Winter Reads: Books That Are Giving Us Light
Co-Teach Language Arts Chair Jill Clingan reminds us that at the time of this book list release, we are more than halfway through the winter season. While many of us in the Northern Hemisphere are feeling “winter-weary,” she encourages us that this month, “purple and yellow and white crocuses will pop up in surprising, delightful places as a harbinger of hope, of spring. Next month, the frogs will lazily blink awake, float to the surface of their watery beds, and croak their sleepy voices in hopeful harmony. We are moving toward the light. We are moving toward life.”
At the end of January, a group of Mizzou Academy faculty and staff logged in for our quarterly book chat. This season, Executive Director Kathryn Fishman-Weaver asked, “What books are giving you light?” Some titles felt right on time, like Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. Others, like the poetry collection You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston or Rebecca Yarros’s fantasy series Fourth Wing, also seemed like natural answers to the question of what books are bringing light.
What struck us during our book club this last session, though, was how we also found light in struggle or, more aptly, in triumph. We celebrated Malala Yousafzai’s story of redemption and activism for girls’ education. We found hope in Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s beloved fictional protagonist Ada, a young girl with disabilities who saves those she loves and, in doing so, saves herself, as well. Melody, the protagonist in Sharon Draper’s Out of My Mind, is another disability advocate we admired for her voice and genius that challenge perceptions of what children with cerebral palsy or young people receiving special education services can achieve.
We also shared titles about difficult periods in our global history, including World War II stories and novels set during the U.S. Indian boarding school era. Sherry Denney shared a book about a beauty school that opened in Kabul following the fall of the Taliban, and Kathryn highlighted a book on post-apartheid South Africa.
Stories, even complicated and difficult stories, have a way of bringing us together. They remind us of our shared humanity. They open up worlds familiar, unfamiliar, and even impossible.
The two most celebrated features of our Mizzou Academy book club are 1. the opportunity to gather together to celebrate the power of reading and the power of stories, and 2. the book list we generate each meeting that fills our “to-be-read” lists with just enough titles to last us until the next season.
We hope you, too, find titles on this list that, in the words of Rudine Sims Bishop, are “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” that, when you need them most, offer escape, spark learning, and celebrate heroes. As Kari Mayes, our business support specialist, suggests, this weekend might be just the perfect time to “make a date with your couch, a crochet needle, and some literary dragons.”
Wishing you hope, warmth, and powerful stories to light the way!
Jill Clingan, Lisa DeCastro, Sherry Denney, Kathryn Fishman-Weaver, Lou Jobst, Dominique King, Kari Mayes, and Ellie Trick
Middle Grade (MG) and Young Adult (YA)
Non-Fiction
Stealing Little Moon, The Legacy of American Indian Boarding Schools by Dan SaSuWeh Jones
Recommended by Diane Johnson
Little Moon There Are No Stars Tonight was four years old when armed federal agents showed up at her home and took her from her family. Under the authority of the government, she was sent away to a boarding school specifically created to strip her of her Ponca culture and teach her the ways of white society. Little Moon was one of thousands of Indigenous children forced to attend these schools across America and give up everything they'd ever known: family, friends, toys, clothing, food, customs, even their language. She would be the first of four generations of her family who would go to the Chilocco Indian Agricultural School.
Dan SaSuWeh Jones chronicles his family's time at Chilocco--starting with his grandmother Little Moon's arrival when the school first opened and ending with him working on the maintenance crew when the school shut down nearly one hundred years later. Together with the voices of students from other schools, both those who died and those who survived, Dan brings to light the lasting legacy of the boarding school era.
Part American history, part family history, Stealing Little Moon is a powerful look at the miseducation and the mistreatment of Indigenous kids, while celebrating their strength, resiliency, and courage--and the ultimate failure of the United States government to erase them.
It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
Recommended by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver
Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist--and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government.
In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself thanks to his mom’s unwavering love and indomitable will.
This honest and poignant memoir adapted from the #1 New York Times bestseller Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood will astound and inspire readers as well as offer a fascinating perspective on South Africa’s tumultuous racial history.
Note: Kathryn also recommends the original (adult version) and particularly the audiobook, which is performed by Trevor Noah himself.
I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World (Young Readers Edition) by Malala Yousafzai and Patricia McCormick
Recommended by Sherry Denney
I Am Malala. This is my story.
Malala Yousafzai was only ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region. They said music was a crime. They said women weren't allowed to go to the market. They said girls couldn't go to school.
Raised in a once-peaceful area of Pakistan transformed by terrorism, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. So she fought for her right to be educated. And on October 9, 2012, she nearly lost her life for the cause: She was shot point-blank while riding the bus on her way home from school.
No one expected her to survive.
Now Malala is an international symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner. In this Young Readers Edition of her bestselling memoir, which has been reimagined specifically for a younger audience and includes exclusive photos and material, we hear firsthand the remarkable story of a girl who knew from a young age that she wanted to change the world—and did.
Malala's powerful story will open your eyes to another world and will make you believe in hope, truth, miracles and the possibility that one person—one young person—can inspire change in her community and beyond.
Note: Sherry also recommends the original (adult version).
Historical Fiction
White Bird: A Novel by R.J. Palacio
Recommended by Lou Jobst
Sara Blum lives an idyllic life with her adoring parents in Vichy France. But her world comes crashing down when the Nazi occupation separates the family and forces the young Jewish girl into hiding. Her classmate Julien and his family will risk everything to ensure her survival, and, together, Sara and Julien manage to find beauty in a secret world of their creation.
Note: There is also an excellent graphic novel of this book and a new movie adaptation.
The War that Saved my Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Recommended by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver, Jill Clingan, and Lisa DeCastro
Ten-year-old Ada has never left her one-room apartment. Her mother is too humiliated by Ada’s twisted foot to let her outside. So when her little brother Jamie is shipped out of London to escape the war, Ada doesn’t waste a minute—she sneaks out to join him.
So begins a new adventure for Ada, and for Susan Smith, the woman who is forced to take the two kids in. As Ada teaches herself to ride a pony, learns to read, and watches for German spies, she begins to trust Susan—and Susan begins to love Ada and Jamie. But in the end, will their bond be enough to hold them together through wartime? Or will Ada and her brother fall back into the cruel hands of their mother?
The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
Recommended by Lisa DeCastro
When Ada awakes from surgery on her club foot, the news that greets her will change the course of her life. Doors that her mother had shut tightly are swinging open—
But World War II rages on. Ada and her brother, Jamie, are forced to move into a cottage with the iron-faced Lady Thorton and her daughter, Maggie. Life in the crowded home is tense. Then Ruth arrives. Ruth, a Jewish girl, from Germany. A German? Could Ruth be a spy?
As the fallout from the war intensifies, calamity creeps closer to Ada’s doorstep, and life grows more complicated. Who will Ada decide to be? How can she keep fighting? And who will she struggle to save?
Fiction
Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper
Recommended by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver
Eleven-year-old Melody is not like most people. She can’t walk. She can’t talk. She can’t write. All because she has cerebral palsy. But she also has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She’s the smartest kid in her whole school, but NO ONE knows it. Most people—her teachers, her doctors, her classmates—dismiss her as mentally challenged because she can’t tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by her disability. And she’s determined to let everyone know it…somehow.
Looking for Smoke Written by KA Kobell
Recommended by Lisa DeCastro
In her powerful debut novel, Looking for Smoke, author K. A. Cobell (Blackfeet) weaves loss, betrayal, and complex characters into a thriller that will illuminate, surprise, and engage readers until the final word. A must-pick for readers who enjoy books by Angeline Boulley and Karen McManus!
When local girl Loren includes Mara in a traditional Blackfeet Giveaway to honor Loren’s missing sister, Mara thinks she’ll finally make some friends on the Blackfeet reservation.
Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered.
Because the four members of the Giveaway group were the last to see Samantha alive, each becomes a person of interest in the investigation. And all of them—Mara, Loren, Brody, and Eli—have a complicated history with Samantha.
Despite deep mistrust, the four must now take matters into their own hands and clear their names. Even though one of them may be the murderer.
The Queen of Water by Laura Resau
Recommended by Sherry Denney
Born in an Andean village in Ecuador, Virginia lives with her family in a small, earthen-walled dwelling. In her Indigenous community, it is not uncommon to work in the fields all day, even as a child, or to be called a longa tonta-stupid Indian-by members of the privileged class of mestizos, or Spanish descendants. When seven-year-old Virginia is taken from her home to be a servant to a mestizo couple, she has no idea what the future holds.
In this poignant novel based on her own story, the inspiring Maria Virginia Farinango has collaborated with acclaimed author Laura Resau to recount one girl's unforgettable journey to find her place in the world. It will make you laugh and cry, and ultimately, it will fill you with hope.
Dystopian Fiction
The Grace Year by Kim Liggett
Recommended by Ellie Trick
No one speaks of the grace year. It’s forbidden.
In Garner County, girls are banished for their sixteenth year to release their magic into the wild so they can return purified and ready for marriage.
But not all of them will make it home alive.
Tierney James dreams of a better life―but as her own grace year draws near, she quickly realizes that there’s more to fear about the grace year than the brutal elements and the poachers in the woods.
Their greatest threat may very well be each other.
With sharp prose and gritty realism, Liggett's The Grace Year examines the complex and sometimes twisted relationships between girls, the women they eventually become, and the difficult decisions they make in-between.
The Unwind Dystology by Neal Shusterman
Recommended by Dominique King
After the Second Civil War, the Bill of Life was passed, stating that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. But it allows parents to get rid of their teenager through a process called “unwinding.” These kids may have nothing left to give to their families but can still give to society through the body parts that are harvested for donations.
Three teens defy the system and run away from their unwinding: Connor, a rebel whose parents have ordered his unwinding; Risa, a ward of the state who is to be unwound due to cost-cutting; and Lev, his parents’ tenth child whose unwinding has been planned since birth as a religious tithing.
As their paths intersect and lives hang in the balance, Connor, Risa, and Lev must work together to survive—and they may change the fate of America in the process.
Adult
Non-Fiction
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
Recommended by Kathryn Fishman-Weaver
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. Next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.
As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.
With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Recommended by Jill Clingan
Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered.
A moving personal narrative shot through with lessons from literature, mythology, and the natural world, May's story offers instruction on the transformative power of rest and retreat. Illumination emerges from many sources: solstice celebrations and dormice hibernation, C.S. Lewis and Sylvia Plath, swimming in icy waters and sailing arctic seas.
Ultimately Wintering invites us to change how we relate to our own fallow times. May models an active acceptance of sadness and finds nourishment in deep retreat, joy in the hushed beauty of winter, and encouragement in understanding life as cyclical, not linear. A secular mystic, May forms a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor
Recommended by Dominique King
In The Grieving Brain, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O’Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O’Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm, and guides us through how we encode love and grief. With love, our neurons help us form attachments to others; but, with loss, our brain must come to terms with where our loved ones went, or how to imagine a future without them.
The Grieving Brain addresses:
- Why it’s so hard to understand that a loved one has died and is gone forever
- Why grief causes so many emotions—sadness, anger, blame, guilt, and yearning
- Why grieving takes so long
- The distinction between grief and prolonged grief
- Why we ruminate so much after we lose a loved one
- How we go about restoring a meaningful life while grieving
Based on O’Connor’s own trailblazing neuroimaging work, research in the field, and her real-life stories, The Grieving Brain combines storytelling, accessible science, and practical knowledge that will help us better understand what happens when we grieve and how to navigate loss with more ease and grace.
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book about Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson
Recommended by Sherry Denney
In Furiously Happy, number-one New York Times best-selling author Jenny Lawson explores her lifelong battle with mental illness. A hysterical, ridiculous book about crippling depression and anxiety? That sounds like a terrible idea.
But terrible ideas are what Jenny does best.
Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebekah Taussig
Recommended by Sherry Denney
Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.
Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.
Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
The Sound of Music Story: How a Beguiling Young Novice, a Handsome Austrian Captain, and Ten Singing von Trapp Children Inspired the Most Beloved Film of All Time by Tom Santopietro
Recommended by Dominique King
On March 2, 1965, The Sound of Music was released in the United States and the love affair between moviegoers and the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was on. Rarely has a film captured the love and imagination of the moviegoing public in the way that The Sound of Music did as it blended history, music, Austrian location filming, heartfelt emotion, and the yodeling of Julie Andrews into a monster hit.
Tom Santopietro has written the ultimate Sound of Music fan book with all the details from behind-the-scenes stories of the filming in Austria and Hollywood to new interviews with Johannes von Trapp and others. Santopietro looks back at the real-life story of Maria von Trapp, goes on to chronicle the sensational success of the Broadway musical, and recounts the story of the near cancellation of the film when Cleopatra bankrupted 20th Century Fox.
We all know that Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer played Maria and Captain Von Trapp, but who else had been considered? Tom Santopietro knows and tells all while providing a historian’s critical analysis of the careers of director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, a look at the critical controversy which greeted the movie, the film’s relationship to the turbulent 1960s, and the super stardom that engulfed Julie Andrews. Tom Santopietro’s The Sound of Music Story is a book for everyone who cherishes this American classic.
Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil by Deborah Rodriguez
Recommended by Sherry Denney
Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills–as doctors, nurses, and therapists–seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a gift for befriending Afghans, and once her profession became known she was eagerly sought out by Westerners desperate for a good haircut and by Afghan women, who have a long and proud tradition of running their own beauty salons. Thus an idea was born.
With the help of corporate and international sponsors, the Kabul Beauty School welcomed its first class in 2003. Well meaning but sometimes brazen, Rodriguez stumbled through language barriers, overstepped cultural customs, and constantly juggled the challenges of a postwar nation even as she learned how to empower her students to become their families’ breadwinners by learning the fundamentals of coloring techniques, haircutting, and makeup.
Yet within the small haven of the beauty school, the line between teacher and student quickly blurred as these vibrant women shared with Rodriguez their stories and their hearts: the newlywed who faked her virginity on her wedding night, the twelve-year-old bride sold into marriage to pay her family’s debts, the Taliban member’s wife who pursued her training despite her husband’s constant beatings. Through these and other stories, Rodriguez found the strength to leave her own unhealthy marriage and allow herself to love again, Afghan style.
With warmth and humor, Rodriguez details the lushness of a seemingly desolate region and reveals the magnificence behind the burqa. Kabul Beauty School is a remarkable tale of an extraordinary community of women who come together and learn the arts of perms, friendship, and freedom.
Fiction
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Recommended by Barbie Banks, Ellie Trick, and Kathryn Fishman-Weaver
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains' toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local high-end supermarket. The store's security guard, seeing a young black woman out late with a white child, accuses Emira of kidnapping two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, a bystander films everything, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make things right.
But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix's desire to help. At twenty-five, she is about to lose her health insurance and has no idea what to do with her life. When the video of Emira unearths someone from Alix's past, both women find themselves on a crash course that will upend everything they think they know about themselves, and each other.
With empathy and piercing social commentary, Such a Fun Age explores the stickiness of transactional relationships, what it means to make someone family, and the complicated reality of being a grown up. It is a searing debut for our times.
Time of the Child by Niall Williams
Recommended by Lou Jobst
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father's shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.
But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy's lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter's lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
Fourth Wing Series by Rebecca Yaros
Recommended by Kari Mayes and Ellie Trick
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away … because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Mirage by Bandula Chandraratna
Recommended by Sherry Denney
Within a closed Saudi Arabia kingdom, an unexceptional man, Sayeed, finds happiness with Lalifa, a girl who might have been beyond his reach had widowhood and misfortune not brought her within it. But soon the struggle to make a decent life for his new wife and her child amidst heat, dirt, and squalor form the backdrop of tragedy, one fueled by pretty jealousy, sexual desire, and religious fervor.
The Henna Artist (The Jaipur Trilogy) by Alka Joshi
Recommended by Sherry Denney
Escaping from an abusive marriage, seventeen-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant 1950s pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist—and confidante—to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the secrets of the wealthy, she can never reveal her own…
Known for her original designs and sage advice, Lakshmi must tread carefully to avoid the jealous gossips who could ruin her reputation and her livelihood. As she pursues her dream of an independent life, she is startled one day when she is confronted by her husband, who has tracked her down these many years later with a high-spirited young girl in tow—a sister Lakshmi never knew she had. Suddenly the caution that she has carefully cultivated as protection is threatened. Still she perseveres, applying her talents and lifting up those that surround her as she does.
Wandering Stars: a Novel by Tommy Orange
Recommended by Lisa DeCastro
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in There There—warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts—asking what it means to be the children and grandchildren of massacre. Wandering Stars is a novel about epigenetic and generational trauma that has the force and vision of a modern epic, an exceptionally powerful new book from one of the most exciting writers at work today and soaring confirmation of Tommy Orange’s monumental gifts.
A Cup of Friendship: A Novel by Deborah Rodriguez
Recommended by Sherry Denney
The story of a remarkable coffee shop in the heart of Afghanistan, and the men and women who meet there - thrown together by circumstance, bonded by secrets, and united in an extraordinary friendship.
After hard luck and some bad choices, Sunny has finally found a place to call home - it just happens to be in the middle of a war zone. The 38-year-old American’s pride and joy is the Kabul Coffee House, where she brings hospitality to the expatriates, misfits, missionaries, and mercenaries who stroll through its doors. She’s especially grateful that the busy days allow her to forget Tommy, the love of her life, who left her in pursuit of money and adventure.
Working alongside Sunny is the maternal Halajan, who vividly recalls the days before the Taliban and now must hide a modern romance from her ultratraditional son - who, unbeknownst to her, is facing his own religious doubts. Into the café come Isabel, a British journalist on the trail of a risky story; Jack, who left his family back home in Michigan to earn “danger pay” as a consultant; and Candace, a wealthy and well-connected American whose desire to help threatens to cloud her judgment.
When Yazmina, a young Afghan from a remote village, is kidnapped and left on a city street pregnant and alone, Sunny welcomes her into the café and gives her a home - but Yazmina hides a secret that could put all their lives in jeopardy. As this group of men and women discover that there’s more to one another than meets the eye, they’ll form an unlikely friendship that will change not only their own lives but the lives of an entire country.
Brimming with Deborah Rodriguez’s remarkable gift for depicting the nuances of life in Kabul, and filled with vibrant characters that listeners will truly care about, A Cup of Friendship is the best kind of fiction - full of heart yet smart and thought-provoking.
The Institute by Stephen King
Recommended by Ellie Trick
In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis' parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there's no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents - telekinesis and telepathy - who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and 10-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, "like the roach motel," Kalisha says. "You check in, but you don't check out."
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don't, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.
Bloomsbury Girls by Natalie Jenner
Recommended by Jill Clingan
Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans:
Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiance was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances--most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction.
Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she's been working to support the family following her husband's breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own.
Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she's working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future.
As they interact with various literary figures of the time--Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others--these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.
The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
Recommended by Jill Clingan
Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy. These people―a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others―could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.
A powerful and moving novel that explores the tragedies and triumphs of life, both large and small, and the universal humanity in us all, Natalie Jenner's The Jane Austen Society is destined to resonate with readers for years to come.
Poetry
You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston
Recommended by Lou Jobst
You Took the Last Bus Home is the first and long-awaited collection of ingeniously hilarious and surprisingly touching poems from Brian Bilston, the UK’s mysterious “Poet Laureate of Twitter.” With endless wit, imaginative wordplay, and underlying heartache, he offers profound insights into modern life. There is love and death, the inestimable value of a mobile phone charger, the unbearable torment of forgetting to take the rubbish out, and the improbable nuances of the English language. Constantly experimenting with literary form, Bilston’s words have been known to float off the page, take the shape of the subjects they explore, and reflect our contemporary world in the form of Excel spreadsheets, Venn diagrams, and Scrabble tiles. This irresistibly charming collection of his best-loved poems will make you laugh out loud while making you question the very essence of the human condition in the twenty-first century.