Bookmark the Blog


HILLBILLY ELEGY

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance is one of our book group favorites for 2018

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for more than forty years, has been reported with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them.

read more

CLOUD AND WALLFISH

One of our recommended books is Cloud and Wallfish by Anne Nesbet

Slip behind the Iron Curtain into a world of smoke, secrets, and lies in this stunning novel where someone is always listening and nothing is as it seems.

Noah Keller has a pretty normal life, until one wild afternoon when his parents pick him up from school and head straight for the airport, telling him on the ride that his name isn’t really Noah and he didn’t really just turn eleven in March. And he can’t even ask them why — not because of his Astonishing Stutter, but because asking questions is against the newly instated rules.

read more

MOON BROW

Moon Brow

Before he enlisted as a soldier in the Iran–Iraq War and disappeared, Amir Yamini was a playboy whose only concerns were seducing women and riling his religious family. Five years later, his mother and sister Reyhaneh find him in a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers, his left arm and most of his memory lost. Amir is haunted by the vision of a mysterious woman whose face he cannot see—the crescent moon on her forehead shines too brightly. He names her Moon Brow.

Back home in Tehran, the prodigal son is both hailed as a living martyr to the cause of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution and confined as a dangerous madman.

read more

THE ASTONISHING COLOR OF AFTER

The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan is one of our book group favorites for 2018

A stunning, heartbreaking debut novel about grief, love, and family, perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson and Celeste Ng.

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.

Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush,

read more

LOVE, HATE AND OTHER FILTERS

Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed is one of our book group favorites for 2018

In Samira Ahmed’s New York Times bestselling debut novel, an Indian-American Muslim teen copes with Islamophobia, cultural divides among peers and parents, and a reality she can neither explain nor escape.

American-born seventeen-year-old Maya Aziz is torn between worlds. There’s the proper one her parents expect for their good Indian daughter: attending a college close to their suburban Chicago home, and being paired off with an older Muslim boy her mom deems “suitable.” And then there is the world of her dreams: going to film school and living in New York City—and maybe (just maybe) pursuing a boy she’s known from afar since grade school,

read more

AUNTIE POLDI AND THE SICILIAN LIONS

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER

An Auntie Poldi Adventure

“Break out the prosecco! There’s a new detective in town—and she’s 60, sexy, wise and utterly adorable. In the first book of what promises to be a smash series, Poldi moves from Munich to Sicily, intent on cheerfully drinking herself to death with a view of the sea. Instead her handyman goes missing, she finds his corpse, and what choice does she have but to solve the crime? To use her favorite saying: Namaste, Poldi!”—People (Book of the Week)

For fans of A Man Called Ove and the novels of Adriana Trigiani,

read more