Here are 100 books that Luba fans have personally recommended if you like
Luba.
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In the ‘60s, everyone was reading—or claiming to have read—Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. I faked reading it, to appear cool. The idea of a road trip, though—characters running away, running toward, or often both—and the self-discovery that ensues—was so intriguing, I made it the heart of the novel I first drafted decades ago. I wrote about a middle-aged woman who flees her life to find a lost love and her lost youth, then put the manuscript away. For 30 years. When I retired from my social work career, I pulled it from the closet, revised it, and became an author at 74.
When this astonishing debut novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship came out, I wondered if the author had met my mother. Because Adele August believes there’s nothing for her in her small Wisconsin town, she sets off for Los Angeles with her twelve-year-old daughter and a dream—Ann will be a child star; Adele will make a wealthy marriage; they’ll live the lives they were meant to. Simpson’s writing is gorgeous: “My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest… who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway... girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away… but who finally sighed, and calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went home.” Reality can’t live up to Adele’s delusions; mother-child roles are often reversed; but love underlies this tangled…
A national bestseller—adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon—Anywhere But Here is the heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter. A moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer, the novel follows the two women as they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions. A brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation, Anywhere But Here is a story about the things we do for love, and a powerful study of familial bonds.
I have always been drawn to stories of miserable rich people, especially tales of how old money contorts lineage into something rotten. I grew up in Northern California, and while my family was comfortable, we weren’t part of the tennis club and yachting elite. During my childhood, we spent a lot of time exploring abandoned properties. It was a passion that I kept when I moved to Los Angeles as an adult and started to explore forgotten parts of Hollywood’s past. Los Angeles has always fascinated me because it embodies extreme wealth and extreme poverty: like the American dream itself, it straddles both extremes and promises everything while guaranteeing nothing.
I read this book for the first time when I was in high school, and it made me realize that main characters aren’t always good people. Maria Wyeth is a selfish, broken actress who stumbles through a series of bad decisions. She cares about nothing, not even herself, but the language is so beautiful and evocative of a 1960s Los Angeles that you can’t help wondering what happens.
If nothing else, pick it up for the laissez-faire attitude of the extremely wealthy and beautiful before the age of social media.
A profoundly disturbing novel that ruthlessly dissects American life in the late 1960s, from the author of The White Album and The Year of Magical Thinking.
Benny called for a round of Cuba Libres and I gave him some chips to play for me and went to the ladies' room and never came back.
Somewhere out beyond Hollywood, hollowed-out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving. In her early thirties, divorced from her husband, dislocated from friends, anesthetized to pain and please, Wheth is a woman who has run out of both desires…
I’m a sucker for unlikeable. A charged word that’s sometimes used about protagonists but mostly only about female protagonists. When they don’t fit a template. When they are imperfect. When they push back. When they are too emotional or too distant or too interior or too driven or too obsessed or too mean or too nice or too smart or not smart enough. The protagonists in these novels are flawed—period. But flawed is complex and perfect is simple and simple is boring and no one wants to read a boring novel.
Joan abandons her life and moves across the country on a quest to find a stranger from her past, convinced it will help her find peace.
In a savagely honest style, Animalrecounts Joan’s affairs, family history, a traumatic incident from her youth, and a gaping emptiness within herself that she’s desperate to understand. “If someone asked me to describe myself in a single word, depravedis the one I would use.”
Depraved, sure. Maybe. But it’s impossible to be angry at her because she’s so candid about what she’s doing and why. The prose itself is fresh and stark and haunting.
From Lisa Taddeo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon Three Women, comes an “intoxicating” (Entertainment Weekly), “fearless” (Los Angeles Times), and “explosive” (People) novel about “what happens when women are pushed beyond the brink, and what comes after the reckoning” (Esquire).
Joan has spent a lifetime enduring the cruelties of men. But when one of them commits a shocking act of violence in front of her, she flees New York City in search of Alice, the only person alive who can help her make sense of her past. In the sweltering hills above Los Angeles,…
I am the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Library and Moonlight in Odessa. Like the authors on the list I selected for Shepherd, I'm skilled at turning experiences at minimum-wage jobs into novels. I earned $25 a month teaching full-time at a high school in Odessa, which is the setting for my first novel. My second book takes place at the American Library in Paris, where I was the programs manager. Setting is the start of my fiction, because I believe that where we are from has a lot to do with who we are. I hope that you’ll enjoy these selections.
The book is an insider guide to Paris and features interviews with amazing women who are making the city better and more interesting, one action, one thought, one sentence at a time. I finished the book wishing I could meet the Parisiennes over coffee to discuss the different challenges that they faced.
In a follow-up to the popular The New Paris, Lindsey Tramuta explores the impact that the women of Paris have had on the rapidly evolving culture of their city
The New Parisienne focuses on one of the city's most prominent features, its women. Lifting the veil on the mythologized Parisian woman-white, lithe, ever fashionable-Lindsey Tramuta demystifies this oversimplified archetype and recasts the women of Paris as they truly are, in all their complexity. Featuring 50 activists, creators, educators, visionaries, and disruptors-like Leila Slimani, Lauren Bastide, and Mayor Anne Hidalgo-the book reveals Paris as a blossoming cultural center of feminine power.…
I am the USS Midway Chair in Modern US Military History at San Diego State University. I’ve been teaching courses on the relationships between war and society for years and am fascinated not just by the causes and conduct of war, but, more importantly, by the costs of war. To me, Americans have a rather peculiar connection with war. In many ways, war has become an integral part of American conduct overseas—and our very identity. And yet we often don’t study it to question some of our basic assumptions about what war can do, what it means, and what the consequences are for wielding armed force so readily overseas.
I teach at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) and it’s important for my students to identify with the historical actors we study. Escobedo resonates with them because she artfully discusses how the “Good War” was perceived within Mexican American families living in Southern California. She argues that Mexican American women, especially those working in the defense industry, were “racially malleable” and members of an “in-between” community during the war.
There’s so much going on in this story—insights into race and gender, sexuality and family dynamics, fears about “race mixing,” and wartime demographic shifts. Yet in all this, Escobedo never loses sight of the women themselves and their powerful voices.
During World War II, unprecedented employment avenues opened up for women and minorities in U.S. defense industries at the same time that massive population shifts and the war challenged Americans to rethink notions of race. At this extraordinary historical moment, Mexican American women found new means to exercise control over their lives in the home, workplace, and nation. In From Coveralls to Zoot Suits, Elizabeth R. Escobedo explores how, as war workers and volunteers, dance hostesses and zoot suiters, respectable young ladies and rebellious daughters, these young women used wartime conditions to serve the United States in its time of…
I’ve dedicated my life to the study of Chinese history. I received a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard and have spent my career teaching Chinese history at universities in Taiwan. I am the author of eleven books and many academic articles and book reviews about Chinese history. As an American who has spent decades lecturing about Chinese history in Mandarin to Taiwanese students, I have an uncommon perspective on the subject.
Even though this is a work of anthropology, it also provides unique insights into rural history. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Margery Wolf did fieldwork in a poor village in rural Taiwan. At that time, modernization was just beginning to affect the countryside, so most aspects of village life were still traditional. Although Taiwanese society differed from the mainland in certain ways, in most aspects of life there carried on the traditions of Chinese village life. This book looks at rural society from a female perspective. Due to poverty, both women and men had few options. They did whatever it took to survive. Many of the people the author interviewed seem very discontent with their lives, but they usually had no other choice.
Studies of Chinese society commonly emphasizze men's roles and functions, a not unreasonable approach to a society with patrilineal kinship structure. But this emphasis has left many important gaps in our knowledge of Chinese life.
This study seeks to fill some of these gaps by examining the ways rural Taiwanese women manipulate men and each other in the pursuit of their personal goals. The source of a woman's power, her home in a social structure dominated by men, is what the author calls the uterine family, a de facto social unity consisting of a mother and her children.
I am a professor of creative writing who knows when readers stop feeling, they stop reading. We all want to feel, to live vicariously. To experience the unimaginable. I’ve lived large. I’ve raced on the back of an ostrich, rode an elephant through the jungles of Thailand, raced catamarans in the Caribbean, and danced with the Shaka Zulu in Africa. The best books are those that feel like memories…that touch us…that make us feel.
I think every woman should read this book. In a time when we need a “movement” to be seen or heard, Dragons reminded me of our strength, of how often the world has its boot on the back of our necks.
I loved the story of 2 sisters-one who desperately wants to be a dragon and the other, who does not. It was my first audiobook and I finished it in 2 days.
A KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF 2022 • A rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are. • The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon
Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordinary wives and mothers sprouted wings, scales, and talons; left a…
I have published more than twenty books and hundreds of articles. But not one of those books and articles inspired the kind of devotion I felt toward The Power of Gratitude. In a way, this book encapsulates a lifetime of writing. It is the book I believe I was called to write.
This book is a memoir that demonstrates the power and joys of gratitude through the author’s memories of her childhood in Moline, Illinois.
Diane Johnson demonstrates much gratitude for her childhood, but she is no midwestern hickster. Johnson is a Hollywood film writer who has worked with such directors as Francis for Coppola and Sydney Pollack. She has traveled the world, and yet she reveals how the gratitude for her youth has sustained her through life.
“Smart . . . perceptive . . . Flyover Lives is a memoir of the Midwest sure to charm readers.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
From the New York Times bestselling author of Le Divorce, a dazzling meditation on the mysteries of the “wispy but material” family ghosts who shape us
Growing up in the small river town of Moline, Illinois, Diane Johnson always dreamed of floating down the Mississippi and off to see the world. Years later, at home in France, a French friend teases her: “Indifference to history—that’s why you Americans seem so naïve and don’t really know where you’re…
I’ve always been drawn to family stories, from King Lear to Anna Karenina. The ties that bind us to family—however strained or frayed those ties might be—contain within their fibers the entire spectrum of human emotion. For a writer, this is fertile territory. I could contemplate endlessly the rivalry that exists between a pair of siblings, or the expectations a child has for their parent. Family dynamics are often kept private, which makes encountering them on the page even more thrilling. To be let in on the life of another, granted permission to bear witness to their secrets and innermost longings, is the rare gift that literature brings us.
Meet the Oppenheimer triplets, the stars of this book, whose loathing for one another borders on the Shakespearean. As a reader, I was instantly drawn in by Korelitz’s shrewd writing—and held there by her wondrous talents as a plot-maker. Indeed, this novel twists and turns in thrilling ways that kept my eyes glued to the page.
*A New York Times Notable Book of 2022* *A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction* *An NPR Best Book of the Year*
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth.
The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF.…
I grew up dreaming of other worlds, both real and imagined. I’ve since had the great fortune of living in Angola, Bangladesh, Gambia, Italy, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Tanzania—each country as fascinating to me as the next. Yet there’s so much more of the world I want to experience! This is why I love novels that immerse me in the history and culture of foreign lands. By entering the hearts and minds of characters with different life experiences than myself, I feel a sense of connection that expands my own worldview. I hope you enjoy these books as much as I have!
Set in Baghdad in 2002, this book introduced me to a part of the world that I knew little about. The novel is written as a braided narrative of three interconnected women—Huda, Rania, and Ally—each harboring their own secrets and lies as they navigate life under Sadaam Hussein’s authoritarian regime.
I found myself holding my breath as the three women’s lives became increasingly entangled and endangered. This compelling and suspenseful novel asks how much we are willing to compromise our values in order to protect the people we love. I enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about Iraq in the process.
“Breathtaking…Riveting and profound! I adored this book!” —Ellen Marie Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of The Orphan Collector
“A deeply involving and important novel by a master storyteller.” —Susan Wiggs, # 1 New York Times bestselling author
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
In this moving, suspenseful debut novel, three courageous women confront the complexities of trust, friendship, motherhood, and betrayal under the rule of a ruthless dictator and his brutal secret police. Former foreign correspondent Gina Wilkinson draws on her own experiences to take readers inside a haunting story of Iraq at the turn of the millennium and the impossible choices faced…
