Here are 100 books that Nobody Gets Out Alive fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have lived in Alaska for forty years, working both as a construction worker and a college professor. I love Alaska, but not always the way it is depicted, particularly on reality TV. I hope the characters I create and the stories I tell will bring a more balanced view of everyday Alaskans, who are, after all, Americans too. The Hunger of Crows shows small-town Alaska through the eyes of four characters: two lifelong Alaskans, and two “from Outside” as we say here. Hopefully, it will provide a balanced view of this great place.
Although I happen to know that poet Anne Coray intended this to be an environmentalist novel (a town threatened with doom by a giant mining operation), this beautifully written story set in the fictitious town of Lost Mountain in remote Western Alaska is an example of how Alaskans come together in the face of threats to the beauty and natural wonder of our great land. It may be about the land, but it is the cast of quirky characters that makes it human.
The searing debut novel of poet and writer Anne Coray, Lost Mountain is an impassioned story of love, loss, environment, and politics against a landscape facing threat of destruction.
"Anne Coray, the author of three poetry collections, has brought her observational and writing skills to fiction that demonstrates both her attention to language and her passion for her home place. . . Lost Mountain is many things: a love story between the two main characters, a portrait of a small and isolated community, a mystery, a paean to salmon and lives that surround salmon, a not-very-disguised critique of a megamine…
I have lived in Alaska for forty years, working both as a construction worker and a college professor. I love Alaska, but not always the way it is depicted, particularly on reality TV. I hope the characters I create and the stories I tell will bring a more balanced view of everyday Alaskans, who are, after all, Americans too. The Hunger of Crows shows small-town Alaska through the eyes of four characters: two lifelong Alaskans, and two “from Outside” as we say here. Hopefully, it will provide a balanced view of this great place.
Also environmentally themed (a town threatened by a giant clear-cutting lumber operation), Whispering Alaskais ultimately a family story of twin sisters coming to Alaska. I loved the way Jones depicts the vastly different twin girls: one compliant and friendly, the other withdrawn and driving her father nuts. Tolstoy famously said all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. Well, this family is struggling with the loss of the girl’s mother on top of trying to find their places in the rainy Southeast coastal town. Listed as “middle-grade” Y/A, it’s a great read for adults interested in Alaska too.
In this eco-focused middle-grade novel, readers follow the story of twin sisters who move with their father to a small town in Alaska for a new start after the devastating loss of their mother.
It’s been four months since their mother died. The twins and their father have moved from Pennsylvania to a small town in Alaska to be near extended family. Nicky and Josie find the wilderness mysterious and beautiful, and a much-needed refuge. The girls drifted apart somewhat during their transition, each dealing with grief in a different way. Now, as they settle into a new normal, they…
I have lived in Alaska for forty years, working both as a construction worker and a college professor. I love Alaska, but not always the way it is depicted, particularly on reality TV. I hope the characters I create and the stories I tell will bring a more balanced view of everyday Alaskans, who are, after all, Americans too. The Hunger of Crows shows small-town Alaska through the eyes of four characters: two lifelong Alaskans, and two “from Outside” as we say here. Hopefully, it will provide a balanced view of this great place.
Born and raised in remote bush Alaska, Kanter’s hypnotizing writing will take you with him across the remote tundra of his home territory as he hunts and lives among the great herds of caribou. Each short chapter is like a prose poem, beautifully written and evocative of the people and the place. A glimpse into historical, almost prehistorical, life in Alaska.
Bestselling, award-winning author of Ordinary Wolves, a debut novel Publisher’s Weekly called “a tour de force”
Conservation-based story of changing Arctic from an on-the-ground perpective
Features full-color photography throughout
A stunningly lyrical firsthand account of a life spent hunting, studying, and living alongside caribou, A Thousand Trails Home encompasses the historical past and present day, revealing the fragile intertwined lives of people and animals surviving on an uncertain landscape of cultural and climatic change sweeping the Alaskan Arctic. Author Seth Kantner vividly illuminates this critical story about the interconnectedness of the Iñupiat of Northwest Alaska, the Western Arctic Caribou Herd,…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have lived in Alaska for forty years, working both as a construction worker and a college professor. I love Alaska, but not always the way it is depicted, particularly on reality TV. I hope the characters I create and the stories I tell will bring a more balanced view of everyday Alaskans, who are, after all, Americans too. The Hunger of Crows shows small-town Alaska through the eyes of four characters: two lifelong Alaskans, and two “from Outside” as we say here. Hopefully, it will provide a balanced view of this great place.
Chosen by National Public Radio as “essential reading” for anyone traveling to Alaska, Kizzia’s lively, often humorous historical account of the remote copper mining town of McCarthy tucked beneath the Wrangel Mountains will astound you with its descriptions of bush country life in Alaska from 1938 to 1982. A book that begins and ends with the effects of a mass murder in a remote small town. Thrilling reading.
In this history of life in an isolated ghost town, bestselling Alaska author Tom Kizzia unfolds a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal. The spirit of Alaska in the old days-impetuous, free-wheeling, and bounty-blessed-lived on in the never-quite-abandoned mining town of McCarthy. While the new state boomed in the pipeline era, cagey old-timers and young back-to-the-landers forged a rough wilderness community that lived by its own rules.
As the T'ang Dynasty mountain poet Han Shan wrote in his Cold Mountain Poems, "If your heart was like mine, you'd get it and be right here."
Jenny Hale Pulsipher is a professor of history at Brigham Young University and the author of numerous articles and two award-winning books, Subjects unto theSame King: Indians, English, and the Contest of Authority in Early New England and Swindler Sachem: The American Indian Who Sold His Birthright, Dropped Out of Harvard, and Conned the King of England.
Ulrich, winner of the Pulitzer Prize forA Midwife's Tale, first wrote this ground-breaking study of women in early New England. With her characteristically elegant prose and inspired organization, she details the varied roles women played in family, community, and religious life. An illuminating work, and a page-turner.
This enthralling work of scholarship strips away abstractions to reveal the hidden--and not always stoic--face of the "goodwives" of colonial America. In these pages we encounter the awesome burdens--and the considerable power--of a New England housewife's domestic life and witness her occasional forays into the world of men. We see her borrowing from her neighbors, loving her husband, raising--and, all too often, mourning--her children, and even attaining fame as a heroine of frontier conflicts or notoriety as a murderess. Painstakingly researched, lively with scandal and homely detail, Good Wives is history at its best.
I love to read and write about strong women. I don't necessarily mean gunning down aliens while wearing tight pants. Those books can be good too, but let's be honest, tight pants encourage yeast infections. I prefer books where women handle anything from murder to wayward cats with intelligence and compassion, while wearing whatever they want. The women, I mean. Cats already figured out to skip the pants.
I fell in love with Kate Shugak as soon as I met her on the page.
Kate's an Aleutian private investigator who lives with Mutt, her half-wolf, half-husky, on a 160-acreage homestead in Alaska. Do you know why Kate carries a scar from ear to ear? Do you know why Kate and Mutt's nearest other neighbors are a grizzly bear and a moose, and why they like it that way?
If so, you probably know how everyone turns to Kate for justice and that this very first book won an Edgar Award. Maybe you, like me, have read all 26 books in this series. High five.
Kate Shugak returns to her roots in the far Alaskan north, after leaving the Anchorage D.A.'s office. Her deductive powers are definitely needed when a ranger disappears. Looking for clues among the Aleutian pipeliners, she begins to realize the fine line between lies and loyalties--between justice served and cold murder.
The Road from Belhaven is set in 1880s Scotland. Growing up in the care of her grandparents on Belhaven Farm, Lizzie Craig discovers as a small girl that she can see the future. But she soon realises that she must keep her gift a secret. While she can sometimes glimpse…
I have always been obsessed with the idea of other worlds I can’t sense but can somehow contrive to glimpse, whether with a magic amulet or some fabulous technology. As a kid growing up in the woods and devouring fantasy novels and biology texts alike, I couldn’t decide between science or writing as a way of exploring the unknown, and ultimately, I ended up doing both: becoming a writer specializing in marine and coastal environments, one of the many places in our world where the deeper we look at the senses of the creatures living there, the more we realize just how limited our own perceptions are.
It has been years, and I cannot stop thinking about the visual this book left me with: a young woman sleeping in a makeshift plastic bubble under the sea's surface, tethered to a walkway across the Indian Ocean. I love when a speculative fiction book dives deep into exactly how a futuristic technology looks, feels, smells, integrates into life, and doesn’t just fill a plot point—which is probably why I was left with such a vivid image of this tent-bubble-habitat-material.
I am also an avid camper and know what it’s like to trust techy material in inhospitable circumstances. Take that feeling of trying to sleep while rain pours on a tent you hope is as waterproof as advertised. Now multiply it by 100 and add a violently undulating walkway across the Indian Ocean, and you get why I love this book.
One day Meena gets out of bed covered in blood, with mysterious snakebites on her chest. Her worst fears have been realised: someone is after her and she must flee India at once. As she plots her escape, she learns of The Trail, an energy-harvesting bridge spanning the Arabian Sea that has become a refuge for itinerant vagabonds and loners on the run. This is her salvation.
Slipping out in the cover of night, with a knapsack full of supplies including a pozit GPS system, a scroll reader, and a sealable waterproof pod, Meena sets off for Ethiopia, the place…
I don’t just write stories, I study them. I’ve noticed that nearly every major hero/ine’s journey and epic tale has an adoption component. From Bible stories and Greek myths (adoption worked out well for Moses, not so much for Oedipus) to Star Wars through This Is Us, we humans are obsessed with origin stories. And it’s no wonder: “Where do I come from?” and “Where do I belong?” are questions that confound and comfort us from the time we are tiny until we take our final breath. As an adoptive mother and advocate for continuing contact with birth families, I love stories about adoption, because no two are alike. They give us light and insight into how families are created and what it means to be a family—by blood, by love, and sometimes, the combination of the two.
In this exquisitely written poem of a memoir, Jillian Lauren splays her heart wide open, on every page as she transforms from an addict whose used up most of her luck to a mother whose role requires great stores of grit, determination, and love. We’re right there with her as she and her husband decide to adopt a boy from Ethiopia, and we’re along for the bumpy, often painful, occasionally joyful, ride through the challenges of parenting this tiny person who has already lost so much, but has so much to give. Outside of motherhood, she’s so funny and interesting I kind of want to be best friends with her. Not in a weirdo-stalker way, though.
A Best Memoir of 2015, "This memoir is compulsively readable and full of humor and heart."-AdoptiveFamilies.com
"A punk rock Scheherazade" (Margaret Cho) shares the zigzagging path that took her from harem member to PTA member...
In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in in her bestselling memoir, SOME GIRLS. In her thirties, Jillian's most radical act was learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs. After Jillian loses…
From a youth devouring the books of Bruce Catton to my formative years as a historian, I’ve been fascinated by the Civil War, especially the thinking and experiences of southerners who lived through the cataclysmic war years. In my teaching and writing, I’ve tried to focus on the lived experiences, the hopes and fears, of southerners who seemingly embraced secession and an independent Southern Confederacy in the expectation of a short, victorious war only to become disenchanted when the war they thought would come to pass turned into a long, bloody stalemate. The books I’ve listed share my passion for the war and open new and often unexpected windows into the Confederate experience.
A great book for teaching me how much the wartime experiences and political resistance of the soldiers’ wives and the slaves impacted the fate of the Confederacy and pushed it in directions never imagined by the planters who created the Confederacy to serve their interests and not the majority of the population they expected to do their bidding.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Merle Curti Award
"McCurry strips the Confederacy of myth and romance to reveal its doomed essence. Dedicated to the proposition that men were not created equal, the Confederacy had to fight a two-front war. Not only against Union armies, but also slaves and poor white women who rose in revolt across the South. Richly detailed and lucidly told, Confederate Reckoning is a fresh, bold take on the Civil War that every student of the conflict should read." -Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic
James Malloy is a ferry captain--or used to be, until he was unceremoniously fired and replaced by a "girl" named Courtney Farris. Now, instead of piloting Brenton Island’s daily lifeline to the glitzy docks of Newport, Rhode Island, James spends his days beached, bitter, and bored.
I’ve admired old buildings, hotels in particular, for many years. When immersed in a historic building, I find myself leaning in to discover what the walls might tell me if only I could listen closely enough. When I began writing The Hotel Hamilton series, I scoured the archives for historic hotels, learning how they came to be and how they've evolved through the years. One of the most fascinating aspects of hotel life for me is the juxtaposition of experiences felt by the guests versus those of the hotel staff. The upstairs/downstairs vibe of hotel life is ripe for creating tension within a novel, and that always intrigues me.
I slid into the grandeur and opulence of The Savoy with my imaginary suitcase in hand. Set in the 1920s and featuring London’s heyday after the devastation of WWI, it is easy to escape with this novel.
I roamed the city streets in my mind’s eye and watched with anticipation as Dolly set her sights on a life in the theatre. I love a good mystery, and this one had me dashing, right alongside Dolly, as she tried to outrun her past and make a future for herself with only her dreams to fuel her. I adore Hazel Gaynor’s novels, and this book did not disappoint.
