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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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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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THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL

One of our recommended books is The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo

Immigrant. Socialite. Magician.

Jordan Baker grows up in the most rarefied circles of 1920s American society—she has money, education, a killer golf handicap, and invitations to some of the most exclusive parties of the Jazz Age. She’s also queer and Asian, a Vietnamese adoptee treated as an exotic attraction by her peers, while the most important doors remain closed to her.

But the world is full of wonders: infernal pacts and dazzling illusions, lost ghosts and elemental mysteries. In all paper is fire, and Jordan can burn the cut paper heart out of a man. She just has to learn how.

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ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING

One of our recommended books is Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen

A searching, sharply observed debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.

How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.

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