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KUDOS

One of our recommended books for 2019 is Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk, the award-winning and critically acclaimed author of Outline and Transit, completes the transcendent literary trilogy with Kudos, a novel of unsettling power.

A woman writer visits a Europe in flux, where questions of personal and political identity are rising to the surface and the trauma of change is opening up new possibilities of loss and renewal. Within the rituals of literary culture, Faye finds the human story in disarray amid differing attitudes toward the public performance of the creative persona. She begins to identify among the people she meets a tension between truth and representation,

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EDINBURGH

Edinburgh

As a child, Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys’ choir in Maine. Silent after being abused by the director, he is unable to warn the other boys or protect his best friend, Peter, from the director’s advances. Even after the director is imprisoned, Fee continues to believe he is responsible, and while he survives to adulthood, his friends do not. In the years that follow, he struggles to bury his guilt and grief, until he meets a beautiful young student that resembles Peter, and he is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.

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CITIZEN

Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seemingly slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship.

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SO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT RACE

One of our recommended books for 2019 is So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo

In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America.

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy–from police brutality to the mass incarceration of African Americans–have made it impossible to ignore the issue of race. Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair–and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend?

In So You Want to Talk About Race,

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AMERICAN BY DAY

A gripping and timely novel that follows Sigrid—the dry-witted detective from Derek B. Miller’s best-selling debut Norwegian by Night—from Oslo to the United States on a quest to find her missing brother

She knew it was a weird place. She’d heard the stories, seen the movies, read the books. But now police Chief Inspector Sigrid Ødegård has to leave her native Norway and actually go there; to that land across the Atlantic where her missing brother is implicated in the mysterious death of a prominent African-American academic. AMERICA.

Sigrid is plunged into a United States where race and identity,

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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,

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