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THE GREAT ALONE

The Great Alone by Kristen Hannah is one of our recommended books for 2019

Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. After losing yet another job, he impulsively decides to move his family off the grid to Alaska, America’s last true frontier.

Thirteen-year-old Leni is coming of age caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship and hopes that a new land will lead to a better future. Her mother, Cora, will do anything for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown.

At first, Alaska seems to be the answer to their prayers. In a remote corner of the state,

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SONG IN A WEARY THROAT

A prophetic memoir by the activist who “articulated the intellectual foundations” (The New Yorker) of the civil rights and women’s rights movements.

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against “Jane Crow” sexism. Her legal brilliance was pivotal to the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson, the success of Brown v. Board of Education,

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ENDLING #1: THE LAST

An epic new series from Katherine Applegate, the Newbery Medal-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of The One and Only Ivan, Crenshaw, and Wishtree.

Byx is the youngest member of her dairne pack. Believed to possess remarkable abilities, her mythical doglike species has been hunted to near extinction in the war-torn kingdom of Nedarra.

After her pack is hunted down and killed, Byx fears she may be the last of her species. The Endling. So Byx sets out to find safe haven, and to see if the legends of other hidden dairnes are true.

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BIG LITTLE MAN

A “searingly honest self-exploration” (New York Times) of the experience and psyche of the Asian American male, including Tizon’s stunning final article, “My Family’s Slave”

Shame, Alex Tizon tells us, is universal—his own happened to be about race. To counteract the steady diet of American television and movies that taught Tizon to be ashamed of his face, his skin color, his height, he turned outward. (“I had to educate myself on my own worth. It was a sloppy, piecemeal education, but I had to do it because no one else was going to do it for me.”) Tizon illuminates his youthful search for Asian men who had no place in his American history books or classrooms.

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THIS IS JUST MY FACE

In This Is Just My Face, Gabourey Sidibe—the “gives-zero-effs queen of Hollywood AND perceptive best friend in your head” (Lena Dunham)—paints her unconventional rise to fame with full-throttle honesty. Sidibe tells engrossing, inspiring stories about her Bed-Stuy/Harlem/Senegalese family life with a polygamous father and a gifted mother who supports her two children by singing in the subway, her first job as a phone sex “talker,” and her Oscar-nominated role in Lee Daniels’s Precious.

Sidibe’s memoir hits hard with self-knowing dispatches on friendship, celebrity, weight, haters, fashion, race, and depression (“Sidibe’s heartfelt exploration of insecurity .

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HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL

From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist—and how we form our identities in life and in art.

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incomparable” by Junot Díaz, and “incendiary” by the New York Times. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life,

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