Alison's bookshelf: all

Alison's bookshelf: all en-US Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:42:54 -0700 60 Alison's bookshelf: all 144 41 https://www.goodreads.com/images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Heart the Lover 229804861 INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.” —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.

In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.]]> Lily King 0802165184 Alison 3 4.31 2025 Heart the Lover

author: Lily King
name: Alison
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/09/19
date added: 2026/09/19
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)]]> 50881608 The Pillars of the Earth tells the story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest Gothic cathedral the world has known . . . of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect—a man divided in his soul . . . of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame . . . and of a struggle between good and evil that will turn church against state and brother against brother.

A spellbinding epic tale of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfth-century England, this is Ken Follett’s historical masterpiece.

For the miniseries tie-in edition with the same ASIN go to this Alternate Cover Edition]]> 1008 Ken Follett Alison 4 4.50 1989 The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)

The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1)

author: Ken Follett
name: Alison
average rating: 4.50
book published: 1989
rating: 4
read at: 2026/09/05
date added: 2026/09/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stranger 49552 The Stranger has long been considered a classic of twentieth-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as number one on its "100 Books of the Century" list. Through this story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on a sundrenched Algerian beach, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd."]]> 123 Albert Camus Alison 0 to-read 4.04 1942 The Stranger

author: Albert Camus
name: Alison
average rating: 4.04
book published: 1942
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Play It As It Lays 428 Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.
]]> 231 Joan Didion 0374529949 Alison 0 to-read 3.92 1970 Play It As It Lays

author: Joan Didion
name: Alison
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1970
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/08/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Whistler 242693052 The acclaimed, prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling writer returns with a moving, luminous novel that reminds us of the sweetness and impermanence of life and the power of connection to defy time.

When Daphne Fuller and her husband Jonathan visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, they notice an older, white-haired gentleman following them. The man turns out to be Eddie Triplett, her former stepfather, who had been married to her mother for a little more than year when Daphne was nine. Now fifty-three, Daphne hasn’t seen Eddie for many years, not since the fateful event that changed the direction of both their lives. Meeting again, time falls away; while their relationship was brief, it had a profound impact on them both, and now that they are reunited, they have no intention of ever being separated again.

Whistler is a story about two adults looking back over the choices they made, and the choices that were made for them. It’s a story about bravery, memory, the often small yet consequential moments that define our lives, and the endless stream of loss that in time comes for us all. Beautiful in its simplicity, it is ultimately about how love endures, and how the feeling of being known by one other person, even for a short period of time, can change everything.]]> 304 Ann Patchett 0063511630 Alison 5 4.29 2026 Whistler

author: Ann Patchett
name: Alison
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2026
rating: 5
read at: 2026/07/19
date added: 2026/07/19
shelves:
review:

]]> The Names 217245618
“Dazzling.” —The Washington Post

“A magnificent novel.” —Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Horse

“This one will stay with me for years to come.” —Miranda Cowley Heller, New York Times bestselling author of The Paper Palace

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son's birth. Her husband, Gordon, respected in the community but a controlling presence at home, intends for her to follow a long-standing family tradition and name the baby after him. But when faced with the decision, Cora hesitates...

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of their lives, shaped by Cora’s last-minute choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

Through a prism of what-ifs, Florence Knapp invites us to consider the "one . . . precious life" we are given. Full of hope, this is the story of three names, three versions of a life, and the infinite possibilities that a single decision can spark. It is the story of one family and love’s endless capacity to endure, no matter what fate has in store.

The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.]]> 328 Florence Knapp 0593833902 Alison 3 4.09 2025

author: Florence Knapp
name: Alison
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/07/12
date added: 2026/07/12
shelves:
review:

]]> The Calamity Club 228820257
Eleven-year-old Meg, one of the unadoptable “big girls” at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford on a mission to ask her social-climbing sister to help the struggling family she’s left behind. And Charlie is a woman with a past, running low on luck but driven by fire, fury, and grit. When their fates converge, they come up with an audacious plan to take back control of their lives. Together, they form an unlikely sisterhood—but in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife, women’s freedom is fragile, and making an enemy can have dire consequences, will the price they pay for their outrageous risk-taking be too high?

The Calamity Club will make you laugh, cry, and cheer—an epic testament to resilience, friendship, and the fierce, funny women who know that calamity can be the spark of new beginnings. This is Kathryn Stockett at her most confident, heartfelt, and hilarious—the triumphant return of one of the most beloved storytellers of our time.]]> 656 Kathryn Stockett 1954118813 Alison 4 4.61 2026 The Calamity Club

author: Kathryn Stockett
name: Alison
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2026
rating: 4
read at: 2026/06/28
date added: 2026/06/28
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Cool Machine (The Harlem Trilogy, #3)]]> 243042929
1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime Pepper is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

With his usual pitch-perfect prose Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.]]> 368 Colson Whitehead 0385550502 Alison 0 to-read 4.20 2026 Cool Machine (The Harlem Trilogy, #3)

author: Colson Whitehead
name: Alison
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Crook Manifesto (The Harlem Trilogy, #2)]]> 61812836 Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory.

It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards bankruptcy, and a shooting war has broken out between the NYPD and the Black Liberation Army. Amidst this collective nervous breakdown furniture store owner and ex-fence Ray Carney tries to keep his head down and his business thriving. His days moving stolen goods around the city are over. It's strictly the straight-and-narrow for him -- until he needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter May and he decides to hit up his old police contact Munson, fixer extraordinaire. But Munson has his own favors to ask of Carney and staying out of the game gets a lot more complicated - and deadly.

1973. The counter-culture has created a new generation, the old ways are being overthrown, but there is one constant, Pepper, Carney's endearingly violent partner in crime. It's getting harder to put together a reliable crew for hijackings, heists, and assorted felonies, so Pepper takes on a side gig doing security on a Blaxploitation shoot in Harlem. He finds himself in a freaky world of Hollywood stars, up-and-coming comedians, and celebrity drug dealers, in addition to the usual cast of hustlers, mobsters, and hit men. These adversaries underestimate the seasoned crook - to their regret.

1976. Harlem is burning, block by block, while the whole country is gearing up for Bicentennial celebrations. Carney is trying to come up with a July 4th ad he can live with. ("Two Hundred Years of Getting Away with It!"), while his wife Elizabeth is campaigning for her childhood friend, the former assistant D.A and rising politician Alexander Oakes. When a fire severely injures one of Carney's tenants, he enlists Pepper to look into who may be behind it. Our crooked duo have to battle their way through a crumbling metropolis run by the shady, the violent, and the utterly corrupted.]]> 336 Colson Whitehead 0385545150 Alison 0 to-read 3.83 2023 Crook Manifesto (The Harlem Trilogy, #2)

Crook Manifesto (The Harlem Trilogy, #2)

author: Colson Whitehead
name: Alison
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)]]> 242380266 When your life flashes before your eyes, where would you stop?

No one can change the past, but the Midnight Train can take you there. The chance to re-live the moments that meant most. To see what kind of person you really were.

For Wilbur his best days were with Maggie, the love of his life. On his honeymoon in Venice.

Before he gave it all away.

He wishes he could go back and live differently. But to do so risks everything . . .

A magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.]]> 296 Matt Haig 0593833376 Alison 0 to-read 3.93 2026 The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)

The Midnight Train (The Midnight World, #2)

author: Matt Haig
name: Alison
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Son of Nobody 233411679 Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.

The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time—until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later.

As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief.

Son of Nobody takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, always.]]> 352 Yann Martel 132411813X Alison 0 to-read 3.51 2026 Son of Nobody

author: Yann Martel
name: Alison
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Exit Party 241683548 From the bestselling author of Station Eleven, Exit Party is Emily St. John Mandel’s epic new story of crimes committed and loves lost across worlds and decades.

2031. America is at war with itself, but for the first time in weeks there is some hope: the Republic of California has been declared, the curfew in Los Angeles is lifted, and everyone in the city is going to a party.

Ari, newly released from prison, arrives with her friend Gloria just as a fragile new era begins. But there are people at the party who shouldn’t be there. Something is very wrong...

Years later, living a different life in Paris, Ari remains haunted by that night. Whatever happened at the party fractured her sense of reality – and may hold the key to a very different world.

Freedom and surveillance, art and survival, love and loss in a broken world: Exit Party is the electrifying new novel from Emily St. John Mandel.]]> 320 Emily St. John Mandel 1035081318 Alison 0 to-read 4.19 2026

author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: Alison
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[In the Time of the Butterflies]]> 45013993 Librarian's Note: an alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here.

Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands.

From the author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents comes this tale of courage and sisterhood set in the Dominican Republic during the rise of the Trujillo dictatorship. A skillful blend of fact and fiction, In the Time of the Butterflies is inspired by the true story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government. Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--known as "las mariposas," or "the butterflies," in the underground--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered.

Alvarez's controlled writing perfectly captures the mounting tension as "the butterflies" near their horrific end. The novel begins with the recollections of Dede, the fourth and surviving sister, who fears abandoning her routines and her husband to join the movement. Alvarez also offers the perspectives of the other sisters: brave and outspoken Minerva, the family's political ringleader; pious Patria, who forsakes her faith to join her sisters after witnessing the atrocities of the tyranny; and the baby sister, sensitive Maria Teresa, who, in a series of diaries, chronicles her allegiance to Minerva and the physical and spiritual anguish of prison life.

In the Time of the Butterflies is an American Library Association Notable Book and a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award nominee.]]> 337 Julia Alvarez 1565129768 Alison 0 to-read 4.13 1994

author: Julia Alvarez
name: Alison
average rating: 4.13
book published: 1994
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 14891 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident.

The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years.

By turns overwhelming, sublime, heartbreaking, and uplifting, the daily experiences of the unforgettable Nolans are raw with honesty and tenderly threaded with family connectedness -- in a work of literary art that brilliantly captures a unique time and place as well as incredibly rich moments of universal experience.]]> 496 Betty Smith 0061120073 Alison 0 to-read 4.29 1943 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

author: Betty Smith
name: Alison
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1943
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> By Any Other Name 203337138 From the New York Times bestselling co-author of Mad Honey comes an “inspiring” (Elle) novel about two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are both forced to hide behind another name.

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.

In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.]]> 528 Jodi Picoult 0593497228 Alison 0 to-read 4.10 2024 By Any Other Name

author: Jodi Picoult
name: Alison
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mother Mary Comes to Me 224004055 A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

“Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write, to make sense of her feelings about the mother she ran from at age eighteen, “not because I didn’t love her, but in order to be able to continue to love her.” And so begins this astonishing, sometimes disturbing, and surprisingly funny memoir of the author’s journey from her childhood in Kerala, India, where her single mother founded a school, to the writing of her prizewinning novels and essays, through today.

With the scale, sweep, and depth of her novels, The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, and the passion, political clarity, and warmth of her essays, Mother Mary Comes to Me is an ode to freedom, a tribute to thorny love and savage grace—a memoir like no other.]]> 331 Arundhati Roy 1668094711 Alison 0 to-read 4.36 2025

author: Arundhati Roy
name: Alison
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Mad Mabel 231127044
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She's lived on her idyllic street, Kenny Lane, for sixty years--longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else's business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past that she has worked exceedingly hard at concealing. Because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end.

When a new little girl (talkative, curious, nosy) moves into the neighborhood and stops at nothing to befriend Elsie, her carefully-constructed life threatens to come crashing down as the secrets in Elsie's past start coming to light. Who was "Mad Mabel" fifty years ago? Who is Elsie Fitzpatrick today? And if the past has a habit of repeating itself, who has the most to lose?]]> 352 Sally Hepworth 1250284546 Alison 0 to-read 4.34 2025

author: Sally Hepworth
name: Alison
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/06/05
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection]]> 220487339 #1 New York Times bestseller • #1 Washington Post bestseller • #1 Indie Bestseller • USA Today Bestseller

John Green, award-winning author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

AN ACCLAIMED BEST BOOK OF 2025: NPR, Scientific American, Science News, Booklist, BookPage, Chicago Sun-Times. Goodreads Readers’ Choice Nonfiction Winner.

Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.

In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.

In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.]]> 206 John Green 1101592419 Alison 4 4.29 2025 Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

author: John Green
name: Alison
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2026/06/03
date added: 2026/06/03
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life]]> 200634712
The notion of a living world is one of humanity’s oldest beliefs. Though once scorned by many scientists, the concept of Earth as a vast interconnected living system has gained acceptance in recent decades. Life not only adapts to its surroundings—it also shapes them in dramatic and enduring ways. Over billions of years, life transformed a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis, breathing oxygen into the atmosphere, concocting the modern oceans, and turning rock into fertile soil. Life is intertwined with Earth’s capacity to regulate its climate and maintain balance.

To reveal life’s profound influence on the planet, Jabr transports the reader to such extraordinary places as an observatory halfway between the treetops and clouds, an experimental nature reserve in Siberia, and a former gold mine nearly one mile underground. We learn how microbes may have played a role in forming the continents. We discover how plants help keep oxygen levels high enough to support complex life, but not so high that Earth becomes disastrously flammable. We see how termites, elephants, and other animals sculpt the planet’s landmasses; how kelp forests and coral reefs store carbon and buffer ocean acidity; and how bacteria change the weather.

Humans are one of the most extreme examples of life changing Earth. Through fossil fuel consumption, agriculture, and pollution, humans have radically altered more aspects of the planet in less time than any other species, pushing Earth into a crisis. But we are also in a unique position to understand and protect the planet’s wondrous ecology and self-stabilizing processes. Jabr introduces us to a diverse cast of fascinating characters doing exactly that. Through compelling narrative, evocative descriptions, and lucid explanations, he shows us how Earth became the world we’ve known, how it is rapidly becoming a very different world, and how we will determine what kind of Earth our descendants inherit for millennia to come.]]> 304 Ferris Jabr 0593133978 Alison 0 to-read 4.10 2024 Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life

author: Ferris Jabr
name: Alison
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Into the Blue 242765313
In the summer of 2000, AJ Graves dreams of writing for SNL; instead, she’s stuck working in a video rental store, with slim odds of escaping her Massachusetts small town and large family. Then in walks Noah Drew, the enigmatic and intense scion of the Drew acting dynasty, and her life changes forever. Despite wildly different upbringings, the two forge a deep, cosmic bond first as friends, then as acting partners—until one day, Noah disappears without a word.

Seven years later in New York City, AJ is shocked to find herself cast in the same intergalactic TV production as Noah, by then a well-known Hollywood heartthrob. As their on-screen characters grow closer every day, the lines between reality and acting begin to blur. Unable to stay away from each other, AJ and Noah are forced to confront the truth of what happened years ago—and the devastating secret that will send their lives careening apart, even as fate continues to draw them together.

Blending unforgettable characters, explosive chemistry, and devastating emotion, Into the Blue is a journey unlike any other—one that asks: What does it mean to diverge from the script to forge your own story?]]> 448 Emma Brodie Alison 0 to-read 3.98 2026

author: Emma Brodie
name: Alison
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Small Things Like These 59016923 "A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." --Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.]]> 70 Claire Keegan 0802158757 Alison 4 4.11 2021

author: Claire Keegan
name: Alison
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2026/05/26
date added: 2026/05/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The Stationery Shop 42201995
Then Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer—handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry—and she loses her heart at once. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran.

A few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts—a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country’s future. In the chaos, Bahman never shows. For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. With a sorrowful heart, she moves on—to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England—until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century: Why did you leave? Where did you go? How is it that you were able to forget me?

A poignant, heartfelt new novel by the award-nominated author of Together Tea—extolled by the Wall Street Journal as a “moving tale of lost love” and by Shelf Awareness as “a powerful, heartbreaking story”—explores loss, reconciliation, and the quirks of fate.]]> 312 Marjan Kamali 1982107480 Alison 0 to-read 4.22 2019 The Stationery Shop

author: Marjan Kamali
name: Alison
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Secret Book Society 222906527 A captivating new historical novel from Madeline Martin, set in Victorian London about a forbidden book club, dangerous secrets, and the women who dare to break free.

You are cordially invited to the Secret Book Society…

London, 1895: Trapped by oppressive marriages and societal expectations, three women receive a mysterious invitation to an afternoon tea at the home of the reclusive Lady Duxbury. Beneath the genteel facade of the gathering lies a secret book club—a sanctuary where they can discover freedom, sisterhood, and the courage to rewrite their stories.

Eleanor Clarke, a devoted mother suffocating under the tyranny of her husband. Rose Wharton, a transplanted American dollar princess struggling to fit the mold of an aristocratic wife. Lavinia Cavendish, an artistic young woman haunted by a dangerous family secret. All are drawn to the enigmatic Lady Duxbury, a thrice-widowed countess whose husbands’ untimely deaths have sparked whispers of murder.

As the women form deep, heartwarming friendships, they uncover secrets about their marriages, their pasts, and the risks they face. Their courage is their only weapon in the oppressive world that has kept them silent, but when secrets are deadly, one misstep could cost them everything.
]]> 331 Madeline Martin Alison 3 4.29 2025 The Secret Book Society

author: Madeline Martin
name: Alison
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/05/21
date added: 2026/05/21
shelves:
review:

]]> Clytemnestra 61266463
For fans of Madeline Miller, a stunning debut following Clytemnestra, the most notorious villainess of the ancient world and the events that forged her into the legendary queen.

As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best…

You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offence against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly, you plot.

But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice.

Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So, you bide your time and force the gods' hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did.

If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.

"Crackles with vivid fury, passion, and strength." —Jennifer Saint, bestselling author of Elektra and Ariadne]]> 582 Costanza Casati 1728268257 Alison 5 4.22 2023 Clytemnestra

author: Costanza Casati
name: Alison
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2026/05/13
date added: 2026/05/13
shelves:
review:

]]> What the Wind Knows 40407141 In an unforgettable love story, a woman’s impossible journey through the ages could change everything…

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time.

The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar. Mistaken for the boy’s long-missing mother, Anne adopts her identity, convinced the woman’s disappearance is connected to her own.

As tensions rise, Thomas joins the struggle for Ireland’s independence and Anne is drawn into the conflict beside him. Caught between history and her heart, she must decide whether she’s willing to let go of the life she knew for a love she never thought she’d find. But in the end, is the choice actually hers to make?]]> 418 Amy Harmon 1503959600 Alison 0 to-read 4.36 2019 What the Wind Knows

author: Amy Harmon
name: Alison
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2019
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Before Dorothy 219301734 The greatest journey is the one you least expect…Kansas 1932

When news reaches Kansas that her beloved sister has tragically died, Emily Gale must become a mother overnight. Her sister’s orphaned child, Dorothy, desperately needs a home.

But Emily doubts her ability to fill her sister’s shoes; her life on the barren Kansas prairies is no place for a child.

On the unforgiving plains, Emily's courage is endlessly tested. The prolonged drought and relentless dust storms threaten to destroy everything – including her home and her marriage.

Can Emily overcome her grief and let Dorothy heal her heart?

From the promise of Chicago in the 1920s to the harsh beauty of the Kansas prairie during the dust bowl of the 1930s, this is a story of family, duty and one woman’s journey of self-discovery.]]> 352 Hazel Gaynor 0593440331 Alison 0 to-read 4.07 2025 Before Dorothy

author: Hazel Gaynor
name: Alison
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Lost Girls of Willowbrook 59530862
Sage Winters always knew her sister was a little different even though they were identical twins. They loved the same things and shared a deep understanding, but Rosemary—awake to every emotion, easily moved to joy or tears—seemed to need more protection from the world.

Six years after Rosemary’s death from pneumonia, Sage, now sixteen, still misses her deeply. Their mother perished in a car crash, and Sage’s stepfather, Alan, resents being burdened by a responsibility he never wanted. Yet despite living as near strangers in their Staten Island apartment, Sage is stunned to discover that Alan has kept a shocking secret: Rosemary didn’t die. She was committed to Willowbrook State School and has lingered there until just a few days ago, when she went missing.

Sage knows little about Willowbrook. It’s always been a place shrouded by rumor and mystery. A place local parents threaten to send misbehaving kids. With no idea what to expect, Sage secretly sets out for Willowbrook, determined to find Rosemary. What she learns, once she steps through its doors and is mistakenly believed to be her sister, will change her life in ways she never could imagined . . .]]> 369 Ellen Marie Wiseman 1496715888 Alison 0 to-read 3.82 2022 The Lost Girls of Willowbrook

author: Ellen Marie Wiseman
name: Alison
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/05/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Book of Lost Names 52762903 The Book of Lost Names.

The accompanying article discusses the looting of libraries by the Nazis across Europe during World War II—an experience Eva remembers well—and the search to reunite people with the texts taken from them so long ago. The book in the photograph, an eighteenth-century religious text thought to have been taken from France in the waning days of the war, is one of the most fascinating cases. Now housed in Berlin’s Zentral- und Landesbibliothek library, it appears to contain some sort of code, but researchers don’t know where it came from—or what the code means. Only Eva holds the answer—but will she have the strength to revisit old memories and help reunite those lost during the war?

As a graduate student in 1942, Eva was forced to flee Paris after the arrest of her father, a Polish Jew. Finding refuge in a small mountain town in the Free Zone, she begins forging identity documents for Jewish children fleeing to neutral Switzerland. But erasing people comes with a price, and along with a mysterious, handsome forger named Rémy, Eva decides she must find a way to preserve the real names of the children who are too young to remember who they really are. The records they keep in The Book of Lost Names will become even more vital when the resistance cell they work for is betrayed and Rémy disappears.

An engaging and evocative novel reminiscent of The Lost Girls of Paris and The Alice Network, The Book of Lost Names is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of bravery and love in the face of evil.]]> 388 Kristin Harmel 1982131896 Alison 0 to-read 4.41 2020

author: Kristin Harmel
name: Alison
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Babel 57945316 From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a historical fantasy epic that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire's quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?]]> 544 R.F. Kuang 0063021420 Alison 0 to-read 4.13 2022 Babel

author: R.F. Kuang
name: Alison
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)]]> 51901147 Ambition will fuel him.

Competition will drive him.

But power has its price.

It is the morning of the reaping that will kick off the tenth annual Hunger Games. In the Capitol, eighteen-year-old Coriolanus Snow is preparing for his one shot at glory as a mentor in the Games. The once-mighty house of Snow has fallen on hard times, its fate hanging on the slender chance that Coriolanus will be able to outcharm, outwit, and outmaneuver his fellow students to mentor the winning tribute.

The odds are against him. He's been given the humiliating assignment of mentoring the female tribute from District 12, the lowest of the low. Their fates are now completely intertwined -- every choice Coriolanus makes could lead to favor or failure, triumph or ruin. Inside the arena, it will be a fight to the death. Outside the arena, Coriolanus starts to feel for his doomed tribute... and must weigh his need to follow the rules against his desire to survive no matter what it takes.]]> 541 Suzanne Collins Alison 0 to-read 4.00 2020 The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (The Hunger Games, #0)

author: Suzanne Collins
name: Alison
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Honeysuckle 231254939 The Bear and the Nightingale meets Weyward in this enchanting, deeply compelling debut about love and power, autonomy and consent.

Once upon a time, on the edge between meadow and forest, there was a lonely child with only his older sister for company. In exchange for being left in peace, his sister made him a playmate-Daye, a girl woven from flowers and words. And for the first time, this boy, Rory, had a friend.

Rory couldn't be happier, until he learns that Daye is a short-lived creature. At the end of each season, she must be woven back together or fall gruesomely apart. And every time Daye falls apart might be her last.

As Rory and Daye grow older and the line between friendship and romance begins to blur, Rory becomes desperate to break this cycle of bloom and decay. But the farther Rory pushes his research and experiments to lengthen Daye's existence, the more Daye begins to wonder just how much control she really has over her own life.

As a loose reimagining of the story of Blodeuwedd from Welsh mythology, Honeysuckle is an entrancing, inventive, and unsettling debut.]]> 326 Bar Fridman-Tell 1639736743 Alison 0 to-read 4.07 2026

author: Bar Fridman-Tell
name: Alison
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Things We Never Say 242082631
And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.]]> 224 Elizabeth Strout Alison 0 to-read 4.01 2026

author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Alison
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Land 241126782 'You will never understand how the land remembers, how deep the roots grow'

A spellbinding story of separation, longing, recovery and survival as a family makes a new home in the aftermath of tragedy.

On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.

The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping, and get them both home?

Land is a story of buried treasure, overlapping lives, ancient woodland, persistent ghosts, a particularly loyal dog, and how, when it comes to both land and history, nothing ever goes away.]]> 400 Maggie O'Farrell 0593320646 Alison 0 to-read 4.17 2026 Land

author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Alison
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/30
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Correspondent 217273280 “Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.]]> 291 Virginia Evans 0593798449 Alison 4 4.51 2025 The Correspondent

author: Virginia Evans
name: Alison
average rating: 4.51
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2026/04/26
date added: 2026/04/26
shelves:
review:

]]> The Poisonwood Bible 7244 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.]]> 546 Barbara Kingsolver 0060786507 Alison 5 4.11 1998 The Poisonwood Bible

author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Alison
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1998
rating: 5
read at: 2026/04/20
date added: 2026/04/20
shelves:
review:

]]> The Astral Library 235289973 From New York Times bestselling author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to the Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures.

Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy—Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?]]> 304 Kate Quinn 0063244780 Alison 0 to-read 3.52 2026 The Astral Library

author: Kate Quinn
name: Alison
average rating: 3.52
book published: 2026
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/04/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Stolen Queen 211051568 From New York Times bestselling author Fiona Davis, an utterly addictive new novel that will transport you from New York City’s most glamorous party to the labyrinth streets of Cairo and back.

Egypt, 1936: When anthropology student Charlotte Cross is offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, she leaps at the opportunity. But after an unbearable tragedy strikes, Charlotte knows her future will never be the same.

New York City, 1978: Eighteen-year-old Annie Jenkins is thrilled when she lands an opportunity to work for iconic former Vogue fashion editor Diana Vreeland, who’s in the midst of organizing the famous Met Gala, hosted at the museum and known across the city as the “party of the year.” Though Annie soon realizes she’ll have her work cut out for her, scrambling to meet Diana’s capricious demands and exacting standards.

Meanwhile, Charlotte, now leading a quiet life as the associate curator of the Met’s celebrated Department of Egyptian Art, wants little to do with the upcoming gala. She’s consumed with her research on Hathorkare—a rare female pharaoh dismissed by most other Egyptologists as unimportant.

That is, until the night of the gala. When one of the Egyptian art collection’s most valuable artifacts goes missing . . . and there are signs Hathorkare’s legendary curse might be reawakening.

As Annie and Charlotte team up to search for the missing antiquity, a desperate hunch leads the unlikely duo to one place Charlotte swore she’d never return: Egypt. But if they’re to have any hope of finding the artifact, Charlotte will need to confront the demons of her past—which may mean leading them both directly into danger.]]> 349 Fiona Davis 0593474295 Alison 3 4.14 2025 The Stolen Queen

author: Fiona Davis
name: Alison
average rating: 4.14
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/02/25
date added: 2026/02/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Wild Dark Shore 211051083 From the beloved, New York Times bestselling author of Migrations and Once There Were Wolves, a novel about a family living alone on a remote island, when a mysterious woman washes up on shore

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon.

Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place.

Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, can they trust each other enough to protect one another—and the precious seeds in their care? And can they finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together?

A novel of heart-stopping twists, dizzying beauty, and ferocious love, Wild Dark Shore is about the impossible choices we make to protect the people we love, even as the world around us is ending.]]> 306 Charlotte McConaghy 125082799X Alison 3 4.23 2025

author: Charlotte McConaghy
name: Alison
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/02/18
date added: 2026/02/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Strange Case of Jane O. 213940661 In this mind-bending novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles, a young mother and her unconventional psychiatrist encounter strange dimensions of the human mind and love as they try to understand the eerie things that are happening to Jane.

A woman born with perfect memory suddenly develops a series of eerie psychological symptoms--blackouts, hallucinations, premonitions, an inexplicable sense of dread. It is the first year after her child is born, and she and her untraditional psychiatrist struggle to solve the mystery of what is happening to Jane, to her mind. Then Jane suddenly goes missing and is found a day later lying unconscious in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, with no memory of her missing hours. A police detective becomes suspicious of Jane, and begins to track her, convinced that Jane is lying and is a danger to others, especially to the infant son she loves. What happened to Jane, and what do these peculiar experiences, including in something called a fugue state, have to do with a hallucination Jane has about a young man she knew twenty years ago, who warns her of a disaster ahead?

The extraordinary mystery behind Jane's symptoms leads the forward-thinking young Dr. Byrd to reassess everything he thought he knew about Jane, the mind, psychology, and reality, including the events of his own life. This stunning novel is a provocative literary puzzle about memory, identity, consciousness, and the tender bonds of love between a mother and child, a man and a woman, as well as a celebration of the gymnastic capabilities and the unexplained nature of the human mind.

Inspired by The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks and Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and alternating between Dr. Byrd's story and Jane's, Karen Thompson Walker's spellbinding novel delves beyond hard logic and rational understanding to offer a beautiful exploration about the ways in which love, memory, the mind, and fate defy explanation.]]> 288 Karen Thompson Walker 1984853953 Alison 3 4.01 2025 The Strange Case of Jane O.

author: Karen Thompson Walker
name: Alison
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 3
read at: 2026/02/13
date added: 2026/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> Norwegian Wood 214615790 From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love.

Now with a new introduction by the author.

Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.

Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.]]> 307 Haruki Murakami Alison 2 4.03 1987

author: Haruki Murakami
name: Alison
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1987
rating: 2
read at: 2026/02/01
date added: 2026/02/01
shelves:
review:

]]> Sisters in Science 203747797
In the 1930s, Germany was a hotbed of scientific thought. But after the Nazis took power, Jewish and female citizens were forced out of their academic positions. Hedwig Kohn, Lise Meitner, Hertha Sponer, and Hildegard Stücklen were eminent in their fields, but they had no choice but to flee due to their Jewish ancestry or anti-Nazi sentiments.

Their harrowing journey out of Germany became a life-and-death situation that required Herculean efforts of friends and other prominent scientists. Lise fled to Sweden, where she made a groundbreaking discovery in nuclear physics, and the others fled to the United States, where they brought advanced physics to American universities. No matter their destination, each woman revolutionized the field of physics when all odds were stacked against them, galvanizing young women to do the same.

Well-researched and written with cinematic prose, Sisters in Science brings these trailblazing women to life and shows us how sisterhood and scientific curiosity can transcend borders and persist—flourish, even—in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.]]> 384 Olivia Campbell 0778333388 Alison 0 to-read 3.66 2024 Sisters in Science

author: Olivia Campbell
name: Alison
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Theo of Golden 242376245 One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…

His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers.

Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their “rightful owners.” With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered.

A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.]]> 400 Allen Levi 1668236516 Alison 0 to-read 4.33 2023 Theo of Golden

author: Allen Levi
name: Alison
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> All the Colors of the Dark 215153740
When the daughter of a wealthy family is targeted, the most unlikely hero emerges—Patch, a local boy, who saves the girl, and, in doing so, leaves heartache in his wake.

Patch and those who love him soon discover that the line between triumph and tragedy has never been finer. And that their search for answers will lead them to truths that could mean losing one another.

A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.]]> 597 Chris Whitaker 0593798880 Alison 3 4.24 2024 All the Colors of the Dark

author: Chris Whitaker
name: Alison
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2026/01/20
date added: 2026/01/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Atmosphere 236746136 An epic new novel, set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program, about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easy-going even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warm-hearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, everything changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, with complex protagonists, telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love, this time among the stars.]]> 352 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158717 Alison 4 4.32 2025 Atmosphere

author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Alison
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2026/01/11
date added: 2026/01/11
shelves:
review:

]]> Broken Country 214208333 “The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him.”

Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.]]> 320 Clare Leslie Hall 1668078201 Alison 4 4.42 2025 Broken Country

author: Clare Leslie Hall
name: Alison
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2026/01/10
date added: 2026/01/10
shelves:
review:

]]> Buckeye 221403081 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY glorious sweep of a (Ann Patchett) that weaves the intimate lives of two midwestern families across generations, from World War II to the late twentieth century.

Mesmerizing.People
Captivating.The New York Times Book Review
once-in-a-decade novel . . . I fell in love with these characters. Jenna Bush Hager

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, People, Minnesota Star Tribune, New York Post, Chicago Public Library

LONGLISTED FOR THE JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE

That, as he saw it now, was his work: trying to make right what gotten wrong. that a fair measure of a person, what they did with their mistakes?

In the jubilant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, shares a single, life-altering moment with Margaret Salt, a woman determined to outrun her past. Cal is married to Becky, whose spiritual gifts help the living speak to the dead, while Margaret husband, Felix, is serving at sea, believed to be safe until a telegram suggests otherwise.

What begins as a fleeting transgression becomes a complex secret that irrevocably binds all four of them in unexpected ways. As their small Ohio town remakes itself in the postwar boom, the Salt and Jenkins families remain in each other orbit, and the consequences of choices made long ago begin to emerge, reshaping their lives in ways that will forever impact the next generation.

Sweeping yet intimate, resplendent with moments of deep emotion and unforgettable characters, Buckeye is a transportive story of love, loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness.]]> 451 Patrick Ryan 0593595041 Alison 5 4.24 2025 Buckeye

author: Patrick Ryan
name: Alison
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2026/01/04
date added: 2026/01/04
shelves:
review:

]]> Trespasses 60417483 Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.

Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast. By day she teaches at a parochial school; at night she fills in at her family's pub. There she meets Michael Agnew, a barrister who's made a name for himself defending IRA members. Against her better judgment - Michael is not only Protestant but older, and married - Cushla lets herself get drawn in by him and his sophisticated world, and an affair ignites. Then the father of a student is savagely beaten, setting in motion a chain reaction that will threaten everything, and everyone, Cushla most wants to protect.

As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a heart-pounding, heart-rending drama of thwarted love and irreconcilable loyalties, in a place what you come from seems to count more than what you do, or whom you cherish. ]]> 292 Louise Kennedy 0593540891 Alison 0 to-read 3.90 2022 Trespasses

author: Louise Kennedy
name: Alison
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2026/01/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Atmosphere 220818107 #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • From the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.

The stunning hardcover of Atmosphere features beautiful endpapers and a premium dust jacket!

“Thrilling . . . heartbreaking . . . uplifting . . . the fast-paced, emotionally charged story of one ambitious young woman, finding both her voice and her passion.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Women

“NASA? Space missions? The ’80s? This is a collection of all the things I love.”—Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary and The Martian

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars.]]> 345 Taylor Jenkins Reid 0593158725 Alison 4 4.40 2025 Atmosphere

author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
name: Alison
average rating: 4.40
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/12/03
date added: 2025/12/03
shelves:
review:

]]> The Poppy Fields 218549887 From the New York Times bestselling author of the smash-hit The MeasureRead with Jenna TODAY Show pick—comes a stunning speculative story of healing, self-discovery, forgiveness, and found friendship.

Welcome to the Poppy Fields, where there’s hope for even the most battered hearts to heal.

Here, in a remote stretch of the California desert, lies an experimental and controversial treatment center that allows those suffering from the heartache of loss to sleep through their pain...and keep on sleeping. After patients awaken from this prolonged state of slumber, they will finally be healed. But only if they’re willing to accept the potential shadowy side effects.

On a journey to this mystical destination are four very different strangers and one little dog: Ava, a book illustrator; Ray, a fireman; Sasha, an occupational therapist; Sky, a free spirit; and a friendly pup named PJ. As they attempt to make their way from the Midwest all the way west to the Poppy Fields—where they hope to find Ellis, its brilliant, enigmatic founder—each of their past secrets and mysterious motivations threaten to derail their voyage.

A high-concept speculative novel about heartache, hope, and human resilience, The Poppy Fields explores the path of grief and healing, a journey at once profoundly universal and unique to every person, posing the questions: How do we heal in the wake of great loss? And how far are we willing to go in order to be healed?]]> 316 Nikki Erlick 0063349353 Alison 4 3.65 2025 The Poppy Fields

author: Nikki Erlick
name: Alison
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2025
rating: 4
read at: 2025/11/24
date added: 2025/11/24
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests]]> 221490938 Three courses. Seven guests. One card. It's a deadly evening they'll never forget.

Seven strangers meet for an anonymously hosted dinner party. As the evening winds down, seven cards appear, one in front of each of the guests. On each card is a number - the age at which the guest will die. Spooked but skeptical, the guests disperse into the rainy night with the hope of forgetting the morbid turn of events.

Two weeks later, one guest is dead. At exactly the age the card predicted.

More guests begin to die as the years go on, each one dead at the same age as their card. It soon becomes clear that something much more sinister is abound. Now, it's up to the quickly dwindling group of dinner guests to figure out who (or what) was behind that fateful dinner party all those years ago, before their numbers catch up with them too.

Told from the perspectives of each of the seven guests, which span from hilarious to hateful, Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests is a spellbinding and mysterious exploration of mortality, begging the how would you live your life if you knew your number was up?]]> 352 K.J. Whittle 1464242402 Alison 2 3.56 2025 Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests

Seven Reasons to Murder Your Dinner Guests

author: K.J. Whittle
name: Alison
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 2
read at: 2025/11/02
date added: 2025/11/02
shelves:
review:

]]> Under the Whispering Door 53588713 Welcome to Charon's Crossing.
The tea is hot, the scones are fresh, and the dead are just passing through.

When a reaper comes to collect Wallace from his own funeral, Wallace begins to suspect he might be dead.

And when Hugo, the owner of a peculiar tea shop, promises to help him cross over, Wallace decides he’s definitely dead.

But even in death he’s not ready to abandon the life he barely lived, so when Wallace is given one week to cross over, he sets about living a lifetime in seven days.

Hilarious, haunting, and kind, Under the Whispering Door is an uplifting story about a life spent at the office and a death spent building a home.]]> 390 T.J. Klune Alison 3 4.19 2021

author: T.J. Klune
name: Alison
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2025/10/31
date added: 2025/10/31
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It]]> 123857637 A former FBI hostage negotiator offers a new, field-tested approach to negotiating – effective in any situation.

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a kidnapping negotiator brought him face-to-face with bank robbers, gang leaders, and terrorists. Never Split the Difference takes you inside his world of high-stakes negotiations, revealing the nine key principles that helped Voss and his colleagues succeed when it mattered the most – when people’s lives were at stake.

Rooted in the real-life experiences of an intelligence professional at the top of his game, Never Split the Difference will give you the competitive edge in any discussion.]]> 274 Chris Voss 1847941494 Alison 0 to-read 4.28 2016 Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It

author: Chris Voss
name: Alison
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/25
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Paper Palace 58061810
It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"--the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside.

Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will have to decide between the life she has made with her genuinely beloved husband, Peter, and the life she always imagined she would have had with her childhood love, Jonas, if a tragic event hadn't forever changed the course of their lives. As Heller colors in the experiences that have led Elle to this day, we arrive at her ultimate decision with all its complexity.

Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.]]> 400 Miranda Cowley Heller 0593329848 Alison 4 3.95 2021

author: Miranda Cowley Heller
name: Alison
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/10/20
date added: 2025/10/20
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games)]]> 214333691
As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes.

Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves.

When Haymitch's name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He's torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who's nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he's been set up to fail. But there's something in him that wants to fight . . . and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.]]> 400 Suzanne Collins 1546171479 Alison 5 4.54 2025 Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games)

Sunrise on the Reaping (The Hunger Games)

author: Suzanne Collins
name: Alison
average rating: 4.54
book published: 2025
rating: 5
read at: 2025/10/18
date added: 2025/10/18
shelves:
review:

]]> The Guest in Room 120 227772357 A gripping novel inspired by one of America’s most mysterious deaths, that of Stanford University’s founder Jane Stanford.

1905. As the mother of a university and a woman with an iron will, Jane Stanford has made her share of enemies. After a scare at her mansion in San Francisco and on the advice of her doctor, she flees to Honolulu and the fashionable new Moana hotel. But as fate would have it, the island is not as safe as it seems.

2005. Zoe Finch is a bestselling author who desperately needs a jump start on her next novel when she makes a split decision to attend a writers conference at the Moana under an assumed name. As a storm brews offshore, she begins having nightmares that feel hauntingly real. Terrified, Zoe enlists the help of mystery writer Dylan Winters, and over the course of the week, races to uncover the shocking truth of what happened in the hotel one hundred years ago almost to the day.

1905. Iliahi Baldwin’s life changes the moment she lands a job at the Moana. Newly hired and reeling from a tragic loss, she strikes up an unlikely friendship with the formidable Jane Stanford upon her arrival, leaving young Ili devastated when the unthinkable happens. Ili knows things, but there are powerful people who need the truth to remain hidden, and to cross them could prove disastrous.

An unforgettable tale of betrayal, secrets, and death that still echoes through the years.

]]> 336 Sara Ackerman 0778387224 Alison 0 to-read 3.74 2025 The Guest in Room 120

author: Sara Ackerman
name: Alison
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> What We Can Know 223854881 A quest, a literary thriller and a love story, What We Can Know spans the past, present and future to ask profound questions about who we are and where we are going.

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.

2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.

Tom Metcalfe, a scholar at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain's remaining archipelagos, pores over the archives of the early twenty-first century, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith.

When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the great lost poem, revelations of entangled love and a brutal crime emerge, destroying his assumptions about a story he thought he knew intimately.

What We Can Know is a masterpiece that reclaims the present from our sense of looming catastrophe, and imagines a future world where all is not quite lost.]]> 303 Ian McEwan 0593804724 Alison 0 to-read 3.72 2025

author: Ian McEwan
name: Alison
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> We Live Here Now 219833105
But these things happen only when Emily is alone, so are they happening at all? She is still medically fragile. Her post-sepsis condition can cause hallucinatory side effects, which means she cannot fully trust her senses. Freddie does not notice anything odd and is happy with their chance at a fresh start. She, however, starts to believe the house is haunted by someone who had been murdered in it even though she can find no evidence of a wrongful death. As bizarre events pile up and her marriage starts to crumble, Emily becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about Larkin Lodge. But just as the house has secrets so do Emily and her husband.]]> 291 Sarah Pinborough 1250394058 Alison 0 to-read 3.67 2025 We Live Here Now

author: Sarah Pinborough
name: Alison
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> One of Us 222376809 A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from master of literary horror Dan Chaon.

It’s 1915 and the world is transforming, but for thirteen-year-old Bolt and Eleanor—twins so close they can literally read each other’s minds—life is falling apart. When their mother dies, they are forced to leave home under the care of a vicious con man who claims to be their long-lost uncle Charlie, the only kin they have left. During a late-night poker game, when one of his rages ends in murder, they decide to flee.

Salvation arrives in the form of Mr. Jengling, founder of the Emporium of Wonders and father to its many members. He adopts Bolt and Eleanor, who travel by train across the vast, sometimes brutal American frontier with their new family, watching as the exhibitions spark amazement wherever they go. There’s Minnie, the three-legged lady, and Dr. Chui, who stands over seven feet tall; Thistle Britches, the clown with no nose, and Rosalie, who can foretell the death of anyone she meets.

After a lifetime of having only each other, Eleanor and Bolt are finally part of something bigger. But as Bolt falls in deeper with their new clan, he finds Eleanor pulling further away from him. And when Uncle Charlie picks up their trail, the twins find themselves facing a peril as strange as it is terrifying, one which will forever alter the trajectory of their lives. An ode to the misfits and the marginalized, One of Us is a riotous and singularly creepy celebration of the strange and the spectacular and of family in its many forms.]]> 288 Dan Chaon 1250175232 Alison 0 to-read 3.54 2025

author: Dan Chaon
name: Alison
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Missing Pages 227991193 From international bestselling author Alyson Richman comes a love story, a ghost story, and an elegy to the healing power of books.

Harry Widener boards the Titanic holding tight to a priceless book he just purchased in London. After mayhem strikes the ship, Harry’s last known words are that he must return to his cabin for his treasure. Neither the young man nor the book are seen again. In his honor, his mother builds the Harry Widener Memorial Library at Harvard to memorialize her son and house his extensive book collection.

Decades later, Violet Hutchins, a Harvard sophomore recovering from her own great loss, is working as a page at the Widener Library. When strange things begin happening at the library—books falling off shelves or opening to random pages—Violet wonders if Harry Widener’s ghost is trying to communicate the missing pieces of his story from beyond the grave.

This powerful and haunting novel is perfect for readers of Marie Benedict’s The Personal Librarian and Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library.]]> 416 Alyson Richman 1454953217 Alison 0 to-read 4.01 2025 The Missing Pages

author: Alyson Richman
name: Alison
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Irish Goodbye 222376716 In this debut, for fans of J. Courtney Sullivan and Mary Beth Keane, three adult sisters grapple with a shared tragedy over a Thanksgiving weekend spent in their childhood home, navigating complex relationships and old tensions.

It’s been years since the three Ryan sisters were all home together at their family’s beloved house on the eastern shore of Long Island. Two decades ago, their lives were upended by an accident on their brother Topher’s boat, a friend’s brother was killed, the lawsuit nearly bankrupted their parents, and Topher spiraled into a depression, eventually taking his life. Now the Ryan women are back for Thanksgiving, eager to reconnect, but each carrying a heavy secret. The eldest, Cait, still holding guilt for the role no one knows she played in the boat accident, rekindles a flame with her high school crush, Topher’s best friend and the brother of the boy who died. Middle sister Alice’s been thrown a curveball threatening the career she’s restarting and faces a difficult decision that may doom her marriage. And the youngest, Maggie, is finally taking the risk to bring the woman she loves home to her devoutly Catholic mother. Infusing everything is the grief for Topher that none of the Ryans have figured out how to carry together.

When Cait invites a guest to Thanksgiving dinner, old tensions boil over and new truths surface, nearly overpowering the flickering light of their family bond. Far more than a family holiday will be ruined unless the sisters can find a way to forgive themselves—and one another.]]> 288 Heather Aimee O'Neill 1250408156 Alison 0 to-read 3.66 2025 The Irish Goodbye

author: Heather Aimee O'Neill
name: Alison
average rating: 3.66
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> A Guardian and a Thief 232207672 Megha Majumdar’s electrifying new novel, following her acclaimed New York Times bestseller A Burning —longlisted for the National Book Award—is set in a near-future Kolkata, India, ravaged by climate change and food scarcity, in which two families seeking to protect their children must battle each other. A piercing and propulsive tour de force.

In a near-future Kolkata beset by flooding and famine, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma’s husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma’s purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen.

Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two the story of Ma’s frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom. With stunning control and command, Megha Majumdar paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of two families, each operating from a place of ferocious love and undefeated hope, each discovering how far they will go to secure their children’s future as they stave off encroaching catastrophe.

A masterful new work from one of the most exciting voices of her generation.]]> 224 Megha Majumdar 0593804872 Alison 0 to-read 3.73 2025 A Guardian and a Thief

author: Megha Majumdar
name: Alison
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Other Bennet Sister 52960838 Mary, the bookish ugly duckling of Pride and Prejudice's five Bennet sisters, emerges from the shadows and transforms into a desired woman with choices of her own.

What if Mary Bennet's life took a different path from that laid out for her in Pride and Prejudice? What if the frustrated intellectual of the Bennet family, the marginalized middle daughter, the plain girl who takes refuge in her books, eventually found the fulfillment enjoyed by her prettier, more confident sisters? This is the plot of Janice Hadlow's The Other Bennet Sister, a debut novel with exactly the affection and authority to satisfy Jane Austen fans.

Ultimately, Mary's journey is like that taken by every Austen heroine. She learns that she can only expect joy when she has accepted who she really is. She must throw off the false expectations and wrong ideas that have combined to obscure her true nature and prevented her from what makes her happy. Only when she undergoes this evolution does she have a chance at finding fulfillment; only then does she have the clarity to recognize her partner when he presents himself--and only at that moment is she genuinely worthy of love.

Mary's destiny diverges from that of her sisters. It does not involve broad acres or landed gentry. But it does include a man; and, as in all Austen novels, Mary must decide whether he is the truly the one for her. In The Other Bennet Sister, Mary is a fully rounded character--complex, conflicted, and often uncertain; but also vulnerable, supremely sympathetic, and ultimately the protagonist of an uncommonly satisfying debut novel.]]> 480 Janice Hadlow 1250787629 Alison 0 to-read 4.34 2020 The Other Bennet Sister

author: Janice Hadlow
name: Alison
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/10/13
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)]]> 205066300 New York Times bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick was named a Best Book of the Year by Time and NPR. In coastal Maine, local residents feel the reverberations of one shocking act.

With her remarkable insight into the human condition and silences that contain multitudes, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and more—as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, fall in love and yet choose to be apart, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.

Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, “Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love.”]]> 338 Elizabeth Strout 0593446100 Alison 3 4.17 2024 Tell Me Everything (Amgash, #5)

author: Elizabeth Strout
name: Alison
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/10/05
date added: 2025/10/05
shelves:
review:

]]> The Virgin Suicides 54230865 Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life.

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters—beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys—commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.

Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time.]]> 260 Jeffrey Eugenides Alison 3 3.69 1993 The Virgin Suicides

author: Jeffrey Eugenides
name: Alison
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1993
rating: 3
read at: 2025/08/28
date added: 2025/08/28
shelves:
review:

]]> The Berry Pickers 143399923
On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi’kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe will be forever haunted by grief, guilt, and the agony of imagining how his life could have been.

In an affluent suburb nearby, Norma is growing up as the only child of unhappy parents. She is smart, precocious, and bursting with questions she isn’t allowed to ask – questions about her missing baby photos; questions about her dark skin; questions about the strange, vivid dreams of campfires and warm embraces that return night after night. Norma senses there are things her parents aren’t telling her, but it will take decades to unravel the secrets they have kept buried since she was a little girl.

The Berry Pickers is an exquisitely moving story of unrelenting hope, unwavering love, and the power of family – even in the face of grief and betrayal.]]> 320 Amanda Peters 1646221966 Alison 3 4.31 2023

author: Amanda Peters
name: Alison
average rating: 4.31
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2025/08/20
date added: 2025/08/20
shelves:
review:

]]> Bel Canto 4906348
"Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book." —Washington Post Book World

New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn to communicate across cultural barriers in times of crisis

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxanne Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Patchett's lyrical prose and lucid imagination make Bel Canto a captivating story of strength and frailty, love and imprisonment, and an inspiring tale of transcendent romance.]]> 336 Ann Patchett 0061738883 Alison 3 4.13 2001

author: Ann Patchett
name: Alison
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2001
rating: 3
read at: 2025/08/08
date added: 2025/08/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide]]> 41068144 The instant #1 New York Times and USA Today best seller by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, the voices behind the hit podcast My Favorite Murder now available in paperback. Includes special bonus material!

Sharing never-before-heard stories ranging from their struggles with depression, eating disorders, and addiction, Karen and Georgia irreverently recount their biggest mistakes and deepest fears, reflecting on the formative life events that shaped them into two of the most followed voices in the nation.

In Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered, Karen and Georgia focus on the importance of self-advocating and valuing personal safety over being ‘nice’ or ‘helpful.’ They delve into their own pasts, true crime stories, and beyond to discuss meaningful cultural and societal issues with fierce empathy and unapologetic frankness.]]> 304 Karen Kilgariff Alison 3 4.06 2019 Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide

Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered: The Definitive How-To Guide

author: Karen Kilgariff
name: Alison
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2025/08/03
shelves:
review:

]]> The Truth About Melody Browne 58438501 This “touching, insightful, and gripping story” (Sophie Kinsella, New York Times bestselling author) from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone follows a young woman searching for answers about her mysterious past.

When she was a child, Melody Browne’s house burned down, destroying all her family’s possessions and her memories. Ever since this tragic event, Melody has had no recollection of her life before she was rescued from the flames.

Now in her early thirties, Melody is a single mother, living in the middle of London with her teenaged son. She hasn’t seen her parents since she left home at fifteen, but she has no desire to reconnect until one night, while attending a hypnotist show with a date, she faints. When she comes around, she is suddenly overwhelmed with fragmented memories of her life before that fateful fire.

Slowly, she begins the arduous process of piecing together the real story of her childhood. Her journey takes her up and down the countryside, to seaside towns to the back streets of London, where she meets strangers who seem to love her like their own. But the more answers she uncovers, the more questions she is left with, and Melody can’t help but wonder if she’ll ever know the whole truth about her past.

Filled with “classic storytelling” (Elle) and unforgettable characters that will stay with you long after the finale page, The Truth About Melody Browne is “an absolute must-read” (Cosmopolitan, UK).]]> 304 Lisa Jewell 1982129387 Alison 0 to-read 3.67 2009

author: Lisa Jewell
name: Alison
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/08/03
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Intermezzo 208931300 An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family—but especially love—from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.

Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.

Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.]]> 464 Sally Rooney 0374602638 Alison 0 to-read 3.77 2024 Intermezzo

author: Sally Rooney
name: Alison
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/07/21
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Unmaking of June Farrow 100183621
In the small mountain town of Jasper, North Carolina, June Farrow is waiting for fate to find her. The Farrow women are known for their thriving flower farm - and the mysterious curse that has plagued their family line. The whole town remembers the madness that led to Susanna Farrow's disappearance, leaving June to be raised by her grandmother and haunted by rumors.

It's been a year since June started seeing and hearing things that weren't there. Faint wind chimes, a voice calling her name, and a mysterious door appearing out of nowhere - the signs of what June always knew was coming. But June is determined to end the curse once and for all, even if she must sacrifice finding love and having a family of her own.

After her grandmother's death, June discovers a series of cryptic clues regarding her mother's decades-old disappearance, except they only lead to more questions. But could the door she once assumed was a hallucination be the answer she's been searching for? The next time it appears, June realizes she can touch it and walk past the threshold. And when she does, she embarks on a journey that will not only change both the past and the future, but also uncover the lingering mysteries of her small town and entangle her heart in an epic star-crossed love.

With The Unmaking of June Farrow, Adrienne Young delivers a brilliant novel of romance, mystery, and a touch of the impossible--a story you will never forget.]]> 341 Adrienne Young 0593598687 Alison 5 4.20 2023

author: Adrienne Young
name: Alison
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/07/19
date added: 2025/07/19
shelves:
review:

]]> The Overstory 36075657 An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.

In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."

]]> 513 Richard Powers 0393635538 Alison 5 4.23 2018 The Overstory

author: Richard Powers
name: Alison
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 5
read at: 2025/07/07
date added: 2025/07/07
shelves:
review:

]]> The Unraveling of Julia 221179145 From a #1 international bestselling author, a gothic, suspenseful tale in which a young widow inherits a Tuscan estate from a mysterious benefactor and finds herself thrust into the crosshairs of a dangerous conspiracy—a “compelling thriller with dashes of romance and excellent twists!” (Karin Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author).

Lately, Julia Pritzker is beginning to think she’s cursed. She’s lost her adoptive parents, then her husband is murdered. When she realizes that her horoscope essentially foretold his death, she begins to spiral. She fears her fate is written in the stars, not held in her own hands.

Then a letter arrives out of the blue, informing her that she has inherited a Tuscan villa and vineyard —but her benefactor is a total stranger named Emilia Rossi. Julia has no information about her biological family, so she wonders if Rossi could be a blood relative. Bewildered, she heads to Tuscany for answers.

There, Julia is horrified to discover that Rossi was a paranoid recluse, who believed herself to be a descendent of Duchess Caterina Sforza, a legendary Renaissance ruler. Stunned by her uncanny resemblance to Rossi, and even to Caterina, Julia is further unnerved when she unearths eerie parallels between them, including an obsession with astrology.

Before long, Julia suspects she’s being followed, and strange things begin to happen. Not even a chance meeting with a handsome Florentine can ease her troubled mind. When events turn deadly, Julia’s harrowing struggle becomes a search for her identity, a race to save her sanity, and ultimately, a question of her very survival.

Twisty, transportive, and haunting—this is suspense with a passport.]]> 400 Lisa Scottoline 1538769999 Alison 0 to-read 3.42 2025 The Unraveling of Julia

author: Lisa Scottoline
name: Alison
average rating: 3.42
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox]]> 250729 9780755308446.

Maggie O’Farrell takes readers on a journey to the darker places of the human heart, where desires struggle with the imposition of social mores. This haunting story explores the seedy past of Victorian asylums, the oppression of family secrets, and the way truth can change everything.

In the middle of tending to the everyday business at her vintage clothing shop and sidestepping her married boyfriend’s attempts at commitment, Iris Lockhart receives a stunning phone call: Her great-aunt Esme, whom she never knew existed, is being released from Cauldstone Hospital - where she has been locked away for over sixty years. Iris’s grandmother Kitty always claimed to be an only child. But Esme’s papers prove she is Kitty’s sister, and Iris can see the shadow of her dead father in Esme’s face. Esme has been labeled harmless - sane enough to coexist with the rest of the world. But Esme’s still basically a stranger, a family member never mentioned by the family, and one who is sure to bring life-altering secrets with her when she leaves the ward. If Iris takes her in, what dangerous truths might she inherit?

Maggie O’Farrell’s intricate tale of family secrets, lost lives, and the freedom brought by truth will haunt readers long past its final page.]]> 277 Maggie O'Farrell Alison 0 to-read 3.92 2006 The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Alison
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2006
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Instructions for a Heatwave 16077150
Gretta Riordan wakes on a stultifying July morning to find that her husband of forty years has gone to get the paper and vanished, cleaning out his bank account along the way. Gretta's three grown children converge on their parents' home for the first time in years: Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who despise her and a blighted past that has driven away the younger sister she once adored; and Aoife, the youngest, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal a devastating secret.

Maggie O'Farrell writes with exceptional grace and sensitivity about marriage, about the mysteries that inhere within families, and the fault lines over which we build our lives—the secrets we hide from the people who know and love us best. In a novel that stretches from the heart of London to New York City's Upper West Side to a remote village on the coast of Ireland, O'Farrell paints a bracing portrait of a family falling apart and coming together with hard-won, life-changing truths about who they really are.]]> 352 Maggie O'Farrell 0755358783 Alison 0 to-read 3.72 2013 Instructions for a Heatwave

author: Maggie O'Farrell
name: Alison
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me]]> 176443404
He is considered by many the greatest basketball player ever produced by the hoops-crazy state of Kentucky. In two years at the University of Kentucky, he scored over 1,000 points, led the Wildcats to a Sweet Sixteen appearance and was nicknamed “King Rex.” The first player ever drafted by the Charlotte Hornets, he spent twelve seasons in the NBA, dazzling in dunk contests and sinking one of the most memorable buzzer-beaters in league history. But by the end of his career, Rex Chapman was harboring a destructive secret.

Years before America’s opioid crisis would become national news, Chapman developed a dependency on Vicodin and Oxycontin, ultimately ingesting fifty painkillers a day. In addition, he developed a severe gambling addiction, once nearly losing $400,000 at a Las Vegas blackjack table. All this would cost him his family as well as most of the $40 million fortune he’d made in basketball, leaving him to live in his car and shoplift to support his addictions. Only when he was arrested—and his mugshot made national news—did he finally commit to getting clean.

In It’s Hard for Me to Live With Me , Chapman—who has amassed millions of social media followers for his relatable and uplifting posts—tells the story of his addiction and recovery in unflinching detail. With equal frankness, he describes his history with depression; the racism he witnessed growing up and how that shaped his outspokenness on matters of social justice; and his complex and volatile relationship with his father, also a former professional basketball player. Cowritten with New York Times bestselling author Seth Davis, Chapman’s memoir is an equally devastating and inspiring story about the human struggle for self-acceptance.]]> 272 Rex Chapman 1982197773 Alison 4 4.01 It’s Hard for Me to Live with Me

author: Rex Chapman
name: Alison
average rating: 4.01
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/18
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]> My Friends 217163697 The beautiful new novel that will make you laugh and cry, from the global bestselling author of Anxious People and A Man Called Ove. Fredrik Backman returns with an unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later…

You have to take life for granted, the artist thinks, the whole thing: sunrises and slow Sunday mornings and water balloons and another person’s breath against your neck. That’s the only courageous thing a person can do.

In the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world three tiny figures sit at the end of a pier. Most people don’t even notice them. Most people think it’s just a depiction of the sea. But Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise.

Twenty-five years earlier, in a distant seaside town, a group of teenagers seek refuge from their bruising home lives by spending long summer days together. They tell jokes, they share secrets, and they commit small acts of rebellion. These lost souls find in each other a reason to get up each morning, a reason to dream, a reason to love.

Out of that summer emerges a transcendent work of art, a painting that will unexpectedly be placed into 18-year-old Louisa’s care. Determined to learn how it came to be and to decide what to do with it, Louisa embarks on a cross-country journey. But the closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more nervous she becomes.

In this stunning testament to the transformative, timeless power of friendship and art, Louisa is proof that happy endings don’t always take the form we expect.]]> 436 Fredrik Backman 1982112824 Alison 0 to-read 4.28 2025 My Friends

author: Fredrik Backman
name: Alison
average rating: 4.28
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Say Everything 214151379 Gen X icon Ione Skye bares all in an achingly vulnerable coming-of-age memoir about chasing fame, desire, and true love in the shadow of her famous, absent father.

In 1987, sixteen-year-old Ione Skye landed the breakout role of Diane Court, the dream girl who inspires John Cusack’s iconic boombox serenade in the hit Cameron Crowe film, Say Anything. While Skye seemed perfectly typecast as an aloof valedictorian, she was anything but.

Deserted by her dad, the folk singer legend Donovan, Skye was a ninth-grade dropout who sought solace and validation in the eyes of audiences and dreamy costars like Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix, Matthew Perry, John Cusack, and Robert Downey Jr. But like her sixties It Girl mom, Skye’s greatest weakness was musicians.

On the heels of a toxic relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis, which began when she was just sixteen and he was twenty-four, the actress leapt into wedded bliss with her first great love, Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz.

But marriage was not the magical hall pass to adulthood Skye had imagined. Awakening to her bisexuality and desperately insecure, she risked her fairytale marriage for a string of affairs with gorgeous nineties “bad girls.” The dream marriage imploded, and Skye’s trust in herself and her future along with it.

Set against a backdrop of rock royalty compounds, supermodel cliques, and classic late-century films like River’s Edge, Gas Food Lodging, and Wayne’s World, Say Everything is a wild ride of Hollywood thrills as well as a lyrical reflection on ambition, intimacy, and a messy, sexy, unconventional life.]]> 304 Ione Skye 1668048264 Alison 4 3.94

author: Ione Skye
name: Alison
average rating: 3.94
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/05/18
date added: 2025/05/18
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.]]> 40163165 New York Times bestsellers, Brené Brown has taught us what it means to dare greatly, rise strong, and brave the wilderness. Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers, and culture shifters, she's showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead.

Leadership is not about titles, status, and wielding power. A leader is anyone who takes responsibility for recognizing the potential in people and ideas, and has the courage to develop that potential.

When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it with others. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into vulnerability when it's necessary to do good work.

But daring leadership in a culture defined by scarcity, fear, and uncertainty requires skill-building around traits that are deeply and uniquely human. The irony is that we're choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the exact same time as we're scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines and AI can't do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection, and courage, to start.

Four-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Brené Brown has spent the past two decades studying the emotions and experiences that give meaning to our lives, and the past seven years working with transformative leaders and teams spanning the globe. She found that leaders in organizations ranging from small entrepreneurial startups and family-owned businesses to nonprofits, civic organizations, and Fortune 50 companies all ask the same question:

How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders, and how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?

In this new book, Brown uses research, stories, and examples to answer these questions in the no-BS style that millions of readers have come to expect and love.

Brown writes, "One of the most important findings of my career is that daring leadership is a collection of skills and practices that are 100 percent teachable. It's learning and unlearning that requires brave work, tough conversations, and showing up with your whole heart. Easy? No. Because choosing courage over comfort is not always our default. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and our work. It's why we're here."

Whether you've read Daring Greatly and Rising Strong or you're new to Brené Brown's work, this book is for anyone who wants to step up and into brave leadership.]]> 320 Brené Brown 0399592520 Alison 0 to-read 4.23 2018 Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.

author: Brené Brown
name: Alison
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/15
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow]]> 57390604
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.

But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.

Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.]]> 417 Zoulfa Katouh 0316351377 Alison 0 to-read 4.43 2022 As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

author: Zoulfa Katouh
name: Alison
average rating: 4.43
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Book of Doors 156480764
In New York City, bookseller Cassie Andrews is living an unassuming life when she is given a gift by a favourite customer. It's a book—an unusual book, full of strange writing and mysterious drawings. And at the very front there is a handwritten message to Cassie, telling her that this is the Book of Doors, and that any door is every door.

What Cassie is about to discover is that the Book of Doors is a special book that bestows an extraordinary powers on whoever possesses it, and soon she and her best friend Izzy are exploring all that the Book of Doors can do, swept away from their quiet lives by the possibilities of travelling to anywhere they want.

But the Book of Doors is not the only magical book in the world. There are other books that can do wondrous and dreadful things when wielded by dangerous and ruthless individuals—individuals who crave what Cassie now possesses.

Suddenly Cassie and Izzy are confronted by violence and danger, and the only person who can help them is, it seems, Drummond Fox. He is a man fleeing his own demons—a man with his own secret library of magical books that he has hidden away in the shadows for safekeeping. Because there is a nameless evil out there that is hunting them all...

Because some doors should never be opened.]]> 418 Gareth Brown 1787637247 Alison 0 to-read 4.01 2024 The Book of Doors

author: Gareth Brown
name: Alison
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/28
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)]]> 45047384 A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.

Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.

When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.

But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.

An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.]]> 393 T.J. Klune Alison 5 4.33 2020

The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)

author: T.J. Klune
name: Alison
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves:
review:

]]> The Life Impossible 198281740 324 Matt Haig 0593489276 Alison 5 3.44 2024

author: Matt Haig
name: Alison
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2024
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/31
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves:
review:

]]> The Antidote 214537790 The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch," whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate.

Russell's novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.]]> 432 Karen Russell 059380225X Alison 0 to-read 3.83 2025

author: Karen Russell
name: Alison
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Martyr! 139401966 A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet, whose obsession with martyrs leads him to examine the mysteries of his past—toward an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the angel of death to inspire and comfort the dying, and toward his mother, through a painting discovered in a Brooklyn art gallery that suggests she may not have been who or what she seemed.

Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! is a paean to how we spend our lives seeking meaning—in faith, art, ourselves, others.]]> 313 Kaveh Akbar 0593537629 Alison 4 4.10 2024 Martyr!

author: Kaveh Akbar
name: Alison
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/16
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves:
review:

]]> The God of the Woods 199698485 When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found.

As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.]]> 562 Liz Moore Alison 4 4.10 2024 The God of the Woods

author: Liz Moore
name: Alison
average rating: 4.10
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/23
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir]]> 203708359 “What a remarkable and moving story filled with twists and turns, the most famous of faces, and a complex family revealed with loving candor. I was blown away by Griffin Dunne’s life and his ability to capture so much of it in these beautifully written pages.” —Anderson Cooper

"Joyful, tragic, and resilient with a masterful, roving tone...Griffin takes his rightful place in a family and tradition of real writers.” —David Duchovny

Griffin Dunne’s memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances

At eight, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion and uncle John Gregory Dunne’s legendary LA launch party for Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. At sixteen, he got kicked out of boarding school, ending his institutional education for good. In his early twenties, he shared an apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn concessionaire at Radio City Music Hall. A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the midst of it all, Griffin’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s. The outcome was a travesty of justice that marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne’s career as a crime reporter for Vanity Fair and a victims' rights activist.

And yet, for all its boldface cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no mere celebrity memoir. It is, down to its bones, a family story that embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny, and moving characters—its author most of all.]]> 395 Griffin Dunne 0593652835 Alison 2 4.25 2024 The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir

author: Griffin Dunne
name: Alison
average rating: 4.25
book published: 2024
rating: 2
read at: 2025/02/16
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves:
review:

]]> Eternal 40204619 What war destroys, only love can heal.

Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta's heart. But in the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, aligning Italy's Fascists with Hitler's Nazis and altering the very laws that govern Rome. In time, everything that the three hold dear--their families, their homes, and their connection to one another--is tested in ways they never could have imagined.

As anti-Semitism takes legal root and World War II erupts, the threesome realizes that Mussolini was only the beginning. The Nazis invade Rome, and with their occupation come new atrocities against the city's Jews, culminating in a final, horrific betrayal. Against this backdrop, the intertwined fates of Elisabetta, Marco, Sandro, and their families will be decided, in a heartbreaking story of both the best and the worst that the world has to offer.

Unfolding over decades, Eternal is a tale of loyalty and loss, family and food, love and war--all set in one of the world's most beautiful cities at its darkest moment.]]> 480 Lisa Scottoline 052553976X Alison 0 to-read 4.22 2021 Eternal

author: Lisa Scottoline
name: Alison
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/01
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Magic All Around: A Novel 152051625 In this latest enchanting novel from bestselling magical realism author Jennifer Moorman, a treasure hunt through the past reveals one woman’s extraordinary gift for arranging the future.

The Russell women have always lived in a house that is as special as they are—a century-old Victorian with a radio that tunes itself to the listener’s mood and a pantry that rearranges to provide just the right ingredients for any baking need. Lilith Russell was the exception. She left the family home in Ivy Ridge, Georgia, and has been flitting like a hummingbird from place to place with her daughter, Mattie, in the decades since, only returning each summer to drop Mattie off with Lilith’s sister, Penelope.

When Lilith dies suddenly, Mattie is left without her sole companion and the captain who steered her ship. That is, until she visits Ivy Ridge and learns Lilith charted one last course for a series of tasks that she must complete to earn her inheritance, with Penelope overseeing the process.

Both Mattie and Penelope are outraged by Lilith’s seemingly random throw a Halloween party, take a local pizza cooking class, share secrets with someone . . . But Mattie soon realizes that if she completes the tasks, she may unearth her mother’s secrets, including the identity of Mattie’s father. She may also discover more about the Russell family “gifts” and why Lilith chose Penelope’s former love to be the executor of the will. She may even learn how and why Jonathan Carlisle, the boy who stole her heart ten summers ago, also happens to be back in town.

Mattie can only hope that Lilith’s final map will finally point her home.]]> 366 Jennifer Moorman 1400240514 Alison 3 4.19 2024 The Magic All Around: A Novel

author: Jennifer Moorman
name: Alison
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2024
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/17
date added: 2025/01/17
shelves:
review:

]]> Playground 205478762 The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.]]> 381 Richard Powers 1324086033 Alison 0 to-read 4.07 2024 Playground

author: Richard Powers
name: Alison
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/09
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> James 179550498
While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a “literary icon” (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.]]> 304 Percival Everett 0385550375 Alison 4 4.56 2024 James

author: Percival Everett
name: Alison
average rating: 4.56
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/28
date added: 2024/12/28
shelves:
review:

]]> The Backyard Bird Chronicles 194803881
Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.]]> 291 Amy Tan 0593536134 Alison 0 to-read 4.02 2024 The Backyard Bird Chronicles

author: Amy Tan
name: Alison
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness]]> 171681821 From New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Coddling of the American Mind, an essential investigation into the collapse of youth mental health—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the play-based childhood began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the phone-based childhood in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this great rewiring of childhood has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the collective action problems that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.]]> 385 Jonathan Haidt 0593655036 Alison 0 to-read 4.30 2024 The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness

author: Jonathan Haidt
name: Alison
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Husbands & Lovers 199223201
Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams—one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.

Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.

Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes listeners on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.]]> 384 Beatriz Williams 0593724224 Alison 0 to-read 4.04 2024 Husbands & Lovers

author: Beatriz Williams
name: Alison
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Booklover's Library 207909446
In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job to provide for herself and her beloved daughter, Olivia. But with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her.

When the threat of war becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In her daughter’s absence, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbors and coworkers, as well as the recommendations she provides to the library’s quirky regulars. But the job doesn’t come without its difficulties. Books are mysteriously misshelved and disappearing, and her work forces her to confront the memories of her late father and the bookstore they once owned together before a terrible accident.

As the Blitz intensifies in Nottingham and Emma fights to reunite with her daughter, she must learn to depend on her community and the power of literature more than ever to find hope in the darkest of times.]]> 416 Madeline Martin 1335015132 Alison 0 to-read 3.81 2024 The Booklover's Library

author: Madeline Martin
name: Alison
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/24
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet]]> 75670157 "Masterful. The Anthropocene Reviewed is a beautiful, timely book about the human condition--and a timeless reminder to pay attention to your attention." --Adam Grant, #1 bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast Re: Thinking

The instant #1 bestseller from John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, is now available in paperback with two brand-new essays!

"Gloriously personal and life-affirming. The perfect book for right now." --People
"Essential to the human conversation." --Library Journal, starred review

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale--from the QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity.

John Green's gift for storytelling shines throughout this masterful collection. The Anthropocene Reviewed is an open-hearted exploration of the paths we forge and an unironic celebration of falling in love with the world.]]> 318 John Green 0525555242 Alison 0 to-read 4.36 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

author: John Green
name: Alison
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/23
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> The Briar Club 60873122 A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?

Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.]]> 424 Kate Quinn 0063244764 Alison 4 4.41 2024

author: Kate Quinn
name: Alison
average rating: 4.41
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/08
date added: 2024/12/08
shelves:
review:

]]> <![CDATA[The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing]]> 64631561 New York Times bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret; she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.

Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller,” showing that jailhouse politics aren’t that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.

When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she’s legally co-opting other people’s identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.]]> 319 Lara Love Hardin 1982197668 Alison 4 4.42 2023 The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

author: Lara Love Hardin
name: Alison
average rating: 4.42
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/25
date added: 2024/10/25
shelves:
review:

]]> Black Cake 57926137 We can’t choose what we inherit. But can we choose who we become?

In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.

Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor’s true history, and fulfill her final request to “share the black cake when the time is right”? Will their mother’s revelations bring them back together or leave them feeling more lost than ever?

Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut novel is a story of how the inheritance of betrayals, secrets, memories, and even names can shape relationships and history. Deeply evocative and beautifully written, Black Cake is an extraordinary journey through the life of a family changed forever by the choices of its matriarch.]]> 385 Charmaine Wilkerson Alison 0 to-read 4.05 2022

author: Charmaine Wilkerson
name: Alison
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> <![CDATA[My Year of Rest and Relaxation]]> 44279110
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.]]> 289 Ottessa Moshfegh 0525522131 Alison 0 to-read 3.59 2018 My Year of Rest and Relaxation

author: Ottessa Moshfegh
name: Alison
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> Year of Wonders 6586144
Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition.

As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love.

As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."

Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. ]]> 323 Geraldine Brooks Alison 4 4.18 2001

author: Geraldine Brooks
name: Alison
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2001
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/18
date added: 2024/10/18
shelves:
review:

]]>