- Little Fires Every Where by Celeste Ng
From the bestselling author
of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel
that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson
family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their
lives.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town--and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town--and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia's past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
- Before We Were Yours-A Novel by Lisa Wingate
Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill
Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their
family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must
rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in
charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is
familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society
orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be
returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth.
At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep
her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and
uncertainty.
Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.
Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption.
Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.
- Homegoing by Yaa Gynse
The unforgettable New York Times
best seller begins with the story of two half-sisters, separated by
forces beyond their control: one sold into slavery, the other married
to a British slaver. Written with tremendous sweep and power,
Homegoing traces the generations of family who follow, as
their destinies lead them through two continents and three hundred
years of history, each life indeliably drawn, as the legacy of
slavery is fully revealed in light of the present day.
Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
- When Breathe Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi and Abraham Verghesi
At
the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth
of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with
stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and
the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the
future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When
Breath Becomes Air
chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student
“possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that
all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a
neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical
place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father
confronting his own mortality.What
makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the
future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out
into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a
child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of
the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving,
exquisitely observed memoir
Paul
Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his
words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize
that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had
changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from
Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll
go on.’” When
Breath Becomes Air
is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of
facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from
a brilliant writer who became both.
- La Rose by Louise Erdrich
In
this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, the bestselling author of
the National Book Award-winning The
Round House and
the Pulitzer
Prize nominee The
Plague of Doves wields
her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting
contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a
profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American
culture.
North
Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the
edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy
confidence—but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he’s
hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he
staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor’s
five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.
The
youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was
best friends with Landreaux’s five-year-old son, LaRose. The two
families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides
into town; their children played together despite going to different
schools; and Landreaux’s wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty’s
mother, Nola. Horrified at what he’s done, the recovered alcoholic
turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition—the sweat lodge—for guidance,
and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution,
he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. “Our
son will be your son now,” they tell them.
LaRose
is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of
suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce,
rebellious new “sister,” Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator
who can ease her volatile mother’s terrifying moods. Gradually he’s
allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the
Raviches’ own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin
linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain
begins to heal.
But
when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux
begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day
Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two
fragile families whole.
Inspiring
and affecting, LaRose is
a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the
human heart, and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of
America’s most distinguished literary masters.
