Here are 56 books that Paradise Road fans have personally recommended if you like
Paradise Road.
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I have always believed that everyone has a story to tell. I have connected to people throughout my life because I chose to sit, listen, and share stories. I do this in my own neighborhood and on my travels worldwide. I do it with people I don’t have anything in common with and people I think I might not like. Every time, without exception, I learn something. Often, I am inspired. These experiences have tested and grown my compassion, empathy, kindness, and understanding capacity. I suppose this is why I love reading. It’s like meeting strangers and sharing stories.
I loved Jeanette Walls honest and raw telling of her father’s mental illness and her mother’s unorthodox mothering and the impact they both had on her childhood and adulthood. People with mental illness are often portrayed as villains with no redeeming qualities.
Still, Walls finds the bits and pieces of her father that are beautiful, made her childhood sometimes magical, and led to her own successful career and life.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
I was born into a third-generation white South African family. I came to Europe at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a ballet dancer and became interested in liberation politics in the 1960s, working for some years for the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London. It almost goes without saying that Black Africans should be at the centre of books about Africa. In an era in which the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ has gained so much acceptance, it seems almost quixotic to focus on white Africans. However, this is a fascinating group of people who have made a notable contribution to the continent, winning thirteen of the twenty-eight Nobel Prizes awarded to Africans.
This memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s childhood is a hilarious take on her family’s experience of farming in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a refreshing reminder of what it was like to live and grow up as a member of the white minority intent on remaining in power during a fast-changing, violent, and deeply unstable period in the history of southern Africa. It is a wonderful portrayal of some of the traumas of growing up with a witty, mad, and heavy-drinking mother who had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child, a chain-smoking father who farmed by day and fought terrorists by night, and a glamorous older sister. It is a book that keeps you laughing or crying the whole way through.
Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, a story of civil war and a family's unbreakable bond.
How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or live in it. How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
As the daughter of white settlers in war-torn 1970s Rhodesia, Alexandra Fuller remembers a time when a schoolgirl was as likely to carry a shotgun as a satchel. This is her story - of a civil war, of a quixotic battle…
When writing my memoir about serving in the Peace Corps, I knew with every keystroke I was opening myself up for public censure. The things that I needed to get down on paper were not pretty things; they did not show me in a favorable light. I also knew it was the only way to tell my tale. Honesty is compelling even (perhaps especially)when the truth is ugly. Female voices in contemporary literature are raw, messy, and unapologetic. The appeal of candid “femoir” is undeniable, as evidenced by runaway bestsellers in recent years (I’m looking at you, Eat, Pray, Love and Wild). Discover more hidden gems below.
An uproarious tell-all about blooming late, taking chances, and being vulnerable. In an effort to cope with the loss of a defining career and face down a lifetime of insecurities about her body, the author decides to tackle anything (self-exploratory-wise) that would normally send her screaming for the hills. Reluctantly but determinately, she takes the plunge into internet dating, professional cuddling, sensory deprivation, polyamory, Brazilian waxing, and more—all the while getting throat-punched by anxiety. Self-deprecating and ribald, Hameister’s anecdotes illustrate that sometimes pulling up one’s big girl panties can actually mean taking them off.
During the nine years Courtenay Hameister hosted NPR's Live Wire, she lived in a state of near-constant dread and anxiety and she didn't just fret about and fear her next radio show; she fretted about and feared everything.
Until about a year ago, when she decided to take arms against a sea of anxieties and by opposing... maybe not end them but at least become a little more adventurous, spontaneous and comfortable in her own skin. OKAY FINE WHATEVER tells the story of Courtenay's year-long fight against her own nature, which took the form of pushing herself to try new…
All of my novels explore, in some way, how the characters are affected by trauma or loss, and how they respond to these difficulties over time. This comes partly from my impatience with the notion of “closure” and with the idea that we can ever truly find it after a traumatic event or a significant loss. I’m drawn to fiction and nonfiction that doesn’t shy away from the messiness of finding a way to live with these difficulties, or trying to. In addition to writing fiction, I’ve spent nearly ten years recommending novels and story collections through my Small Press Picks website.
This memoir is one of the most compelling accounts of confronting trauma that I’ve ever read. In the case of the author, the traumas are multiple: fear of deportation due to her “illegal” status; years of sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and later in life, the discovery that she carries a gene that leaves her susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. I was moved as I learned how Talusan found the words—both as a writer and as a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a romantic partner, and a citizen—to speak of these difficulties. Her writing about this journey is both spare and powerful, and it bears re-reading and deep reflection. Whenever I return to this book, I find inspiration.
Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.
Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns…
Kathryn J. Atwood’s young adult collective biographies on women and war have garnered multiple book awards. She has been seen on America: Facts vs. Fiction; heard on BBC America; published in The Historian and War, Literature & the Arts; and featured as a guest speaker at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago, the First Division Museum at Cantigny Park, and the Atlanta History Center.
A little-known aspect of the Pacific War was the imprisonment of Allied civilians. While these Japanese-run prison camps were not deliberate death machines, as were the Nazi-run concentration camps, large numbers of women and children died of starvation and disease there, or at least had their health permanently ruined. Many stories would come out of these camps, both horrific and inspiring. Perhaps the most brilliantly creative story of the latter category was the vocal orchestra, a group of imprisoned women who sought to recreate symphonic music with their voices. Colijn’s memoir was made into the film, Paradise Road.
Thrown into the whirlwind of dark forces unleashed with the onset of World War II, a young woman, Helen Colijn, her sisters, and father flee the oncoming Japanese army. Helen Colijn's account of her wartime experiences is a window into a largely overlooked dimension of World War II -- the imprisonment of women and children in Southeast Asia by the Japanese and how these prisoners of war responded to their dire circumstances. The conditions were terrible. Food was scarce; medicine unavailable. Held in captivity for three and a half years, more that a third of the women in Helen's camp…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
Stanley Park occupies such a giant place in the city’s imagination. Most Vancouverites well remember the devastating windstorm that blew through the city in 2006 – it tore down several trees in my own neighbourhood and scared me witless – leveling great swathes of the park. Historian Sean Kheraj uses the storm as a jumping-off point to reflect on the park’s history and its complicated relationship with the citizens of the city.
In early December 2006, a powerful windstorm ripped through Vancouver's Stanley Park. The storm transformed the city's most treasured landmark into a tangle of splintered trees and shattered a decades-old vision of the park as timeless virgin wilderness. In Inventing Stanley Park, Sean Kheraj traces how the tension between popular expectations of idealized nature and the volatility of complex ecosystems helped transform the landscape of one of the world's most famous urban parks. This beautifully illustrated book not only depicts the natural and cultural forces that shaped the park's landscape, it also examines the roots of our complex relationship with…
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver my parents had a collection of books arranged on shelves around the living room. The only one I remember taking down and actually reading was an early history of the city. I recalled being impressed by the simple fact that someone had thought my hometown was interesting enough to write about, not something that was self-evident to a cocky teenager. Many years later, some two dozen books of my own under my belt, I decided maybe I’d earned the right to take a crack at the city myself.
This unusual book is a tour through the working-class city in the middle of the last century. This is a portrait of Vancouver when working people occupied the waterfront, instead of glittering condo towers. Knight imagines taking a trip on the old No.20 streetcar that once ran the length of the city’s eastside waterfront, painting an evocative portrait of the mills, docks, flophouses, and beer parlours that occupied the strip. Then he turns the book over to a series of personal reminiscences from men and women who called the neighbourhood home. Vancouver prides itself today on being a world-class destination for the global super-rich. This is where it came from.
In Along the No. 20 Line, Rolf Knight takes the reader on a tour through working class East Vancouver of a century ago.
Knight's "through line" is literally a line: the old No. 20 Streetcar Line that ran between downtown Vancouver and the present day neighbourhood of the Pacific National Exhibition. From 1892 to 1949, when it was shut down and replaced by the No. 20 Granville / Victoria Drive bus, the No. 20 line took thousands of Vancouverites back and forth from their East Van homes to their jobs along the waterfront, on the docks, in mills, factories and…
Drew Hayden Taylor is an award-winning playwright, novelist, journalist, and filmmaker. Born and raised on the Curve Lake First Nation in Ontario (Anishnawbe), Drew has had over a hundred productions of his plays and enjoys spreading the gospel of Indigenous literature across the world.
An amazing play that explores the repercussions of Residential schools on the Indigenous population, and how its effects are frequently intergenerational. Winner of Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Best Drama, this play spares no one as it sheds light on the damage and healing happening in Indigenous communities across the country.
Where the Blood Mixes is meant to expose the shadows below the surface of the author’s First Nations heritage, and to celebrate its survivors. Though torn down years ago, the memories of their Residential School still live deep inside the hearts of those who spent their childhoods there. For some, like Floyd, the legacy of that trauma has been passed down through families for generations. But what is the greater story, what lies untold beneath Floyd’s alcoholism, under the pain and isolation of the play’s main character?
Loring’s title was inspired by the mistranslation of the N’lakap’mux (Thompson) place name…
I discovered birds rather late in life, almost by accident, as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching in a small western Ethiopian town, an experience that stimulated my passion to know all kinds of birds and, in the process, to know the people and places where they lived. My ultimate career choice of ethnobiology, combining cognitive and environmental analysis, was a perfect synthesis of my various scholarly passions. My subsequent studies of Mayan and Zapotec Indian communities in Mexico and Native North American communities in the Pacific Northwest broadened the scope of my research to include all kinds of animals, plants, and fungi, all the living things we share with Indigenous people.
I embarked on my ethnobiological career as a graduate student and shortly learned I was not alone. My fellow student north of the border, Nancy Turner, was likewise passionately engaged with ethnobotany for her thesis. Turner was trained as a botanist but then devoted her decades-long academic career to documenting how her Indigenous neighbors and friends in British Columbia recognize, name, cultivate, and respect the botanical riches of their millennial homeland.
A key principle clearly articulated by her Indigenous teachers is that plants are our kin and that “everything is one,” so we must all live together in a harmonious balance. People must “look after” the land and support its many “persons.” This Indigenous wisdom is never abstract, but in Turner’s telling, it is always exemplified by real people, specific plants, and particular places.
This is a thought-provoking look at Native American stories, cultural institutions, and ways of knowing, and what they can teach us about living sustainably.
Why Vancouver? Yes, it's my hometown, but I've lived in other places for about 20 years of my life, and I'm anything but a thoughtless booster. Vancouver is a beautiful city, but it's a conflicted one between dreamers of its potential greatness, people wanting a laid-back West Coast lifestyle, and those for whom it's the end of the poverty road with the mildest climate in Canada. Thinking about it, painting it, and writing about it—it's an itch I have to scratch.
A crash course in how the city's evolution has been shaped by its buildings old and new, their architects and developers, and touching on the campaigns to make the city "world class" while others try to hang on to its historic areas. Presented in an engaging tour format with excellent colour photos.
This new edition of the classic urban guidebook brings the city’s architectural story up to date.
Harold Kalman and Robin Ward, long-time chroniclers of Vancouver, offer an authoritative and highly readable book about Vancouver’s most interesting places and explain how, why and by whom the city’s urban environment was created.
Containing more than four hundred entries, ten self-guided tours highlight significant buildings from all eras in the city and its metro region, and feature new projects that transform the skyline more radically than ever before. The tours―organized by neighbourhood and planned variously for walking, cycling, car and transit―reveal Vancouver in…
