Since I began reading seriously (albeit late in life!), I’ve been seduced by the travails of underdog protagonists trying to save their own lives through transformation. If you had told me when I was a teenager—drinking too much, racing muscle cars, and scraping by with Ds and Cs in a vocational high school—that I would end up teaching writing at a university, I would’ve said you were nuts. It wasn’t until I started college in my mid-twenties that I actually read a novel for the pleasure of it. My novel and short story collection are expressions of my cheering on the young underdogs who bravely fight to change their worlds despite all odds.
In a heartfelt story of redemption, Deanna Lambert was labeled the school slut after her father caught her having car sex with a high school boy. Unforgiven and dejected in a smothering, gossip-fueled small town, Deanna faces the people she least wants to face in a moving attempt to outlive her past, with no help offered by her dysfunctional parents and a sister overwhelmed with young motherhood. I loved the gorgeous realism of this book, fueled by the deep intimacy Zarr creates with her sincere, frank-hearted, narrator.
Sara Zarr's lyrical debut novel--a National Book Award finalist--has been adapted for TV!
I was thirteen when my dad caught me with Tommy Webber in the back of Tommy's Buick. Tommy was seventeen and the supposed friend of my brother, Darren.
I'm not sure I even liked him.
In a moment, Deanna Lambert's teenage life is changed forever. Struggling to overcome the lasting repercussions and the stifling role of "school slut," Deanna longs to escape a life defined by her past. With subtle grace, complicated wisdom, and striking emotion, Story of a Girl reminds us of our human capacity for…
Ellen Cassedy explores the ways that people, and countries, can engage with the difficult truths of the Holocaust in order to build a better future. She researched Lithuania’s encounter with its Jewish heritage, including the Holocaust, for ten years. Her book breaks new ground by shining a spotlight on how brave people – Jews and non-Jews – are facing the past and building mutual understanding. Cassedy is the winner of numerous awards and a frequent speaker about the Holocaust, Lithuania, and Yiddish language and literature.
Eva Mozes Kor was ten years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. As a survivor, she became an eloquent – and controversial – activist on behalf of forgiveness. Her book tells the gripping story of how she freed herself from the burden of hatred. Not everyone will agree with her stance, but everyone will be challenged and moved by it.
Eva Mozes Kor was just ten years old when she was sent to Auschwitz. While her parents and two older sisters were murdered there, she and her twin sister Miriam were subjected to medical experiments at the hands of Dr. Joseph Mengele. Later on, when Miriam fell ill due to the long-term effects of the experiments, Eva embarked on a search for their torturers. But what she discovered was the remedy for her troubled soul; she was able to forgive them.
Told through anecdotes and in response to letters and questions at her public appearances, she imparts a powerful lesson…
I’m a writer who has traveled the world in real life and traveled through time in my research and imagination. In the past dozen years, I’ve researched historical women of the Bible for my own novels and have come to realize that women of the ancient world were much like women of today. Biblical women had dreams and fell in love. They worried about their children, politics, and the world around them. They wished for security and happiness just as we do. I have a special regard for historical fiction that brings these ancient women to life—honoring their lives and their struggles.
Although this novel isn’t about a historical biblical woman, both the setting and the premise bring the latter half of the New Testament to vibrant life. In Corinth of the first century, a girl thief is befriended by a Jewish teacher named Paul, leading us into a fast-paced story of action and intrigue. Afshar’s novels brim with authentic historical detail as well as great empathy for what it meant to be a woman in this time in history. Turning the last page of the story, I felt like I’d lived and breathed alongside this long-ago woman.
First-century Corinth is a city teeming with commerce and charm. It’s also filled with danger and corruption―the perfect setting for Ariadne’s greatest adventure.
After years spent living with her mother and oppressive grandfather in Athens, Ariadne runs away to her father’s home in Corinth, only to discover the perilous secret that destroyed his marriage: though a Greek of high birth, Galenos is the infamous thief who has been robbing the city’s corrupt of their ill-gotten gains.
Desperate to keep him safe, Ariadne risks her good name, her freedom, and the love of the man she adores to become her father’s…
I’ve been fascinated by different cultures since I was 14 years old growing up in inner-city Chicago. My passion has given me a curious quest to travel the world and learn about different cultures. My friends have a tagline for me which is ‘From the Hood to Hanoi and All the Stops In Between’ because of my international teaching in Vietnam. As an adult who is now an international professor, sought-out global trainer, and cultural subject matter expert, my passion has increased for bringing an awareness to a broader audience about the beauty of diverse friendships.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a story about the redemptive love of a civil rights icon who was brutally beaten, threatened, and who lived through the era of civil rights unrest and huge racism. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and has received notable awards such as a noble peace prize.
His book is a fascinating read about a man who had every reason to hate white people along the journey or racism and civil unrest but instead chose the path of love and forgiveness. He has titled it One Blood as he believes that we all have things in common, even in the midst of suffering and pain, if we allow ourselves to grow through the suffering and become the mirror image of the hate and bitterness that we have received on the journey of life.
Dr. Perkins’ final manifesto on race, faith, and reconciliation
We are living in historic times. Not since the civil rights movement of the 60s has our country been this vigorously engaged in the reconciliation conversation. There is a great opportunity right now for culture to change, to be a more perfect union. However, it cannot be done without the church, because the faith of the people is more powerful than any law government can enact.
The church is the heart and moral compass of a nation. To turn a country away from God, you must sideline the church. To turn…
I'm a mom of two daughters who is fascinated with reading nonfiction parenting books and listening to parenting-related podcasts. My absolute favorite, though, is when fiction authors take a dense parenting topic and turn it into a relatable and engaging story so that readers can explore the same important issues and challenges in a more enjoyable way.
This novel exemplifies parenting fiction in my mind. It takes a concept I could’ve read about in a nonfiction parenting book (how to handle teenage drinking) and slides it into a compelling narrative that realistically depicts all the potential complexities and nuances in the parenting decisions and how they might play out, including several factors and consequences related to teen alcohol use and parent-sponsored parties that I would’ve never thought of myself.
Two mothers face the consequences of their choices in a gripping novel about friendship, family, and forgiveness by Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author Jamie Beck.
Grace first met Mimi when she blew into their sons' toddler playgroup like a warm bay breeze that loosened Grace's tight spaces. Despite differing approaches to life and parenting, the fast friends raised their kids together while cementing a sisterlike bond that neither believed could be broken. But when a string of ill-fated decisions results in a teen party with a tragic outcome for Grace's son, the friendship is ripped apart and…
When I was growing up, I had no idea that New York State had 200 years of slavery. And when I realized that my Dutch American ancestors had been some of the most fervent enslavers, I knew I had to know more. It wasn’t until I met Eleanor Mire, a woman who is descended from the very people that my family enslaved, that my story became fuller. We realized that, through rape, we shared ancestors, which makes us “linked descendants.” Rather than turning away from the upsetting history, we became friends who knew we needed to keep learning and tell the stories of those who had been lost.
Although this book is less about slavery as it happened and more about what took place after the Civil War ended slavery in the United States, it is one of the best books I’ve ever seen that explains just how America still hasn’t recovered from its legacy.
This is one of those books where I kept underlining passages, such as one where the racist Southerner said that slavery was like an “apprenticeship” for “savage races” or how nostalgia for a romantic version of the Civil War poisoned our understanding of history. I want to read this book three more times so that I can fully absorb its wise lessons.
Winner of the Bancroft Prize Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize Winner of the Merle Curti award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Prize
No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The…
I am a published author, memoir-writing instructor, and retired clinical psychologist. I wrote an initial memoir as a chronological account of my dysfunctional marriages and recovery from them, but lately, I have become very interested in what is termed “hybrid memoirs.” Hybrid memoirs combine personal memoirs with major incidents and research into issues similar to those in the memoir or the culture and laws surrounding them. Since my new book combines my memoir with an account of a crime that affected all the citizens in the country village where I grew up, I have gravitated to memoirs featuring crime as part of the story.
This is both a memoir and the story of a crime. I was interested in this book because the crime happened in the town where I went to university. A crime so close to home seems more frightening, more real.
The author writes a sincere, honest story about how you can be fooled by the person you most want to trust—your husband. I found this book hard to put down.
A remarkably compelling and harrowing story of love and betrayal and one woman’s pursuit of justice, redemption, and healing.
“One month into our marriage, my husband committed horrific violent crimes. In that instant, the life I knew was destroyed. I vowed that one day I would be whole again. This is my story.”
An impassioned, harrowing, and ultimately hopeful story of one woman’s pursuit of justice, forgiveness, and healing.
When Shannon Moroney got married in October 2005, she had no idea that her happy life as a newlywed was about to come crashing down around her. One month after her…
I often refer to myself as a haunted body. Death is something that has fascinated and alarmed me since I can remember. I’ve even had a spooky experience or five that I can’t explain. But to write a ghost story is akin to making someone fall in love with you, or lean in close to hear a secret. I love the intrigue and power of that kind of tale. Our oldest stories are ghost stories and the biggest and most enduring mystery for the entirety of humanity is: Is there life after death?
Helen has been haunting the English classroom for 130 years and has never, not once, been seen. And then she feels his eyes on her. Seeing her, reallyseeing her like she hasn’t been seen in decades. Without wanting to be, Helen is drawn to him. That he has a body and she doesn’t is nothing in the face of their growing love, and the two form a bond that defies death. Let me tell you this book had me in tears. I read it years ago and still think of it with deep affection. I even wrote a song about it when I was far younger and far less self-conscious than I am now!
In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen—terrified, but intrigued—is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to…
I love romance, a true romantic from the day I was born. I also love crime/thriller/twists and turns that keep you on the edge of your seat and wanting to turn the page. As a writer, it was the most natural choice to combine all of these to bring to you as a reader love, passion, danger, shady criminal underworld, and jaw-dropping cliffhangers mixed in with twists you never saw coming. A love story that has you hopelessly entwined with them. A beautiful backdrop of the highlands of Scotland that creates its own unique story –mystical, mighty, and carrying its own hidden dangers.
Quite simply, Robyn is a masterclass at writing beautiful romances and nothing comes better than her Virgin River series.
Her characters are full of depth and conflicts, and the setting of the stories are in beautiful landscapes I want to travel to. There are many great sub-stories to be drawn happily into and of course, who can resist a HEA?
When recently widowed Melinda Monroe sees an advert for a midwife in the remote town of Virgin River, she decides this is the perfect place to escape her heartache.
However, her hopes are dashed within an hour of arriving: the cabin is uninhabitable, the roads are treacherous and the local doctor wants nothing to do with her. But when a tiny baby is abandoned on a front porch, Mel must decide whether to stay and help or…
I love a novel that provokes me to think hard about what it means to be human.
I’ll be forever haunted by this story about a troubled man who commits an unspeakable act of violence, and the mother of the woman he murdered, who invites him into her home. The story made me rethink everything about the boundaries of love and forgiveness and whether it’s really possible to be at peace with events you can’t change.
Equally haunting is the spare, poetic prose of Em Strang’s writing. From time to time, I open the book just to ruminate on a few of its most stunning sentences.
* A New Statesman Most Anticipated Title for 2023 *
From an award-winning Scottish poet, an unforgettable novel about memory and radical forgiveness
How far would you go to overcome the limits of your own forgiveness?
Quinn is serving a life sentence for a crime he's convinced he hasn't committed. Surely the authorities have got it wrong, and when they find his childhood sweetheart, Andrea, his name will be cleared. His parole is drawing near when he receives an unexpected letter from Andrea's mother, who invites Quinn to share her home.
