To Siberia by Per Petterson is an exquisitely written story of a brother and sister who are torn apart by war. The author, of Out Stealing Horses fame, never names his narrator, and when the book begins, she is a 60-year-old woman remembering her childhood with (and without) her beloved brother. Their small town...
Like Crazy: Life With My Mother by Dan Matthews A touching story about the relationship between an aging, unstable mother and her son, and how family, even in the most trying of circumstances, can bring us together to give us the biggest and best moments we will have in our memories. Dan’s mother has...
Pew by Catherine Lacey In a small town in the American South, a genderless figure suddenly appears in a church pew, racially ambiguous, small, and refusing to speak. One family takes in the stranger, and nicknames them Pew. Pew is shuttled from household to household as the town readies itself for a mysterious Forgiveness...
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century by Timothy Synder This compact 80-page book could be started and finished on any afternoon car ride, (or an hour or two on your couch). The author gives us a look back through the mistakes of capitalism’s most cataclysmic human errors of the 20th century, and...
The Invention of Wings Covering a 35-year period in Charleston, the story is told through the eyes of Sarah Grimke, the middle child of slaveowners, and Hetty “Handful” Grimke, a slave. At age ten, Handful is given to Sarah to be her handmaiden for life. Over the years, the girls form a relationship marked...
The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova This part historical, part suspense thriller is set in Oxford, Budapest, Istanbul, Italy, and Paris, from the 1930s through the mid-1970s. She begins with history, and a barbaric medieval ruler, whose life and fascination with immortality becomes the legend for Dracula; and soon enough the protagonist discovers a strange,...
Heartland by Sarah Smarsh A compelling literary memoir, the book at its core follows two different threads: one, the idea of a working class did not exist in the U.S. during Smarsh’s childhood and this sociological and economical oversight on the part of policy makers kept millions of farmers and other blue-collar workers in...
