One of the things I love most about fiction is the way it allows you to “be” different people—to experience, think, feel, and behave from inside a particular temperament, worldview, or experience. My very favorite is adding the complexity of multiple perspectives to that magic trick so that you get to live inside two or more people who may be at complete odds with each other. Reading good fiction is an exercise in empathy, and reading good fiction from multiple viewpoints is empathy supercharged. I’ve loved that immersion since I was a little kid who believed there was nothing better than a novel.
This novel is an immersive read with heaps of empathy for all its characters but especially for the two sisters whose perspectives are at the center of the story: the twin who disappears to live a secret life, passing as white, and the twin left behind.
We don’t get the perspective of Stella, the vanished twin, until 14 years after her disappearance, 150 pages into the book. By then, I was fully absorbed in the grief and unanswered questions of the people she’d abandoned, eager to finally know where she’d been all this time and to understand her complex motivations and the emotional and mental toll of relinquishing—and hiding—her racial identity, her community, her sister, and her past. I picked this book up and didn’t put it down until it was done.
THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP BESTSELLER #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE
'An utterly mesmerising novel..I absolutely loved this book' Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the Booker Prize 2019
'Epic' Kiley Reid, O, The Oprah Magazine
'Favourite book [of the] year' Issa Rae
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years…
Most of the family members in this novel—father, mother, and four teenage kids—are painfully at odds. Most of them don’t much like most of the others, but they also don’t have much understanding of one another’s inner worlds. As readers, we do—one character at a time, in multiplying layers of wounds, desires, and needs that grow into a complex picture of humanness.
I love it when a character who is underestimated or despised from the outside—which Marion, the frumpy, near-invisible wife and mother, certainly is—later becomes the point of view character, and we finally get to see who they really are, hear the secrets of their past, and grasp what has shaped them and why. By the end, Marion takes hold of her own agency and becomes the powerful heart of this novel, a redemption I loved for her.
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social…
I grew up with the true story of the missionaries to an isolated Indigenous tribe in Ecuador who, in 1956, were killed by the people they’d come to help. I loved Five Wives because it’s an incisive but compassionate interrogation of a story from my own religious background, but you don’t need to be familiar with the source material to find it riveting.
As a religiously fervent teen, I was inspired by the courage of the wives of these martyred men, who later returned to bring the gospel to their husbands’ murderers. As an ex-Christian adult, I was awed by the ways Joan Thomas manages to neither patronize her religious characters nor leave the faith-and-martyrdom myths unchallenged. She deftly imagines the inner lives of these women, the very different doubts, struggles, and desires of each in the lead-up to and aftermath of the tragedy, and she doesn’t let anyone off the hook.
WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
A GLOBE AND MAIL, CBC BOOKS, APPLE BOOKS, AND NOW TORONTO BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible and State of Wonder, a novel set in the rainforest of Ecuador about five women left behind when their missionary husbands are killed. Based on the shocking real-life events
In 1956, a small group of evangelical Christian missionaries and their families journeyed to the rainforest in Ecuador intending to convert the Waorani, a people who had never had contact with the outside world. The plan was known as…
Intergenerational conflict! Irreconcilable clashes of values! Decades of history, miscommunication, misunderstanding, secrets, resentments, shifting allegiances, expectations and their failure to be met!
These are my literary catnip, and they’re all here in this book, brought to life through four complex women: a grandmother, a daughter, a granddaughter, and a daughter-in-law, converging in a beach house one fraught summer. I especially love the way these women's lives illustrate the changes to what is possible and permissible for women between generations.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The celebrated author of Commencement and The Engagements introduces four unforgettable women and the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back, every summer, to Maine and to each other.
"Rich and exhilarating ... You don't want the novel to end."—The New York Times Book Review
For the Kellehers, Maine is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and old Irish songs are sung around a piano. As three generations of Kelleher women arrive at the family's beach house, each brings her own hopes and fears. Maggie is thirty-two and…
I love a decades-spanning love story, and this book delivers, complete with separation and longing, the inner psychology and personal journeys of the two main characters, and a satisfying, hopeful coming together—FINALLY!—at the end.
I also learned a ton about race and the differences between the American Black experience and the African Black experience, but in the best way it is possible to learn: fully immersed in a story that’s entertaining and propulsive. I was emotionally invested in Ifemelu and Obinze from the start, and that’s all I really ask of the fiction I love best.
Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience - classics which will endure for generations to come.
How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria. Self-assured Ifemelu heads for America. But quiet, thoughtful Obinze finds post-9/11 America closed to him, and plunges into a dangerous undocumented life in London.
Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria,…
Sadie Jones, a larger-than-life actress and controversial feminist, never wanted to be a mother. No one feels this more deeply than Jude, the daughter Sadie left behind. While Jude spent her childhood touring with her father’s Shakespearian theater company, Sadie catapulted to fame with The Mother Act—a scathing one-woman show about motherhood.
Two decades later, Jude is a talented actress in her own right, and her fraught relationship with Sadie has come to a head. At the packed premiere of Sadie’s latest play, the two come face-to-face, and the intertwined stories of their lives unfold. What emerges is a picture of two very different women navigating the complexities of career, love, and family while grappling with the essential question: can they ever understand each other?
I've always loved fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories. Growing up in the Star Wars generation, I was seven whenA New Hope was released at the theaters. Living in the hollows of West Virginia there weren’t libraries close by, and movies were a great, though seldom, treat. Suggestive material and cursing was not something that we saw in books or movies growing up in a more simple period of time. I still thoroughly enjoy many well-written, clean, books or shows. As an active member of the body of Christ, I now serve with my writing, and hope that kids of all ages can enjoy epic fantasy and adventure books from a clean and wholesome perspective.
Finding Family, Discovery, Destiny. This is what nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley is searching for.
In his homeland, far in the mountains, he stepped into what he could only describe as a time-portal and landed in a strange land known as Egypt. Then he falls through another portal during a storm, only to end up in another world known as Harilhia. Here, he soon discovers a creature he knew from home. He was back, but it wasn't Zanchier.
Can he find his family, and figure out what the Creator wanted him to do with time-travel?
Stormwalker Series Connections In Time Bain's Story Book 1
Nineteen-year-old Bain Brinley has just inadvertently stepped into a time portal and was deposited into a world like none he had ever seen before. He turned to go back through the portal and back to Zanchier to find his family, only to find the portal gone. Now, Bain must face this strange, new, world without anyone else on whom he can depend.
As he gazes out over the hot, dry, desert climate at the large pyramid shaped structures, he is unsure where to go. He is soon thrust into a strange,…