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THE BRIGHT SIDE RUNNING CLUB

One of our recommended books is The Bright Side Running Club by Josie Lloyd

Josie Lloyd’s fearless novel is a tribute to the power of the human spirit in the face of hardship, based on the author’s own experience with cancer and community.

When Keira first receives her breast cancer diagnosis, she never expects to end up joining a running group with three women she’s only just met. Totally blind-sided, all she can think about is how she doesn’t want to tell her family or step back from work. Nor does she want to be part of a group of fellow cancer patients. Cancer is not her club.

And yet it’s running – hot,

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OCEAN STATE

One of our recommended books is Ocean State by Stewart O’Nan

Set in a working-class town on the Rhode Island coast, O’Nan’s latest is a crushing, beautifully written, and profoundly compelling novel about sisters, mothers, and daughters, and the terrible things love makes us do

In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the build-up to and fall-out from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. Angel, the murderer, Carol, her mother,

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THE WAITING PLACE

One of our recommended books is The Waiting Place by Dina Nayeri

Every war, famine, and flood spits out survivors.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) cites an unprecedented 79.5 million forcibly displaced people on the planet today. In 2018, Dina Nayeri—a former refugee herself and the daughter of a refugee—invited documentary photographer Anna Bosch Miralpeix to accompany her to Katsikas, a refugee camp outside Ioannina, Greece, to record the hopes and struggles of ten young Farsi-speaking refugees from Iran and Afghanistan. “I wanted to play with them, to enter their imagined worlds, to see the landscape inside their minds,” she says. Ranging in age from five to seventeen,

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CRESS WATERCRESS

One of our recommended books is Cress Watercress by Gregory Maguire

Gregory Maguire turns his trademark wit and wisdom to an animal adventure about growing up, moving on, and finding community. When Papa doesn’t return from a nocturnal honey-gathering expedition, Cress holds out hope, but her mother assumes the worst. It’s a dangerous world for rabbits, after all. Mama moves what’s left of the Watercress family to the basement unit of the Broken Arms, a run-down apartment oak with a suspect owl landlord, a nosy mouse super, a rowdy family of squirrels, and a pair of songbirds who broadcast everyone’s business. Can a dead tree full of annoying neighbors, and no Papa,

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A GOOD MEASURE

One of our recommended books is A Good Measure by Nan Rossiter

Return to Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia in USA Today bestselling author Nan Rossiter’s third Savannah Skies novel, a heartwarming story about love, acceptance, finding your place in the world, and learning to carry on in the face of overwhelming loss.

It has been eight months since Libby Tennyson’s husband, Jack, passed away, and now every afternoon when the fiery sun sinks below the horizon, she finds herself wandering through the empty old farmhouse in which they raised their six sons. Melancholy hour, she calls it—the time of day that was once a flurry of dinner,

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SHADOWS OF BERLIN

One of our recommended books is Shadows of Berlin by David R. Gillham

A captivating novel of a Berlin girl on the run from the guilt of her past and the boy from Brooklyn who loves her

1955 in New York City: the city of instant coffee, bagels at Katz’s Deli, ultra-modern TVs. But in the Perlman’s walk-up in Chelsea, the past is as close as the present. Rachel came to Manhattan in a wave of displaced Jews who managed to survive the horrors of war. Her Uncle Fritz fleeing with her, Rachel hoped to find freedom from her pain in New York and in the arms of her new American husband,

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