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WE ALL WANT IMPOSSIBLE THINGS

One of our recommended books is We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

For lovers of Meg Wolitzer, Maria Semple, and Jenny Offill comes this raucous, poignant celebration of life, love, and friendship at its imperfect and radiant best.

Edith and Ashley have been best friends for over forty-two years. They’ve shared the mundane and the momentous together: trick or treating and binge drinking; Gilligan’s Island reruns and REM concerts; hickeys and heartbreak; surprise Scottish wakes; marriages, infertility, and children. As Ash says, “Edi’s memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.”

But now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and spending her last days at a hospice near Ash,

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THE WINTHROP AGREEMENT

One of our recommended books is The Winthrop Agreement by Alice Sherman Simpson

A captivating historical novel set in Gilded Age New York City about an immigrant daughter’s ascent from a miserable tenement to the heights of haute couture, driven by an insatiable hunger for a place in society and secrets she must not betray.

When Rivkah Milmanovitch arrives at Ellis Island, her husband is not waiting for her as promised. Alone and pregnant, she makes her way to the Lower East Side tenement of an old friend. Lottie Aarons, whose husband went out for a newspaper and never returned, takes Rivkah in and they work side-by-side in dispiriting sweatshops. Rivkah gives birth to a daughter,

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A SONG OVER MISKWAA RAPIDS

One of our recommended books is A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids by Linda Legarde Grover

When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know—and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

Returning to the fictional Ojibwe reservation in northern Minnesota she has so deftly mapped in her award-winning books, Linda LeGarde Grover reveals traumas old and new as Margie Robineau, in the midst of a fight to keep her family’s long-held allotment land,

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ABSOLUTION

One of our recommended books is Absolution by Alice McDermott

A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives.

American women–American wives–have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963,

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BEFORE ALL THE WORLD

One of our recommended books is Before All the World by Moriel Rothman-Zecher

A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.

I do not believe that all the world is darkness.

In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles–fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep–a Black man from the Seventh Ward,

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UNRULY

One of our recommended books is Unruly by David Mitchell

A rollicking history of England’s kings and queens from Arthur to Elizabeth I, a tale of power, glory, and excessive beheadings by award-winning British actor and comedian David Mitchell

Think you know the kings and queens of England? Think again.

In Unruly, David Mitchell explores how early England’s monarchs, while acting as feared rulers firmly guiding their subjects’ destinies, were in reality a bunch of lucky bastards who were mostly as silly and weird in real life as they appear today in their portraits.

Taking us back to King Arthur (spoiler: he didn’t exist),

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