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| What's Mine and Yours by Naima CosterWhat it is: a multi-generational family drama set in the Piedmont area of North Carolina between 1992 and 2018.
Read it for: a racially diverse cast of well-developed characters whose lives intersect over 30 years; a sweeping tale of two families grappling with race and racism.
For fans of: Mary Beth Keane's Ask Again, Yes, Brit Bennett's The Vanishing Half, and Therese Fowler's A Good Neighborhood. |
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The Divines : a novel
by Ellie Eaton
Piecing together memories from her teen years at an elite English boarding school, Josephine gradually exposes a violent secret behind why the once-prestigious institution abruptly closed in disgrace. A first novel. 75,000 first printing.
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| How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo MbueThe situation: Since the 1980s, the fictional African village of Kosawa has been poisoned by an American oil company's leaking pipelines. After many requests for help are ignored, a small act of rebellion leads to decades of revolution.
What happens: Nothing much changes in Kosawa, as both the nation's despotic regime and the oil company ignore the villagers' pleas. Then Thula, who grew up in Kosawa in the '80s, returns from the U.S. determined to fight back.
Read it for: the links between environmental degradation and human rights. |
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The project
by Courtney Summers
Moving in with an elderly relative after the deaths of her parents, Lo becomes suspicious of a charity organization that she believes is hiding the activities of a cult that may be behind her sister’s estrangement and a young man’s death. 150,000 first printing. Simultaneous eBook.
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Solo
by Kwame Alexander
A novel in verse tells the story of 17-year-old Blade Morrison, who endeavors to resolve painful issues from his past to navigate the challenges of his former rock-star father's addictions, scathing tabloid rumors and a protected secret that threatens his own identity. By the Newbery Medal-winning author of The Crossover. Simultaneous eBook.
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Leaving the Atocha Station
by Ben Lerner
Lerner’s semi-autobiographical first novel is not only a novel by a poet, it’s a novel that is largely about poetry and the questions poetry raises. Centered on the 2004 terrorist bombing of Madrid’s central train station, Leaving the Atocha Station is a pot-fueled, poetry-soaked quest for answers to the big questions about how art and language intersects with life and experience, and the complicated question of whether one is growing more mature with time, or simply becoming more able to fake their way through adulthood.Veering between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a dazzling introduction to one of the smartest, funniest and most audacious writers of a generation
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| Giovanni's Room by James BaldwinWhat it is: This haunting 1956 novel by poet, essayist, and activist James Baldwin follows an American man in Paris who, struggling with his sexuality and separated from his girlfriend, becomes involved in an intense but doomed relationship with a young Italian bartender.
Read it for: poetic language and a better understanding of the fallout of society's historical repression of LGBTQIA identities.
Read this next: Sarah Winman's Tin Man or Edmund White's The Married Man. |
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| Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoWhat it is: a much-lauded portrayal of the broadness of the Black British experience through the stories of 11 women and one nonbinary person whose lives intertwine in sometimes surprising ways.
Read it for: vivid, unique characters; a finely tuned exploration of intersectionality; a mixture of prose and poetry; a history lesson.
Book buzz: This co-winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize landed on too many "best of" book lists to count and also won Fiction Book of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards. It's currently being adapted for television. |
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| Everything Under by Daisy JohnsonWhat it is: a horror-tinged contemporary retelling of the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex, which has its origins in epic poetry and myth.
What happens: After a long estrangement, English lexicographer Gretel reunites with her mother Sarah, who now suffers from dementia. Her reappearance will force Gretel to reckon with monsters from their shared past on a houseboat in Oxford.
For fans of: Maria Dahvana Headley's Beowulf adaptation The Mere Wife. |
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| Conversations with Friends by Sally RooneyStarring: college students Frances, a poet, and Bobbi, her best friend and former lover, who fall in (and in love) with an older heterosexual couple, photographer Melissa and actor Nick.
It's complicated: Frances' secret (but "ironic") affair with Nick affects her relationship with Bobbi; the harm she's doing to herself by refusing to be vulnerable is only slowly revealed.
For more novels featuring poets: Chanelle Benz' The Gone Dead; Danzy Senna's New People. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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