LibraryAware BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023

COUNTY OF SLO PUBLIC LIBRARIES
+ CUESTA COLLEGE

Book of the Year 2023

We Share Stories

A countywide literary event in partnership with Cuesta College, the Book of the Year program encourages community members to read together and engage in discussion and programming.

It’s our mission to connect our community to creativity, culture, and knowledge–and we’re doing that through stories. We believe that connecting readers to timely books and current issues can inspire important discussions and can help bring a community together.

THE STORY: ALL MY RAGE

All My Rage is the 2022 winner of the
National Book Award for Young People's Literature

Lahore, Pakistan. Then.
Misbah is a dreamer and storyteller, newly married to Toufiq in an arranged match. After their young life is shaken by tragedy, they come to the United States and open the Clouds’ Rest Inn Motel, hoping for a new start.

Juniper, California. Now.
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until The Fight, which destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding.

Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother Misbah’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college so she can escape him—and Juniper—forever.

When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth—and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst. (PenguinRandomHouse.com)

THE AUTHOR

Sabaa Tahir is the New York Times-bestselling author of An Ember In the Ashes, A Torch Against the Night, and A Reaper at the Gates, a series of wildly popular fantasy novels that have captured the attention of readers of all ages. Through her fiction, Tahir’s novels raise questions about freedom, morality, and what it means to be human. Before writing full-time, Tahir was an editor at The Washington Post; she is a frequent speaker at book festivals, schools, universities, and libraries.

Tahir grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel, where she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, raiding her brother’s comic book stash, and playing guitar badly. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. (PenguinRandomHouse.com)