liliana’s Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD – New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice – “A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem).

October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Inspired by feminist movements across the world and enraged by the global epidemic of femicide and intimate partner violence, Cristina embarks on a path toward justice. Liliana’s Invincible Summer is the account—and the outcome—of that quest .

In luminous, poetic prose, Rivera Garza tells a singular yet universally resonant story: Liliana is a spirited, wondrously hopeful young woman who tried to survive in a world of increasingly normalized gendered violence. Rivera Garza traces her sister’s history, depicting everything from Liliana’s early romance with a handsome but possessive and short-tempered man to that exhilarating final summer of 1990 when she loved, thought, and traveled more widely and freely than she ever had before.

Using her skills as an acclaimed scholar, novelist, and poet, Rivera Garza collected and curated evidence—handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, interviews with Liliana’s loved ones—to document her sister’s life. Through this remarkable and genre-defying memoir, she confronts the trauma of losing her sister and examines how this tragedy continues to shape who she is—and what she fights for—today. BookBrowse & Amazon

In the summer of 1990, Liliana Rivera Garza, a twenty-year-old architecture student in Mexico City, was murdered by her former boyfriend, who suffocated her with a pillow in her apartment. In this book, Liliana’s sister, a celebrated fiction writer and historian, memorializes her younger sister while indicting the “underground and constant” violence of entrenched male hatred for women. The narrative begins with Rivera Garza’s attempt to recover a lost police file, in 2019, and widens to encompass newspaper clippings, photographs, interviews, and Liliana’s letters and notebooks—what Rivera Garza calls “layers of experience that have settled over time,” and which she has the duty to “desediment.” The result is a text that roves between different styles of narration, sometimes verging on the experimental, as she tries to reconstruct the circumstances that led to her sister’s death, to devise a language adequate to her family’s grief, and to rescue memories of a young woman who was, as Liliana’s notes attest, thirsty for life: “I am a seeker. I want to try new things; maybe more pain and loneliness, but I think it would be worth it. I know there is more than these four walls and this sky, annoyingly blue.” Amazon & BookBrowse https://bookriot.com/2023-national-book-awards-longlists/

Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder by Douglas Preston

From the jungles of Honduras to macabre archaeological sites in the American Southwest, Douglas Preston’s journalistic explorations have taken him across the globe. He broke the story of an extraordinary mass grave of animals killed by the asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, he explored what lay hidden in the booby-trapped Money Pit on Oak Island, and he roamed the haunted hills of Italy in search of the Monster of Florence. When he hasn’t been co-authoring bestselling thrillers featuring FBI Agent Pendergast, Preston has been writing about some of the world’s strangest and most dramatic mysteries.

The Lost Tomb brings together an astonishing and compelling collection of true stories about buried treasure, enigmatic murders, lost tombs, bizarre crimes, and other fascinating tales of the past and present. Amazon

Pulling the Chariots of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping by Shane McCrae

When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage—all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.

For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.

A revelatory account of an American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. A powerful reflection on what is broken in America—this is “an essential story for our times” (Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of White Girls). BookBrowse & Amazon

Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Economist, Chicago Public Library, CrimeReads, The Mary Sue

“My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don’t wait very long.”

Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte.

Some People Need Killing is Evangelista’s meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines’ drug war. For six years, Evangelista chronicled the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte’s war on drugs—a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands—immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others.

The book takes its title from a vigilante whose words seemed to reflect the psychological accommodation that most of the country had made: “I’m really not a bad guy,” he said. “I’m not all bad. Some people need killing.”

A profound act of witness and a tour de force of literary journalism, Some People Need Killing is also a brilliant dissection of the grammar of violence and an important investigation of the human impulses to dominate and resist. NPR & Amazon

Graphic Stories

Impossible People :A Completely Average Recovery Story by Julia Wertz ( graphics)

In her keenly observed graphic memoir, Impossible People, celebrated cartoonist Julia Wertz chronicles her haphazard attempts at sobriety and the relentlessly challenging, surprisingly funny, and occasionally absurd cycle of addiction and recovery.

Opening at the culmination of a disastrous trip to Puerto Rico, the first page of Impossible People finds Julia standing stupefied in the middle of the jungle beside a rental Jeep she’s just crashed. From this moment, the story flashes back to the beginning of her five-year journey towards sobriety that includes group therapy sessions, relapses, an ill-fated relationship, terrible dates, and an unceremonious eviction from her New York City apartment. Far from the typical addiction narrative that follows an upward trajectory from rock bottom to rehab to recovery, Impossible People portrays the lesser told but more common story: That the road to recover is not always linear. With unflinching honesty, Wertz details the arduous, frustrating, and hilarious story of trying and failing and trying again.

Thank You for looking at my book recommendations.

Summaries of the books are from: Amazon, Book Browse, Book Riot, GoodReads, Sunset Magazine, Lit Hub, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, or me!

Tracy

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Tag Archives: Fiction

2026 Summer Time Reading

2026 Spring Books to Read

Two women lead the largest FBI exhumation in history to give voice to 200 forgotten murder victims.

True crime fans of Mindhunter, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, and We Keep the Dead Close, will love how Schweit blends her expertise in law enforcement with her gift for storytelling, to bring readers this gripping true-crime story of social justice.

Until two women decided to listen to the dead.

Katherine Schweit takes readers inside this unprecedented cold case investigation, revealing:

Some of Detroit’s dead have finally reclaimed their identities-but hundreds more still whisper from unmarked graves, waiting for someone to listen. Amazon & The Nerve

2025 Spring Books to Read

2025 Summer Reading

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Penitence: by Kristin Koval

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Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward