| Little faith by Nickolas ButlerWhat it is: a moving, reflective novel in which a mother's involvement in religious extremism threatens her child's life. Inspired by real events, this is a thoughtful look at faith, love, family, and community.
Read it for: the beautifully depicted rural Wisconsin setting, fully developed characters, and descriptive writing.
Read this next: Robert Hillman's The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, which is set in 1960s Australia and similarly focuses on a family torn apart by dangerous religious beliefs. |
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| Queenie by Candice Carty-WilliamsStarring: young Jamaican British Queenie, who finds herself in a downward spiral after a relationship ends.
What happens: Dating disasters (the white men she meets tend to fetishize her) and impulsive decisions spell trouble, but Queenie has friends to lean on, and she eventually takes control of her mental health.
Reviewers say: "This smart, funny, and tender debut embraces a modern woman's messiness" (Booklist). |
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| When All Is Said by Anne GriffinThe set-up: Maurice Hannigan, 84, sits at a bar and toasts his loved ones, none of whom are present.
What happens: With each toast he makes, Maurice dives deeply into his personal history, noting both the changes in his life and in his home of County Meath, Ireland.
For fans of: reflective, family-oriented novels that span decades. |
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Virgil Wander
by Leif Enger
What it's about: the rebirth (of sorts) of middle-aged Midwesterner Virgil Wander, who barely survived the accident that submerged his car in Lake Superior.
Don't miss: Virgil's interactions with Rune, a Norwegian looking for the son he never knew about (and who disappeared ten years previously); his regaining of the language skills he lost in the accident.
For fans of: the characters and depressed industrial towns of Richard Russo's novels.
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Lost children archive
by Valeria Luiselli
What happens: An educational road trip to the U.S.-Mexico border turns harrowing when the children of the unnamed narrators disappear into the desert.
Book buzz: With immigration a hot topic, this complex novel is timely. Author Valeria Luiselli illuminates the devastating plight of migrants by mixing Apache history, contemporary stories of immigrant families separated at the border, and ephemera such as poems, photos, and scraps of music.
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OK, Mr. Field: A novel
by Katharine Kilalea
A pianist has an accident and is forced to abandon his career. He and his wife move to South Africa to live in a house he has developed an obsession with - a house built by a South African architect inspired by Le Corbusier. Within weeks of arriving, Mr Field's wife inexplicably leaves him, to which he has responds with curious lassitude. But in this house on the South African coast (Corbusier's 'machine for living'), some shifts are triggered in its sole occupant. The sequences of spaces in which he lives, which seem to lead towards and away from their destinations at once, mirror his feeling that the things he yearns for are always getting further and further out of reach. But the house's most potent effect on Mr Field is its conjuring up of Hannah Kallenbach, its prior inhabitant, whom he begins to stalk.
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Becoming Mrs. Lewis: A novel: The improbable love story of Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis
by Patti Callahan Henry
When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis, known as Jack, she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn't holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford don and the beloved writer of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters. Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy travelled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, finding a love that even the threat of death couldn't destroy. In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren't meant to have a voice, and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn't know they had.
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What we owe
by Golnaz Hashemzadeh Bonde
Tehran, 1978: Nahid and Masood, both eighteen, are young lovers and young revolutionaries, determined to overthrow the Shah's regime and help to bring about democracy. Their clandestine activities are dangerous, but with youth, passion and right on their side, they feel invincible. Then one night, Nahid allows her younger sister to come along to a huge demonstration. Violence breaks out. Nahid lets go of her sister's hand. Everything changes. As the revolution sours, and the loss becomes too much to bear, Nahid and Masood are forced to flee to Sweden, on borrowed money with forged passports. Tehran is no longer safe for them, and now they are expecting a baby; they need to get out before they lose everything.Thirty years later, Nahid lies in a hospital bed replaying her life, raging at her carers, at her recent cancer diagnosis, at Masood, at her, now pregnant, daughter, and at her exile among people who understand nothing of what she has been through.
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No more boats
by Felicity Castagna
Set in Sydney's working-class western suburbs, No More Boats tells of a family whose unravelling lives collide with a refugee crisis known as the Tampa Affair, when over 400 hundred refugees were left stranded fifteen miles off the Australian coast. The story revolves around Antonio, an Italian immigrant, his wife Rose, with a rich back story of her own, and their two children, Nico and Claire, both, in their owns ways, drifting. After a work-related accident forces him into early retirement and the familiar scaffolding of work, family, the immigrant's dream of betterment, is removed from his life, Antonio's mind begins to fragment. Manipulated by the media and made vulnerable by his feeling of irrelevance, Antonio commits an act that makes him a lightning rod for the factions that are bitterly at odds over the Tampa Affair and the "immigrant question."
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Homeland
by Kempowski, Walter.
It is 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. Jonathan Fabrizius, a journalist living in West Germany, is asked to travel to the contested lands of former East Prussia; where the Nazi legacy lives on in buildings and fortifications, to write about the route for a car rally. It's a plum job, but his interest is piqued by a personal connection. Here, among the refugees fleeing the advancing Russians in 1945, he was born. Homeland is a nuanced work from one of the great modern European storytellers, in which an everyday German comes face to face with his painful family history, and devastating questions about ordinary Germans' complicity in the war.
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Invitation to a bonfire: A novel
by Adrienne Celt
In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country's paranoia about Russian spies. When she meets the visiting writer and fellow Russian émigré Leo Orlov, whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years, her luck seems to have taken a turn for the better. But she soon discovers that Leo is not the solution to her loneliness: he's committed to his art and bound by the sinister orchestrations of his brilliant wife, Vera. As the reader unravels the mystery of Zoya, Lev, and Vera's fate, Zoya is faced with mounting pressure to figure out who she is and what kind of life she wants to build. Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity; not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex, Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one's identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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