I love being taken into a place I have never been; maybe I’ve only heard about. This novel brings me to a family in northern Sri Lanka at the start of the Tamil Tigers insurgency there.
The author draws on her family’s experiences and creates a totally convincing portrait of a family getting sucked into a violent conflict. The narrator is an absorbing character, and her window on life is very compelling.
It takes us through joyful, heartbreaking, and inspiring passages. I kept thinking about this story for a long time after I finished.
"A heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war. This beautiful, nuanced novel follows a young doctor caught within conflicting ideologies as she tries to save lives. I couldn't put this book down" BRIT BENNETT, bestselling author of THE VANISHING HALF
Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path as she watches those around her, including her four beloved brothers and their best friend, get swept up in violent political ideologies and their consequences. She must ask herself: is…
New voices in Native American fiction are getting noticed, and Morgan Talty’s novel Night of the Living Rez introduced me to characters who are powerfully real, with fresh ways of thinking and expressing themselves.
The community in Maine that Talty writes about comes alive, and I feel for their trials and victories. Talty is a new force in American fiction, and this book will show you why. I thoroughly enjoyed this.
Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, American Academy of Arts & Letters Sue Kaufman Prize, The New England Book Award, and the National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree
A Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Chautauqua Prize 2023, and Barnes & Noble Discover Book Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, NPR, Esquire, Oprah Daily, and more
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be…
I have never been to Eastern Europe, but this book took me there in an engaging way.
The novel, which takes place before the current war in Ukraine, is a funny and moving story of an American who goes abroad, not fully understanding the job he’ll be doing in that country.
The miscommunications, the awareness he gains, and his growing connections to the people he finds through the story make it totally entertaining and, in the end, meaningful. I was pulled in and came away really appreciating the author’s storytelling skills.
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Such Good Work Johannes Lichtman returns with a novel that is strikingly relevant to our times—about an American who takes a job in Ukraine in 2018, only to find that his struggle to understand the customs and culture is eclipsed by a romantic entanglement with deadly consequences.
Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, John Turner receives a call from an old college friend who makes him an odd job offer: move to Ukraine to teach customer service agents at a start-up how to sound American. John’s never been to Ukraine, doesn’t…
The People’s Recorder is a podcast about how history is recorded and the power of being heard. It’s the story of people of the Federal Writers’ Project, a 1930s agency that set out to document the lives of everyday Americans. The Project ended up raising as many questions as it answered in its quest to hold up a mirror to America.
The Project hired thousands of out-of-work writers to document American life during the Great Depression, producing a series of state and city guidebooks known as the WPA guides and many oral histories.
Based on the book Soul of a People, the People’s Recorder takes listeners on a journey that explores what that effort achieved, where it fell short, and what it means for today.
