Why am I passionate about this?

For me, writing fiction is a way of tackling issues of fate and identity through storytelling. I believe we’re each the result of an intersection between personality and history and I’m interested in the way our time and place impacts us and creates a backdrop for our lives. My first novel, The Wayward Moon, is historical fiction set in the 9th-century Middle East. My second novel follows a Jewish family back six generations to Belarus. But no matter what period I’m writing about, the most important thing is always to tell a good story.


I wrote

Our Little Histories

By Janice Weizman,

Book cover of Our Little Histories

What is my book about?

When installation artist Jenifer Greenberg-Wu is contracted by Belarusian tycoon Maxim Pranovitch to create a Reality show involving “Jewish people…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Homegoing

Janice Weizman Why did I love this book?

I really admire how this book traces two lines of a tumultuous family history through a series of short stories.

Opening in Ghana 250 years ago, the book follows two trajectories: one family branch that is kidnapped into slavery in America, and a second that remains in Africa while collaborating with slave traders.

This is a brave book that is not afraid to pose difficult questions, but in doing so, it opens a clear-eyed perspective on the way that history shapes us.

By Yaa Gyasi,

Why should I read it?

11 authors picked Homegoing as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A BBC Top 100 Novels that Shaped Our World

Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader's wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. Taking us from the Gold Coast of Africa to the cotton-picking plantations of Mississippi; from the missionary schools of Ghana to the dive bars of Harlem, spanning three continents and seven generations, Yaa Gyasi has written a miraculous novel - the intimate, gripping story of a brilliantly vivid cast of characters and through their lives the very story of America itself.…


Book cover of Atomic Anna

Janice Weizman Why did I love this book?

I’m always impressed by writers who are able to dream up an original plot, and then make that plot come alive on the page.

The book tells the story of three generations of Russian women in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a very unusual blend of Sci-fi, geopolitical history, time travel, and moral dilemmas. A tall order, but the book succeeds in weaving together these narrative strands in a way that feels natural and effortless, while evoking questions about our complex relationship with the notion of scientific progress.

By Rachel Barenbaum,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Atomic Anna as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Bookish
 
Named a Best Book of the Month by Buzzfeed

"The novel is masterfully plotted.”—New York Times Book Review

“Atomic Anna is a dazzling work of ingenuity and imagination.”―Téa Obreht,National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Inland

From the author of A Bend in the Stars, an epic adventure as three generations of women work together and travel through time to prevent the Chernobyl disaster and right the wrongs of their past.
 
Three brilliant women.
Two life-changing mistakes.
One chance to reset the future.

In 1986, nuclear scientist Anna Berkova…


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Book cover of Bailey and the CEO: A Corporate Love Story

Bailey and the CEO By Amy Q. Barker,

A contemporary romance novel about second chances, love in the workplace, and balancing single parenthood with a career. Bailey Grant and Fox Goodman have given up on love. They’re working hard, they’re raising kids—romance is the last thing on their minds. Until they get seated next to each other on…

Book cover of The Corrections

Janice Weizman Why did I love this book?

Franzen is at his best when depicting character, and The Corrections goes deep, creating a family drama that is rooted in detailed psychological portraits of his subjects.

In doing so, he meticulously builds their worlds, motivations, and fears, creating nuanced portrayals that not only reveal individual personality, but also the texture and color of life in America in the late 20th century.

Yet the true theme of the book is family dynamics: what does it mean when your mother insists that you come home for Christmas, and what does it mean when you don’t really want to go?

By Jonathan Franzen,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Corrections as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

“A spellbinding novel” (People) from the New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Franzen, the author of Crossroads, The Corrections is a comic, tragic epic of worlds colliding: an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions, a new world of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental health care, and globalized greed.

After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson’s disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the…


Book cover of On Beauty

Janice Weizman Why did I love this book?

Smith is a master at depicting multi-racial families (something she knows all about, as she grew up in one).

Her narratives take up the complex nature of the relationships between parents, children, and siblings, while delving into issues of race, class, politics, infidelity, and self-knowledge. Smith is expert with her use of voice, as she composes character through idiosyncratic styles of language and expression.

Life in this novel is colorful and messy, as it cleverly investigates the impossibility of really knowing those closest to you.

By Zadie Smith,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked On Beauty as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER

From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family

Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?

Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high…


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Book cover of Liberty Bell and the Last American

Liberty Bell and the Last American By James Stoddard,

Americans love their Constitution. In seventeen-year-old Liberty Bell’s era it has become a myth. Centuries after the Great Blackout obliterates the world's digitized information, America's history is forgotten. Only confused legends remain, written in "The Americana," a book depicting a golden age where famous Americans from different eras existed together.…

Book cover of The Joy Luck Club

Janice Weizman Why did I love this book?

How do our parents and their life stories shape us? How much of our psychological makeup is a response to events that they lived through? How does our parents’ history influence our own life choices?

All of these questions are taken up in The Joy Luck Club, which explores the relationships of four mother/daughter pairs. The mothers, four friends who meet for a weekly mah-jong game, harbor powerful hopes that their daughters will achieve all that they could not. Their daughters struggle under the weight of these expectations, each in their own way.

Tan structures this book like a symphony, where the four stories, like variations on a theme, come together to create a composite portrait of the emotional life of families.

By Amy Tan,

Why should I read it?

10 authors picked The Joy Luck Club as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'The Joy Luck Club is an ambitious saga that's impossible to read without wanting to call your Mum' Stylist

Discover Amy Tan's moving and poignant tale of immigrant Chinese mothers and their American-born daughters.

In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club.

Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers' advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives - until their own inner…


Explore my book 😀

Our Little Histories

By Janice Weizman,

Book cover of Our Little Histories

What is my book about?

When installation artist Jenifer Greenberg-Wu is contracted by Belarusian tycoon Maxim Pranovitch to create a Reality show involving “Jewish people living their Jewish lives” she takes up the challenge, calling on her Israeli relative, Nadav Markovitch and his family, to move into a glass-walled house where they enact Jewish practice before an audience of spectators.

Six generations earlier in a remote village in Belarus, their ancestor, Raizel Shulman needs to save her three young sons from being drafted into the Czar’s army. This is the story of what happened over those six generations. In seven episodes that travel back in time, Raziel’s descendants make fateful choices that shape their story, not as a single overriding narrative, but as a collection of small, intimate histories.

Book cover of Homegoing
Book cover of Atomic Anna
Book cover of The Corrections

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