INDIEspensable Books for 2019

This is a separate thread to keep track of this amazing collection. Every 6-8 weeks I get a box, although Powell's has put this collection on hold after #93 (2021).

Usually one book, but sometimes 2 or 3, and sometimes an extra little gift. My hubby signed me up at the very beginning of this series in like 2008 (?). Thank you Hubby!

I am posting info for each book I haven't read -- title, author, as well a synopsis and an image. Synpopses are from various booksellers and are not mine.

✅ means I have read it.

This is a work in progress....

My goal for 2022 is to read 8 of these!

Link to this thread can be found on my current 75er thread. : )

1. How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet (Don't Think I Have this one)



As a wealthy, young real-estate developer in Los Angeles, T. lives an isolated life. He has always kept his distance from people — from his doting mother to his crass fraternity brothers — but remains unaware of his loneliness until one night, while driving to Las Vegas, he hits a coyote on the highway. The experience unnerves him and inspires a spiritual transformation that leads T. to question his financial pursuits for the first time in his life, to finally take a chance at falling in love, and to begin sneaking into the local zoo, where he finds solace in the presence of endangered species. A beautiful, heart-wrenching tale, How the Dead Dream is also a riveting commentary on community in the modern suburban landscape and how the lives of animals are affected by it. "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself." —Salon.com "How the Dead Dream is a quirky, discursive portrait of one mans evolving consciousness about success, love, kinship, and planetary responsibility. A provocative odyssey." —Boston Sunday Globe

2. Mudbound by Hillary Jordan



In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm — a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not — charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

✅ 3. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

✅ 3. The Outlander by Gil Adamson

✅ 4. Clown Girl by by Monica Drake

5. The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews



Responding to a distress call from Thebes, Hattie returns from Paris to take care of her niece and nephew, only to realize that the responsibility is far greater than she'd expected. Basketball-mad Logan is infatuated with New York Times Magazine interviewer Deborah Solomon, while purple-haired Thebes's hip-hop vernacular grates on everybody's nerves. She decides to take the kids in the family van (think Little Miss Sunshine) to go find their father, last heard to be running an idiosyncratic art galley in South Dakota.

What ensues is a remarkable journey that takes them across the United States, where amidst the diverse personal chaos, they discover one another to be both far crazier and far more normal than any of them thought.

6. The Crow Road by Ian Banks

✅ 7. Literary Periodicals from Tin House, Believer, Paris Review and Open City

8. Tinkers by Paul Harding, 2010 Pulitzer Prize Winner



An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old photographs, wool jackets, rusty tools, and the mangled brass works of antique clocks. Soon, the clouds from the sky above plummet down on top of him, followed by the stars, till the black night covers him like a shroud. He is hallucinating, in death throes from cancer and kidney failure.

A methodical repairer of clocks, he is now finally released from the usual constraints of time and memory to rejoin his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler, whom he had lost 7 decades before. In his return to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in the backwoods of Maine, he recovers a natural world that is at once indifferent to man and inseparable from him, menacing and awe inspiring.

Tinkers is about the legacy of consciousness and the porousness of identity from one generation the next. At once heartbreaking and life affirming, it is an elegiac meditation on love, loss, and the fierce beauty of nature.

9a. A Day's Pleasure by Glenn David Gold

The first part of Sunnyside

9b. Sunnyside by Glenn David Gold



A quintessentially American epic, Sunnyside stars the one and only Little Tramp, Charlie Chaplin. It’s 1916 and, after an extraordinary mass delusion where Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, his fame is at its peak but his inspiration is at a low. As he struggles to find a film project as worthy as himself, we are introduced to a dazzling cast of characters that take us from the battlefields of France to the Russian Revolution and from the budding glamour of Hollywood to madcap Wild West shows. The result is a spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition, and the birth of modern America.

✅ 10. A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick 2009

✅ 11. The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker

✅ 12. Into the Beautiful North by by Luis Alberto Urrea

✅ 13. Stitches by David Small

14. The Cry of the Sloth by Sam Savage 2009



Living on a diet of fried Spam, vodka, sardines, cupcakes, and Southern Comfort, Andrew Whittaker is slowly being sucked into the morass of middle age. A negligent landlord, small-time literary journal editor, and aspiring novelist, he is — quite literally — authoring his own downfall. From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, this novel is a collection of everything Whittaker commits to paper over the course of four critical months.
Beginning in July, during the economic hardships of the Nixon era, we witness our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, and tormented by his ex-wife. Determined to redeem his failures and eviscerate his enemies, Whittaker hatches a grand plan. But as winter nears, his difficulties accumulate, and the disorder of his life threatens to overwhelm him. As his hold on reality weakens and his schemes grow wilder, his self-image as a placid and slow-moving sloth evolves into that of a bizarre and frantic creature driven mad by solitude.

In this tragicomic portrait of a literary life, Sam Savage proves that all the evidence is in the writing, that all the world is, indeed, a stage, and that escape from the mind's prison requires a command performance.

✅ 15. The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

16. Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich



Shadow Tag, the brilliant new novel by Louise Erdrich, is a stunning tour-de-force from the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning and New York Times-bestselling author of Love Medicine and Pulitzer-Prize-finalist The Plague of Doves. In the vein of the novels of such contemporaries as Zoe Heller and Susan Minot, Shadow Tag is an intense and heart-wrenching story of a troubled marriage and a family in disarray—and a radical departure from Erdrich's previous acclaimed work.

When Irene America discovers that her husband has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, as much the truth about her life and her marriage as the Red Diary is a farce. Alternating between these two records, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping novel.

17. Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes



Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and James Jones's The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world — both its horrors and its thrills — and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

✅ 18. The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

✅ 19. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

20. I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson, 2010



An enthralling novel of a mother and son's turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing Horses
Norway, 1989: Communism is unraveling all over Europe. Arvid Jansen, thirty-seven, is trying to bridge the yawning gulf that opened up years earlier between himself and his mother. He is in the throes of a divorce, and she has just been diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, Arvid struggles to find a new footing in his life. As he attempts to negotiate the present changes around him, he casts his mind back to holidays on the beach with his brothers, and to the early days of his courtship. Most importantly, he revisits the idealism of his communist youth, when he chose the factory floor over the college education his mother had struggled so hard to provide. Back then, Arvid's loyalty to his working-class background outweighed his mother's wish for him to escape it. As Petterson's masterful narrative shifts effortlessly through the years, we see Arvid tentatively circling his mother, unable to tell her what she already knows he is thinking. In its piercing portrait of their layered relationship, I Curse the River of Time bears all the hallmarks of Petterson's compassion for humanity that has won him readers the world over.

✅ 20. The Report by Jesica Francis Kane

21. Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen, 2010



Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul--the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter--environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man--she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz--outr rocker and Walter's college best friend and rival--still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become "a very different kind of neighbor," an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes?

In his first novel since The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen has given us an epic of contemporary love and marriage. Freedom comically and tragically captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the heavy weight of empire. In charting the mistakes and joys of Freedom's characters as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever more confusing world, Franzen has produced an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.

21. Skippy Dies (Well, actually just part one, Hopeland) by Paul Murray

22. The Wilding by Benjamin Percy



Echo Canyon is a disappearing pocket of wilderness outside of Bend, Oregon, and the site of conflicting memories for Justin Caves and his father, Paul. Its now slated for redevelopment as a golfing resort. When Paul suggests one last hunting trip, Justin accepts, hoping to get things right with his father this time, and agrees to bring his son, Graham, along.

As the weekend unfolds, Justin is pushed to the limit by the reckless taunting of his father, the physical demands of the terrain, and the menacing evidence of the hovering presence of bear. All the while, he remembers the promise he made to his skeptical wife: to keep their son safe.

Benjamin Percy, a writer whose work Dan Chaon called “bighearted and drunk and dangerous,” shows his mastery of narrative suspense as the novel builds to its surprising climax. The Wilding shines unexpected light on our shifting relationship with nature and family in contemporary society.

23 The Instructions by Adam Levin



Beginning with a chance encounter with the beautiful Eliza June Watermark and ending, four days and 900 pages later, with the Events of November 17, this is the story of Gurion Maccabee, age ten: a lover, a fighter, a scholar, and a truly spectacular talker. Ejected from three Jewish day schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.

The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy -- a novel that is muscular and verbose, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable.

✅ 24 The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard

24 Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson



A sweeping, multigenerational drama, set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City during the late 1980s, Ten Thousand Saints triumphantly heralds the arrival a remarkable new writer. Eleanor Henderson makes a truly stunning debut with a novel that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, immediately joining the ranks of The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. Adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young--and old--are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late 20th century youth culture.

25 Townie by Andre Dubus III, 2011



After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their overworked mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and everyday violence. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash between town and gown, between the hard drinking, drugging, and fighting of "townies" and the ambitions of students debating books and ideas, couldn’t have been more stark. In this unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Dubus shows us how he escaped the cycle of violence and found empathy in channeling the stories of others—bridging, in the process, the rift between his father and himself.

26. Bright Before Us by Katie Arnold Ratliff

27. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
✅ 27. Irma Voth by Miriam Toews

✅ 28. Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante

✅ 29. Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
✅ 29. The Vanishers by Heidi Jalavits

✅ 30 The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
30. Silas Marner by George Eliot

31. Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron

✅ 32. The Book of Jonas by Stephen Dau
32. Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins

33. The Listeners by Leni Zumas

✅ 34. The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

✅ 35. A Million Heavens by John Brandon
35. How Music Works by David Byrne

✅ 36. Familiar by J. Robert Lennon

36. Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry



* Short-listed for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award * Winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award * One of last year's most critically acclaimed books in the UK * A Guernica Best Book of the Year * A Library Journal "Best Indie Fiction of 2013" *

Dark Lies the Island is a wickedly funny and hugely original collection of stories about misspent love and crimes gone horribly wrong. In the Sunday Times Short Story Award–winning "Beer Trip to Llandudno," a pack of middle-aged ale fanatics seeking the perfect pint find more than they bargained for. A pair of sinister old ladies prowl the countryside for a child to make their own. And a poet looking for inner calm buys an ancient inn on the west coast of Ireland but finds instead rancorous locals and catastrophic floodwaters.
Kevin Barry's dazzling language, razor-sharp ear for the vernacular, and keen eye for the tragedies and comedies of daily life invest these tales with a startling vitality. Dark Lies the Island was short-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, and as one of the most acclaimed collections in Europe in many years, it heralds the arrival of a new master of the short story.

✅ 37. The Death of Bees by Lisa O’Donnell

✅ 38. With or Without You by Domenica Ruta

39. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra



In a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa watches from the woods as Russian soldiers abduct her father in the middle of the night and then set fire to her home. When their lifelong neighbor Akhmed finds Havaa hiding in the forest with a strange blue suitcase, he makes a decision that will forever change their lives. He will seek refuge at the abandoned hospital where the sole remaining doctor, Sonja Rabina, treats the wounded.

For Sonja, the arrival of Akhmed and Havaa is an unwelcome surprise. Weary and overburdened, she has no desire to take on additional risk and responsibility. But over the course of five extraordinary days, Sonja’s world will shift on its axis and reveal the intricate pattern of connections that weaves together the pasts of these three unlikely companions and unexpectedly decides their fate. A story of the transcendent power of love in wartime, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a work of sweeping breadth, profound compassion, and lasting significance.

✅ 39. Panopticon by Jennifer Fagan

40. In the House upon the Dirt Between The Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell


In this epic, mythical debut novel, a newly-wed couple escapes the busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost-uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to live there simply, to fish the lake, to trap the nearby woods, and build a house upon the dirt where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods, the second moon weighing down the fabric of their starless sky, and the labyrinth of memory dug into the earth beneath their house.

This novel, from one of our most exciting young writers, is a powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage—and of what happens when a marriage’s success is measured solely by the children it produces, or else the sorrow that marks their absence.

40. Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee



Rebecca Lee, one of our most gifted and original short story writers, guides readers into a range of landscapes, both foreign and domestic, crafting stories as rich as novels. A student plagiarizes a paper and holds fast to her alibi until she finds herself complicit in the resurrection of one professor's shadowy past. A dinner party becomes the occasion for the dissolution of more than one marriage. A woman is hired to find a wife for the one true soulmate she's ever found. In all, Rebecca Lee traverses the terrain of infidelity, obligation, sacrifice, jealousy, and yet finally, optimism. Showing people at their most vulnerable, Lee creates characters so wonderfully flawed, so driven by their desire, so compelled to make sense of their human condition, that it's impossible not to feel for them when their fragile belief in romantic love, domestic bliss, or academic seclusion fails to provide them with the sort of force field they'd expected.

✅ 41. Brewster by Mark Slouka



A powerful story about an unforgettable friendship between two teenage boys and their hopes for escape from a dead-end town.

The year is 1968. The world is changing, and sixteen-year-old Jon Mosher is determined to change with it. Racked by guilt over his older brother’s childhood death and stuck in the dead-end town of Brewster, New York, he turns his rage into victories running track. Meanwhile, Ray Cappicciano, a rebel as gifted with his fists as Jon is with his feet, is trying to take care of his baby brother while staying out of the way of his abusive, ex-cop father. When Jon and Ray form a tight friendship, they find in each other everything they lack at home, but it’s not until Ray falls in love with beautiful, headstrong Karen Dorsey that the three friends begin to dream of breaking away from Brewster for good. Freedom, however, has its price. As forces beyond their control begin to bear down on them, Jon sets off on the race of his life―a race to redeem his past and save them all.
Mark Slouka's work has been called "relentlessly observant, miraculously expressive" (New York Times Book Review). Reverberating with compassion, heartache, and grace, Brewster is an unforgettable coming-of-age story from one of our most compelling novelists.

42. The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee



From the Nobel Prize–winning author of Disgrace, The Childhood of Jesus is the first book in his haunting trilogy that ends with The Death of Jesus (forthcoming from Viking)

Separated from his mother as a passenger on a boat bound for a new land, David is a boy who is quite literally adrift. The piece of paper explaining his situation is lost, but a fellow passenger, Simón, vows to look after the boy. When the boat docks, David and Simón are issued new names, new birthdays, and virtually a whole new life.

Strangers in a strange land, knowing nothing of their surroundings, nor the language or customs, they are determined to find David’s mother. Though the boy has no memory of her, Simón is certain he will recognize her at first sight. “But after we find her,” David asks, “what are we here for?”

An eerie allegorical tale told largely through dialogue, The Childhood of Jesus is a literary feat—a novel of ideas that is also a tender, compelling narrative. Coetzee’s many fans will celebrate his return while new readers will find The Childhood of Jesus an intriguing introduction to the work of a true master.

✅ 43. The Goldfinch by Donna Tart



Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community.

As an adult, Theo moves silkily between the drawing rooms of the rich and the dusty labyrinth of an antiques store where he works. He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle.

The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention. From the streets of New York to the dark corners of the art underworld, this "soaring masterpiece" examines the devastating impact of grief and the ruthless machinations of fate (Ron Charles, Washington Post).

✅ 44. The Best of McSweeney’s by Dave Eggers



✅ 45. Orfeo by Richard Power



In Orfeo, composer Peter Els opens the door one evening to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab―the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to find music in surprising patterns―has aroused the suspicions of Homeland Security. Panicked by the raid, Els turns fugitive and hatches a plan to transform this disastrous collision with the security state into an unforgettable work of art that will reawaken its audience to the sounds all around it.

46. The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt



With The Blazing World, internationally best­selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt, who has long been celebrated for her “beguiling, lyrical prose” (The Sunday Times Books, London), tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: She presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.

The three solo shows are successful, but when Burden finally steps forward triumphantly to reveal herself as the artist behind the exhibitions, there are critics who doubt her. The public scandal turns on the final exhibition, initially shown as the work of acclaimed artist Rune, who denies Burden’s role in its creation. What no one doubts, however, is that the two artists were intensely involved with each other. As Burden’s journals reveal, she and Rune found themselves locked in a charged and dangerous game that ended with the man’s bizarre death.

Ingeniously presented as a collection of texts compiled after Burden’s death, The Blazing World unfolds from multiple perspectives. The exuberant Burden speaks—in all her joy and fury—through extracts from her own notebooks, while critics, fans, family members, and others offer their own conflicting opinions of who she was, and where the truth lies.

From one of the most ambitious and interna­tionally renowned writers of her generation, The Blazing World is a polyphonic tour de force. An intricately conceived, diabolical puzzle, it explores the deceptive powers of prejudice, money, fame, and desire. Emotionally intense, intellectually rigorous, ironic, and playful, Hustvedt’s new novel is a bold, rich masterpiece, one that will be remembered for years to come.

46. We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas



Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed.

When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she’s found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn’t aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream.

Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son, Connell, try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future.

Through the Learys, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century, particularly the promise of domestic bliss and economic prosperity that captured hearts and minds after WWII. The result is a riveting and affecting work of art; one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell one another so before the moment slips away.

✅ 47. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr



47. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison



Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain - real and imagined, her own and others' - Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory - from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration - in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

48. The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil



Twin brothers Yarik and Dima have been inseparable since childhood. Living on their uncle’s farm after the death of their father, the boys once spent their days in collective fields, their nights spellbound by their uncle’s mythic tales. Years later, the two men labor side by side at the Oranzheria, a sea of glass — the largest greenhouse in the world — that sprawls over vast versts of cropland. Lit by space mirrors orbiting above, it ensnares the citizens of Petroplavilsk in perpetual daylight and constant productivity, leaves the twins with only work in common—stalwart Yarik married with children, burdened by responsibility; dreamer Dima living alone with his mother and rooster, wistfully planning the brothers’ return to their uncle’s land.

But an encounter with the Oranzheria’s oligarch owner changes them forever. Dima drifts into a laborless life of bare subsistence while Yarik begins a headspinning ascent from promotion to promotion until both men become poster boys for opposing ideologies, pawns at the center of conspiracies and deceptions that threaten to destroy not only the lives of those they love but the very love that has bonded the brothers since birth.

✅ 49. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchel



✅ 49. Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link



✅ 50. All My Puny Sorrows by Mirian Toews



50. Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio



Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans spawned something of a cult following. In the decade since the tiny limited-edition volume sold out its print run, its devotees have pressed it upon their friends, students, and colleagues, only to find themselves begging for their copy’s safe return. For anyone familiar with D’Ambrosio’s writing, this enthusiasm should come as no surprise. His work is exacting and emotionally generous, often as funny as it is devastating. Loitering gathers those eleven original essays with new and previously uncollected work, so that a broader audience might discover one of our great living essayists. No matter his subject―Native American whaling, a Pentecostal “hell house,” Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J.D. Salinger, or, most often, his own family―D’Ambrosio approaches each piece with a singular voice and point of view; each essay, while unique and surprising, is unmistakably his own.

51. Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbϊck



Swedish Lapland, 1717. Maija, her husband Paavo and her daughters Frederika and Dorotea arrive from their native Finland, hoping to forget the traumas of their past and put down new roots in this harsh but beautiful land. Above them looms Blackåsen, a mountain whose foreboding presence looms over the valley and whose dark history seems to haunt the lives of those who live in its shadow.
While herding the family’s goats on the mountain, Frederika happens upon the mutilated body of one of their neighbors, Eriksson. The death is dismissed as a wolf attack, but Maija feels certain that the wounds could only have been inflicted by another man. Compelled to investigate despite her neighbors’ strange disinterest in the death and the fate of Eriksson’s widow, Maija is drawn into the dark history of tragedies and betrayals that have taken place on Blackåsen. Young Frederika finds herself pulled towards the mountain as well, feeling something none of the adults around her seem to notice.
As the seasons change, and the “wolf winter,” the harshest winter in memory, descends upon the settlers, Paavo travels to find work, and Maija finds herself struggling for her family’s survival in this land of winter-long darkness. As the snow gathers, the settlers’ secrets are increasingly laid bare. Scarce resources and the never-ending darkness force them to come together, but Maija, not knowing who to trust and who may betray her, is determined to find the answers for herself. Soon, Maija discovers the true cost of survival under the mountain, and what it will take to make it to spring.

✅ 52. Our Endless Numbered Days by Claire Fuller



Part fairy-tale, part magic, yet always savagely realistic Claire Fuller's haunting and powerful debut Our Endless Numbered Days will appeal to fans of Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child and Christian Baker Kline's Orphan Train.
Peggy Hillcoat is eight years old when her survivalist father, James, takes her from their home in London to a remote hut in the woods and tells her that the rest of the world has been destroyed. Deep in the wilderness, Peggy and James make a life for themselves. They repair the hut, bathe in water from the river, hunt and gather food in the summers and almost starve in the harsh winters. They mark their days only by the sun and the seasons. When Peggy finds a pair of boots in the forest and begins a search for their owner, she unwittingly begins to unravel the series of events that brought her to the woods and, in doing so, discovers the strength she needs to go back to the home and mother she thought she’d lost. After Peggy's return to civilization, her mother learns the truth of her escape, of what happened to James on the last night out in the woods, and of the secret that Peggy has carried with her ever since.

52. The New & Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott

Part dystopian satire, part Southern Gothic tall tale: a disturbing yet hilarious romp through a surreal New South where newfangled medical technologies change the structure of the human brain and genetically modified feral animals ravage the blighted landscape.
Down on his luck and still pining for his ex-wife, South Carolina taxidermist Romie Futch spends his evenings drunkenly surfing the Internet before passing out on his couch. In a last-ditch attempt to pay his mortgage, he replies to an ad and becomes a research subject in an experiment conducted by the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience in Atlanta, Georgia. After “scientists” download hifalutin humanities disciplines into their brains, Romie and his fellow guinea pigs start debating the works of Foucault and hashing out the intricacies of postmodern subjectivity. The enhanced taxidermist, who once aspired to be an artist, returns to his hometown ready to revolutionize his work and revive his failed marriage. As Romie tracks down specimens for his elaborate animatronic taxidermy dioramas, he develops an Ahab-caliber obsession with bagging “Hogzilla,” a thousand-pound feral hog that has been terrorizing Hampton County. Cruising hog-hunting websites, he learns that this lab-spawned monster possesses peculiar traits. Pulled into an absurd and murky underworld of biotech operatives, FDA agents, and environmental activists, Romie becomes entangled in the enigma of Hogzilla’s origins.
Exploring the interplay between nature and culture, biology and technology, reality and art, The New and Improved Romie Futch probes the mysteries of memory and consciousness, offering a darkly comic yet heartfelt take on the contemporary human predicament.

✅ 53. The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty by Vendella Vida



A spellbinding literary thriller that probes the essence and malleability of identity.

In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she wants to be.

Told with vibrant, lush detail and a wicked sense of humor, The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. This is Vendela Vida’s most assured and ambitious novel yet.

53. Above the Waterfall by Ron Rash

In this poetic and haunting tale set in contemporary Appalachia, New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash illuminates lives shaped by violence and a powerful connection to the land.

Les, a long-time sheriff just three-weeks from retirement, contends with the ravages of crystal meth and his own duplicity in his small Appalachian town.

Becky, a park ranger with a harrowing past, finds solace amid the lyrical beauty of this patch of North Carolina.

Enduring the mistakes and tragedies that have indelibly marked them, they are drawn together by a reverence for the natural world. When an irascible elderly local is accused of poisoning a trout stream, Les and Becky are plunged into deep and dangerous waters, forced to navigate currents of disillusionment and betrayal that will force them to question themselves and test their tentative bond—and threaten to carry them over the edge.

Echoing the heartbreaking beauty of William Faulkner and the spiritual isolation of Carson McCullers, Above the Waterfall demonstrates once again the prodigious talent of “a gorgeous, brutal writer” (Richard Price) hailed as “one of the great American authors at work today” (Janet Maslin, New York Times).

✅ 54. Best Boy by Eli Gottlieb



Sent to a “therapeutic community” for autism at the age of eleven, Todd Aaron, now in his fifties, is the “Old Fox” of Payton LivingCenter. A joyous man who rereads the encyclopedia compulsively, he is unnerved by the sudden arrivals of a menacing new staffer and a disruptive, brain-injured roommate. His equilibrium is further worsened by Martine, a one-eyed new resident who has romantic intentions and convinces him to go off his meds to feel “normal” again. Undone by these pressures, Todd attempts an escape to return “home” to his younger brother and to a childhood that now inhabits only his dreams. Written astonishingly in the first-person voice of an autistic, adult man, Best Boy―with its unforgettable portraits of Todd’s beloved mother, whose sweet voice still sings from the grave, and a staffer named Raykene, who says that Todd “reflects the beauty of His creation”―is a piercing, achingly funny, finally shattering novel no reader can ever forget.

✅ 54. The Boy Who Went Away by Eli Gottllieb

Winner of the American Academy’s Rome Prize for fiction, Eli Gottlieb’s tender, harrowing coming-of-age novel finally returns to print.
Denny Graubart, child-narrator and “domestic surveillance expert,” is having some terrible suspicions about his mother and autistic brother. It’s the 1960s, aka the Diagnostic Dark Ages of Autism, and while his mother struggles to keep his brother out of an institution, signs of something more disturbing are beginning to emerge before young Denny’s eyes. Battered by his own tragicomic sexual awakening during a long, hot summer, Denny will eventually find his most horrified suspicions about his family confirmed.
A powerfully drawn portrait of two brothers locked into an asymmetrical childhood and a family struggling against a weight of medical ignorance, The Boy Who Went Away is “shockingly, electrically alive” (Phillip Lopate). It is also an indispensable bookend to Gottlieb’s Best Boy, which recounts the impact of autism on the same family from the other side, many years later, in the voice of a middle-aged autistic man.

✅ 55. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg

The stunning debut novel from bestselling author Bill Clegg is a magnificently powerful story about a circle of people who find solace in the least likely of places as they cope with a horrific tragedy.
On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is completely devastated when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke—her entire family, all gone in a moment. And June is the only survivor.
Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.
From the couple running a motel on the Pacific Ocean where June eventually settles into a quiet half-life, to the wedding’s caterer whose bill has been forgotten, to Luke’s mother, the shattered outcast of the town—everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.
Elegant and heartrending, and one of the most accomplished fiction debuts of the year, Did You Ever Have a Family is an absorbing, unforgettable tale that reveals humanity at its best through forgiveness and hope. At its core is a celebration of family—the ones we are born with and the ones we create.

55. Tuesday Nights in 1980 by Moly Prentiss



An intoxicating and transcendent debut novel that follows a critic, an artist, and their shared muse as they find their way—and ultimately collide—amid the ever-evolving New York City art scene of the 1980s.
Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, quickly gentrifying playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city. Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for theNew York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country. As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art.
It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason—a small town beauty and Raul’s muse—and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost.
As inventive as Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and as sweeping as Meg Wolitzer’sThe Interestings, Tuesday Nights in 1980 boldly renders a complex moment when the meaning and nature of art is being all but upended, and New York City as a whole is reinventing itself. In risk-taking prose that is as powerful as it is playful, Molly Prentiss deftly explores the need for beauty, community, creation, and love in an ever-changing urban landscape.

✅ 56. City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

New York City, 1976. Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor—and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve.
The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever.
City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock ’n’ roll: about what people need from each other in order to live . . . and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place.



57. Mr. Splitfoot by Samantha Hunt

Praiseworthy novelist Samantha Hunt has previously tackled unusual and misunderstood subjects, such as a young woman who believes she's a mermaid (The Seas, which won Hunt the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award) and the eccentric inventor Nikola Tesla (The Invention of Everything Else, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and winner of the Bard Fiction Prize). Her newest novel, Mr. Splitfoot, an enigmatic story about a pair of orphans with special "abilities," is even more unorthodox.Bonded by hardship at the Love of Christ! Foster Home in which they reside, Ruth and Nat are inseparable. When they begin channeling the dead loved ones of their fellow foster kids for fun, they set into motion a chain of events that will alter their lives forever. Years later, Ruth's pregnant niece Cora finds herself drawn into this mysterious past when, unexpectedly, a visit from her now-mute aunt Ruth urges Cora toward an unknown destination. Alternating between the past and present, the diverging narrative paths unite in an astonishing conclusion. With original, lyrical prose and a cast of unsettling and captivating characters, Mr. Splitfoot will lead you on a journey you won't want to end.

57. Fever at Dawn by Péter Gárdos

A debut novel of Hungarian film director Péter Gárdos. Based on the true story of how the author's Hungarian parents met through letters while both convalescing in Sweden as concentration camp survivors, Fever at Dawn is a powerful, joyful tale about overcoming odds and the endurance of love.



✅ 58. A Doubter’s Almanac by Ethan Canin

In A Doubter's Almanac, Canin is at the height of his powers. Milo Andret is an incredible character, both fascinating and frustrating, a genius who makes the most rudimentary mistakes when it comes to navigating through his life. Andret plays many parts: He is a brilliant mathematician who tries to solve unsolvable problems. He is a son, husband, and father who feels at heart alone in the world. He is a belligerent alcoholic, a gifted craftsman, and a man who would always rather be in the woods. The story of his life is absorbing, poetic, and page-turning, and is some of Canin's most remarkable work.



59. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

In her stunning debut novel, Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi illustrates the emotional turmoil individuals face when their fate rests in circumstances beyond their control. Homegoing begins with the tales of Esi and Effia, two estranged half-sisters born apart in Ghana during the 18th century. Traversing three centuries and several continents, Gyasi takes readers on a harrowing journey following the lives of Esi and Effia and their descendants up to the present day. A truly ambitious work with intertwining storylines and chapters so elegantly composed they read almost as short stories, Gyasi’s novel brings forth the painful history of racism and its impact on family, dreams, and self-identity in a striking, vivid way.



60. Barkskins by Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx, already a cult favorite, became part of the American psyche in 1993 when The Shipping News won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her fantastic story "Brokeback Mountain," from Close Range: Wyoming Stories, ratcheted up her level of fame when the movie adaptation struck a national chord. Through the last two and a half decades, Proulx has been one of our country’s treasures, writing insightful, gorgeous stories and novels that depict the natural world and the landscape of the human heart. Her latest book, Barkskins, is a tremendous achievement, a monumental saga depicting the birth of the modern age in North America through the prism of the timber industry and mankind's relationship with radically changing forest ecosystems. It is her finest work yet.

✅ 60. Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams

True to her name, this slim collection is a joy to read and will leave you puzzling over the absurdity of man and the divinity of God — or even God’s existence. Each story is numbered from 1 to 99 and appended with an "undertitle" that is both apt and bewildering. Some stories are as short as a sentence or two, while others stretch out longer — never more than a few pages, but always well crafted and filled with the hilarity, wit, and thoughtfulness we’ve come to expect from Williams. The slenderness of the collection may inspire you to devour it all in one sitting — don’t! These are tales meant to be savored from bite to bite. Ninety-Nine Stories of God keeps us coming back for more, still.

61. Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

Foer’s first novel in over a decade, Here I Am showcases the unmistakable wit, dark humor, and stark intimacy that have made the author a favorite among Powell’s staff. It is his most ambitious and deeply personal work yet as it examines the Blochs, a Jewish-American family struggling to navigate the challenges of modern family life and questions of Jewish identity against the backdrop of catastrophic disaster in the Middle East. Foer is masterful at capturing the chaos and isolation at home and abroad through spirited exchanges and candid inner speech.

✅ 61. Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer

✅ 61. Universal Harvester by John Darnielle

Universal Harvester (published in February 2017), specially packaged in a VHS rental box inspired by the story. In this eerie novel, Darnielle takes readers to rural Iowa in 2000 where things aren’t quite as bucolic as they seem, as the characters uncover a mystery concerning creepy scenes being spliced into rental tapes shelved at the local Video Hut. Universal Harvester is a haunting novel that will stay with you and prompt ruminations on the shape that grief can take.



62. The Mothers by Brit Bennet

A contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New Republic, and The Paris Review, Brit Bennett has never shied away from asking and answering the difficult questions when it comes to race. Her debut novel, The Mothers, is just as bold in its depiction of abortion. But the story doesn’t end with this polarizing topic — it begins with it, and each page gradually reveals the tangled lives and fates of three teenagers in a black Southern California community: Nadia Turner, an ambitious and rebellious teen; Luke, the local pastor’s son; and Aubrey, Nadia’s timid friend. Narrated by "the Mothers," a chorus of elder parishioners of Upper Room Chapel, the story follows Nadia, Luke, and Aubrey from age 17 into their mid-20s. Bennett’s unflinching honesty in portraying these all-too-human characters (including the narrators) is something to be treasured. The Mothers is a beautifully reflective work about the decisions we make in our youth and their reverberations in our lives and throughout our community.



63. Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Whether dabbling in fiction, screenwriting, or even songwriting, Chabon commands attention through his vivid storytelling and keen sense for detail. It’s this precise prose that leads the reader into a world wholly realized and engrossing, be it fact, fiction, or somewhere in between. Moonglow is an exploration of the tumultuous life of a man only referred to as "my grandfather" by the narrator Mike, who is visiting his grandfather on his deathbed. From his experience in the army hunting down the Nazi Wernher von Braun (inventor of the V-2 rocket), to his time spent in jail for nearly strangling to death a former business partner, to his deep love for an unstable woman haunted by wartime and a dark secret, the grandfather reveals the hidden stories of his life in startling detail. Moonglow examines how secrets, and even lies, can emerge for the sake of family stability — and ultimately come to define us.

✅ 63. Night of Fire by Collin Thubron

A gorgeous, graceful novel that's both meditative and urgent, lyrical and clear-spoken. As an apartment building catches on fire, Thubron tells the stories of its residents, including an ex-priest, a neurosurgeon, and a naturalist, among others. Each tale is its own fully realized world, but as the book progresses, the connections and intersections between the characters slowly emerge. The Times of London raves, "Thubron returns with what might be his masterpiece....Thubron’s prose shines a penetrating light on the nature of memory and being human. Sublime."



64. History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

Emily Fridlund makes a monumental debut with History of Wolves. We fell into a trance within the first few pages of this deeply atmospheric and haunting novel. Backdropped by the remote and harsh landscape of northern Minnesota, History of Wolves follows Linda, a teenage outsider who embeds herself in a newly arrived family across the lake from her parents’ former commune and spartan cabin. For once, Linda feels a sense of belonging but ultimately must decide between doing the right thing and giving up her feelings of acceptance. Fridlund’s powerful prose and constant foreboding keep the story moving forward like a freight train, until suddenly it crashes and we are left feeling shock and awe over what just happened. History of Wolves is a deeply powerful novel about guilt, misguided faith, and the need for acceptance.



65. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

George Saunders’s writing has always been apropos of the current political and social climate, and though his theatrical debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is set in 1862, the modern-day parallels (and contrasts) are striking. The novel portrays a critical time in the life of Abraham Lincoln, who is deep in grief over the death of his son, Willie Lincoln. Disliked by the populace and presiding over a dramatically shifting country, Lincoln finds himself visiting the bardo — a Tibetan purgatory-like state — each night by returning to his son’s tomb while a gaggle of ghosts (including Willie) look on. Told through this chorus of spirits along with real-life and fictional characters, Lincoln in the Bardo turns our idea of the novel on its head. Yet through the fractured narrative, Saunders has created a deft historical tale that speaks volumes about our current unrest and ill-defined state.

✅ 65. The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip by George Saunders

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, illustrated by Lane Smith (The Stinky Cheese Man), is a modern fable that both children and parents can enjoy. Capable, a young girl living in the town of Frip, is tired of the arduous task of brushing gappers off her goats. Gappers are peculiar baseball-sized creatures that adhere themselves to the bodies of goats and shriek loudly, disturbing the goats and thus affecting their milk supply. To the dismay of her neighbors, and true to her name, Capable enacts a plan to get rid of the gappers for good. This timely tale highlights the power of compassion, community, and kindness. Couldn’t we all use a reminder of these neighborly virtues?

✅ 66. Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

Jeff VanderMeer is well known for his Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), a series of books that have won science fiction and fantasy awards but are just as often classified as literature. His latest book, Borne — about a world that has fallen to tragedy — crosses the same boundaries, with beautiful prose and lyrical writing. But Borne is no standard post-apocalyptic novel. There is hope in the devastated city in which it takes place, as VanderMeer immerses us in the trusting, graceful relationship between Rachel and the other-worldly creature she named Borne. It's hard to understand the gravity and force that keeps us captivated by Rachel's attachment to Borne (after all, we don't know if Borne is a he, a human, an animal, a weapon), but the lure is irresistible.

✅ 66. The Grip of It by Jac Jemc

Jac Jemc's The Grip of It, an unsettling, addictive, genre-crossing work of literary horror. Julie and James, a young couple from the city, move into a small town for a fresh start. Their house, however, has a rather malevolent mind of its own. Told from each person's perspective in alternating chapters (and in elegantly written prose), The Grip of It documents their slow slips into haunting or hallucination. Our featured author, Jeff VanderMeer, had high praise for it as well: "The Grip of It is a stunning, smart, genuinely creepy page-turner that I couldn't put down. It's got depth, thrills, twists, and great writing. One of the few haunted house stories that sticks the landing."



67. Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

The eponymous character in Gabe Habash's debut novel has a unique, extraordinary voice that pulls you in from the first page. Stephen is a wrestler at a small college in North Dakota; he is alone in the world, as his parents died in a car crash when he was younger and his grandmother, who raised him afterwards, died more recently. He is obsessed with winning at wrestling, trying to keep a tight circumference of control in his life so that he doesn't have to think about the future beyond the final match. But his life begins to open up to possibility and chaos over the course of Stephen Florida, as he falls in love, fumbles through a close friendship, and navigates his coaches and teammates. Habash is a fantastic writer, and his first novel is extremely funny, dark, frenetic, and ultimately hopeful. Even if you don't know the first thing about wrestling, you'll fall in love with this book.

✅ 67. The Doll’s Alphabet by Camilla Grudova

Also included with this volume was an advance reader copy of Camilla Grudova’s short story collection, The Doll’s Alphabet. Grudova paints a surreal world where decay, rodents, rationed food, and clothing make up the landscape of a dystopian world. The characters are often deprived of control and left crippled by their own meager circumstances. Grudova is regularly compared to both Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood, though her stories also conjure images reminiscent of David Lynch’s film Eraserhead or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. The Doll’s Alphabet is a dark and gothic read and yet we couldn’t look away — we were fully absorbed in this voyeuristic collection and hope you find it just as compelling as we did.



✅ 68. The Burning Girl by Claire Messud

Julia and Cassie are the kind of best friends who can read each other’s minds and finish each other’s sentences, whose intimacy is so old and natural that it seems unquestioningly permanent. When the girls reach middle school and begin to grow apart — bookish Julia in honors classes and the cooler, more aloof Cassie in the party crowd — Julia feels the rift acutely, confused by the opposing inevitabilities of staying friends forever and taking separate paths to adulthood. As Cassie’s home life deteriorates and ugly rumors start flying through school, Julia must decide if and how to help her friend. In Claire Messud’s stunning new novel, The Burning Girl, the ordinary landscapes of youth and small-town life are thick with a suspense and darkness that brilliantly illuminate the liminal headspace of adolescence, caught between the comforts of childhood and the reaching arms of the adult world. Both richly symbolic and frankly written, The Burning Girl cuts to the heart of what it feels like to be a teenage girl, and to lose a friend.



✅ 69. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

From Jesmyn Ward, the National Book Award-winning author of Salvage the Bones, comes another timely and stunning addition to the literary canon. With Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward casts a careful, unsentimental lens on the most disenfranchised Americans. The novel traverses the Gulf Coast on a complex family odyssey, as the characters struggle to find hope and peace in a world that is unsympathetic to them. Leonie, a careworn waitress, finds solace in drugs and Michael, her white boyfriend and the father of their two children. Caught in the middle of Leonie’s quest for the "perfect" family are Jojo, her teenage son, and his toddler sister, Kayla, who prefer the comfort and security of Pop and Mam, the grandparents who raised them. Like Ward’s previous work, Sing, Unburied, Sing is raw and honest in its depiction of the generational poverty, racism, and regret that shadow this family and, more broadly, the rural South. Ward’s signature lyricism lends a visceral quality to her characters and their landscape, without evoking undue sympathy for the most troubled individuals. Sing, Unburied, Sing is an elegantly rendered, brilliant, and necessary reading of the American landscape.

✅ 69. The Fire This Time edited by Jesmyn Ward

Ward’s riveting anthology of contemporary African American essayists and poets offers an astute assessment of what it means to be black in 21st-century America. Lyrical, insistent, and wise, The Fire This Time is a fresh and necessary contribution to our nation’s conversation about race, and an excellent companion to Sing, Unburied, Sing.



✅ 70. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado’s sublimely creepy debut, draws on the lexicons of urban legend, the 19th-century British gothic, and American society’s evolving ideas about female corporeality to tell stories about women on the edge. Machado’s characters are subject to the familiar embarrassments, privations, and violence to which women worldwide are accustomed, but they ’re also privy to something else; in very different ways, Machado’s main characters share a consciousness of the enormity of the world’s brutality against women, whether it’s exercised through the condemnation of fat, the frequency of rape, the male gaze, the disavowal of female testimony, or campfire stories about bad girls getting what they deserve. In the liminal worlds of Her Body and Other Parties — positioned somewhere between 21st-century America and a horrorscape of breathing pavement and sentient dresses — an intangible, living darkness reaches out to hurt women, or convince them to hurt themselves. The dread this darkness inspires powers Machado ’s riveting short story collection, which heralds the arrival of a brilliant and incisive writer.

70. Tomb Song by Julián Herbert

Mexican author Julián Herbert’s Tomb Song (trans. Christina MacSweeney) blends the fictional and the autobiographical to great effect. With the blurred veracity of autofiction, Herbert’s narrator recounts his mother’s life as he sits beside her in the hospital where she's expiring from leukemia — gracefully confronting the role and legacy of memory, in addition to his own work as a writer. The star of Tomb Song is Herbert's enthralling prose, where turns of phrase elegantly and poignantly counter his elegiac story.

71. Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

We rarely feature authors more than once for Indiespensable, but for Volume 71 we’re breaking with tradition to welcome back Leni Zumas (Volume 33) for her latest novel, Red Clocks. Set in a small coastal town in Oregon, Red Clocks follows four women whose lives have been upended by the newly passed Personhood Amendment. This provocative and plausible federal ban on abortion, single parent adoption, and in vitro fertilization influences the women's decisions, including the option of fleeing into nearby Canada. The characters — the Wife, the Mender, the Daughter, and the Biographer — wrestle with American womanhood, independence, reproductive rights, motherhood, parenting, and how to define personhood. Through the Biographer’s subject, Eivør Mínervudottír, a 19th-century female polar explorer, Zumas explores the myriad ways female self-determination has been constrained for centuries by social and personal preoccupations with reproductive freedom. The characters are vividly realized and relatable, and their stories are woven together in a way that highlights the unique yet universal nature of their struggles.



72. Census by Jesse Ball

Set in an unnamed country composed of towns arranged from A to Z, the novel traces the path of its terminally ill narrator who, for his final act, is traveling as a census taker with his son, who is mentally disabled. As he visits home after home, measuring lives while reexamining his own, we feel the weight of his journey and its inevitable conclusion. Both immersive and wondrous, Census is a meditative book about the modest roles we play in a sprawling world and the strength of human bonds in the face of such enormity.

72. Your Duck is My Duck by Deborah Eisenberg

Deborah Eisenberg's Your Duck Is My Duck is quintessential Eisenberg — which is to say, if you've never had the pleasure of reading her, acerbic, dark, hilarious, playful, and absolutely incisive (as well as prodigiously well written). Eisenberg has won a Whiting Award, a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur “genius” grant…the list goes on. In the tradition of fellow short story writers like Lorrie Moore, Amy Hempel, and Grace Paley, Eisenberg's astute portraits of class, race, relationships, and politics — essentially, contemporary life in America — should be required reading.



73. The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

With The Mars Room, bestselling author and two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner brings readers another award-worthy novel. Romy Leslie Hall, prisoner W314159, charmed us from the beginning, riding in a bus for female inmates heading to Stanville Women's Correctional Facility in California, to serve a double life sentence. Romy's life has never been easy, and she reflects on her time before prison, when she worked as a stripper at the Mars Room and cared for her son, Jackson. From prison she offers commentary on the minutiae of institutional life, studded with vivid characters like Conan, an extremely masculine transgender male; Norse, a heavy metal-loving white supremacist; and smiley Laura Lipp, the "baby killer." Entertaining and thoughtful, The Mars Room delves into the racially and economically driven injustices of the American prison system, and the casual violence inflicted upon marginalized children and women in our society. Switching between Romy’s voice and those of her fellow inmates, as well as a dirty cop, a well-intentioned prison employee, and the diaries of Ted Kaczynski, among others, the novel creates a provocative mosaic of those living within and around the prison industrial complex.

73. The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner

In celebration of its fifth anniversary since publication, we are including a reprint of Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, a 2013 National Book Award finalist. The much-revered — and controversial — novel follows Reno, a motorcycle artist, as she dives into the 1970s New York art scene and Italian underground.

73. Conversations on Writing by Ursula K. Le Guin and David Naimon

David Naimon's Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing is a gorgeous tribute to the beloved writer, whose passing many are still mourning (she was still going back and forth on final edits of this book at the time of her death). These insightful, blunt, wide-ranging, and often funny interviews cover all facets of Le Guin's writing, including her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her thoughts and commentary about writing and living — or "talking shop," as she refers to what she's doing in her introduction — are as invaluable and enlightening as the rest of her magnificent work.



✅ 74. There There by Tommy Orange

There There, Tommy Orange’s powerful debut novel, weaves the voices of 12 fascinating characters traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow. An exploration of urban Native identity, There There examines the complex pulls of history, tradition, and assimilation, and grapples with the strains of literal and existential rootlessness. When you hear truth as potent as Orange’s, speaking through generations of suffering and slaughter and consequent addiction and poverty, it surpasses anything as temporary as anger or righteousness or even respect, it takes you to the place of acknowledgement, a recognition of power and knowing. This book changes the story being told about Native Americans — it changes us all — reminding us that no matter how ravaged an identity, place, or a people becomes, it can never be completely annihilated.



75. The Third Hotel by Laura Van Den Berg

Some books, rare ones, offer a hallucinatory experience, and Laura van den Berg’s stunning The Third Hotel fits squarely into that category. Knocked sideways by grief, 37-year-old Clare decides to travel to Havana for a film festival she had planned to attend with her late husband, Richard. An emotionally aloof traveling saleswoman, Clare is an intriguing mix of mundane predilections (she loves Nebraska and airport hotels) and bizarre impulses (she licks murals and eats paper). She’s an enigma to everyone except the reader, who is plunged immediately and inextricably into Clare’s perspective — a position that grows increasingly surreal. When Clare spots Richard in Havana, they engage in a comic game of cat-and-mouse, as Clare seeks answers to unresolved questions about their strained marriage and the metaphysics of death. Playful, puzzling, and evocative, The Third Hotel wraps the reader in the swirling eddy of Clare’s grief and deposits them downstream, as perplexed and transformed as its heroine. We’ve never read a better evocation of the mind-altering experience of loss. With great excitement, we present The Third Hotel as Volume 75 of Indiespensable.

75. Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

Territory of Light, a beautiful, mesmerizing novel by Yūko Tsushima, was first published in a Japanese literary magazine over the course of 1978-79, with each of its 12 chapters coinciding with its month in real time. Tsushima tells the story of a young woman starting a new life alone with her two-year-old daughter in a Tokyo apartment that is overwhelmingly filled with light. As the seasons pass, increasingly uncanny events begin to unfold, recounted in graceful, radiant prose. Margaret Drabble called it "wonderfully poetic” with “a Virginia Woolf quality." We are so pleased to include this advanced reader copy of Territory of Light, which will be published in the United States for the first time in February 2019. It’s a lovely, perfectly eerie fit with The Third Hotel.

76. She Would be King by Wayéta Moore, 10/18

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.

Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.

76. The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis, 10/18

The Silk Road begins on a mat in yoga class, deep within a labyrinth on a settlement somewhere in the icy north, under the canny guidance of Jee Moon. When someone fails to arise from corpse pose, the Astronomer, the Archivist, the Botanist, the Keeper, the Topologist, the Geographer, the Iceman, and the Cook remember the paths that brought them there―paths on which they still seem to be traveling.

The Silk Road also begins in rivalrous skirmishing for favor, in the protected Eden of childhood, and it ends in the harrowing democracy of mortality, in sickness and loss and death. Kathryn Davis’s sleight of hand brings the past, present, and future forward into brilliant coexistence; in an endlessly shifting landscape, her characters make their way through ruptures, grief, and apocalypse, from existence to nonexistence, from embodiment to pure spirit.

Since the beginning of her extraordinary career, Davis has been fascinated by journeys. Her books have been shaped around road trips, walking tours, hegiras, exiles: and now, in this triumphant novel, a pilgrimage. The Silk Road is her most explicitly allegorical novel and also her most profound vehicle; supple and mesmerizing, the journey here is not undertaken by a single protagonist but by a community of separate souls―a family, a yoga class, a generation. Its revelations are ravishing and desolating.



✅ 77. A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne, 12/18

"Irish novelist John Boyne has been on our radar for years with such works as the searing young adult bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2006) and, more recently, the masterful epic The Heart’s Invisible Furies (2017), which The Times Sunday Review described as “nothing less than the story of Ireland over the past 70 years.” Known for his ambitious narratives, Boyne shines a spotlight on ambition itself in his new book, A Ladder to the Sky. The suspenseful multi-act novel follows the trajectory of Maurice Swift, a writer whose life mission is to reach the pinnacle of literary glory. Employing a colorful mix of narrators and points of view, Boyne paints a portrait of a dangerous, amoral man who, aided by his striking good looks, quick wit, and knack for manipulation, finds success by exploiting other people’s talents in increasingly despicable ways. A Ladder to the Sky is as much about the characters that Maurice destroys on his way to the top as it is about the villain of the novel, and their tragic stories linger with us long after Maurice himself has abandoned them. With jabs at creative writing programs, the publishing world, and the literary elite, nothing is sacred in Boyne’s darkly humorous tour de force — we found ourselves laughing and gasping in equal measure."

“Skillfully constructed, and above all, compulsively entertaining…The finest novel of the year.” — The Irish Examiner

“A Ladder to the Sky is clever, chilling and beautifully paced; a study of inner corrosion that Patricia Highsmith herself could not have done better… wickedly astute.” — The Times (London)

77. The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

Wow! Lots of good books here, Twinnie. You could spend your year here.

>18 BLBera: I know! That's why one of my goals is to read 12 of these this year, one a month. Want to read any of them with me?

Happy to! I'd love to read the Boyne's, The Mars Room, to start. There are so many good ones.

>20 BLBera: Great! I am starting Boyne's now and would be up for The Mars Room later on. Sound good?

Which Boyne? I haveThe Heart's Invisible Furies and could start that when I'm finished with the book I'm reading now - a really good mystery. Maybe I'll send it your way when I'm done. :)

I am going to start The Ladder to the Sky--it's calling to me more than the other one right now. Well, we could both read Boyne, just different ones! And I will always take a mystery. Send her over!

I couldn't find my copy of the Boyne, so I started a library book. I'll look for it later. Obviously, I need some help arranging my books.

>4 Berly: I really liked No11 The Twin, Kim.

>24 BLBera: When you are done over there, can you come arrange my piles here? Pretty please?

>25 Caroline_McElwee: I am starting with my most recent one A Ladder to the Sky, but after that I will need some help deciding. Thanks for piping in with that recommendation. : )

>26 Berly: Hah! I was going to ask you to come and help me. Twin minds...

>27 BLBera: ...with cluttered, unorganized shelves!!

78. Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley 2/14/19



When the joyful Zachary dies suddenly, his widow, Lydia, and their closest friends, a married couple named Alec and Christine, are left to comfort one another and their children, a difficult situation both softened and made worse by the couples’ intimate histories. Late in the Day dips in and out of the characters’ lives beginning with primary school, but its chief preoccupation is examining the mental and emotional spaces of middle age — how marriages shift and settle, how much of our self-identity remains informed by youth — a narrative focus that we found rare and illuminating.

“Riveting….A four-person character study — here as always, Hadley is a master of interpersonal dynamics — the novel captures the complexity of loss.” — Kirkus (Starred Review)

✅ 78. The Snakes by Sadie Jones



Recently married, psychologist Bea and Dan, a mixed-race artist, rent out their tiny flat to escape London for a few precious months. Driving through France they visit Bea's dropout brother Alex at the hotel he runs in Burgundy. Disturbingly, they find him all alone and the ramshackle hotel deserted, apart from the nest of snakes in the attic.

When Alex and Bea's parents make a surprise visit, Dan can't understand why Bea is so appalled, or why she's never wanted him to know them; Liv and Griff Adamson are charming and rich. They are the richest people he has ever met. Maybe Bea's ashamed of him, or maybe she regrets the secrets she's been keeping.

Tragedy strikes suddenly, brutally, and in its aftermath the family is stripped back to its heart, and then its rotten core, and even Bea with all her strength and goodness can't escape.

Hey Twin, I was looking over your list and there are a few I would like to read this year:
>5 Berly: Matterhorn - this is a tome and I would probably like to read it in summer
>7 Berly: Irma Voth - I've loved what I've read by Toews. Maybe March? April?
>11 Berly: Bone Clocks - I have an ER copy of this and am trying to read them this year. Another tome, so summer?
>15 Berly:The Fire This Time - Collection of essays on race - maybe February, Black History Month?

Anyway, some ideas. If you're interested, I would be up for a joint read.

So I already have us down as doing these reads together:

March--The Sympathizer with Twin and Ellen
June--Pachinko With Twin and Ellen

Are those right?

I'd also be up for

The Fire This Time in February
Irma Voth in April

Let's wait on summer tome selections until later. : )

>31 Berly: Sounds like a plan. I would like to read The Fire This Time in Feb. and Irma Voth sounds good for April. I will add those to my thread so I remember.

>32 BLBera: Deal!!!

I'll also read Pachinko with you. Now I just need to remember to request it in early May.

I'll read A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra with you. I got it as a SantaThing gift.

Awesome! When? After April....

Anytime is good. Just tell me when.

And remind me when it gets close! LOL!

Perfect. I am going to play it by ear, but put it in my INDIEspensable reader thread as a reminder. I will give you a heads up!! : )

79. Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli



Lost Children Archive documents an unnamed family's journey from New York to Arizona, to reach Apacheria, the region formerly inhabited by the Apache people. Their winding story is told through introspective, journal-like entries that not only detail the characters’ progress towards Apacheria, and their many stops along the way, but also highlight the complex relationships within the family unit. An unfolding news story about refugee children provides another layer of stress and urgency to their travels. Lost Children Archive features a chorus of extremely rich and satisfying voices, while Luiselli’s timely message and original, heartfelt storytelling invite readers to step into the car and join the family’s journey.

✅ 80. Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett



Florida has long been the land of the weird, a place where humidity thickens the blood, strip clubs offer free flu shots, and an alarming number of zoo animals make the news. So it's the perfect setting for Kristen Arnett’s raucous debut novel, Mostly Dead Things, which follows a taxidermist in her late thirties as she tackles the messes left behind by her runaway lover — also her brother’s wife — and her father’s suicide. Jessa-Lynn tries to be her family’s source of stability and reason, only to come up time and again against her own emotional demons and the jointly comforting and disturbing eccentricities of her family and home state. Mostly Dead Things is the quintessential Floridian novel, hilariously strange and discomfiting, yet at the same time deeply human.

✅ 80. Divide Me By Zero by Lara Vapnyar



As a young girl, Katya Geller learned from her mother that math was the answer to everything. Now, approaching forty, she finds this wisdom tested: she has lost the love of her life, she is in the middle of a divorce, and has just found out that her mother is dying. Half-mad with grief, Katya turns to the unfinished notes for her mother’s last textbook, hoping to find guidance in mathematical concepts.

With humor, intelligence, and unfailing honesty, Katya traces back her life’s journey: her childhood in Soviet Russia, her parents’ great love, the death of her father, her mother’s career as a renowned mathematician, and their immigration to the United States. She is, by turns, an adrift newlywed, an ESL teacher in an office occupied by witches and mediums, a restless wife, an accomplished writer, a flailing mother of two, a grieving daughter, and, all the while, a woman in love haunted by a question: how to parse the wild, unfathomable passion she feels through the cool logic of mathematics?

>39 Berly: These both sound good, Twin.

Divide Me by Zero was pretty good! Haven't delved into the other one yet. : )

So, today I got my next INDIEspensable books installment (thank you Hubby!!).

And I am super excited because Colson Whitehead (Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Underground Railroad) is one of the speakers for Literary Arts next season. Yay!! Both books sound fascinating.

81. The Intuitionist is a 1999 novel by Colson Whitehead.



From Wikipedia--The Intuitionist takes place in a city (implicitly, New York) full of skyscrapers and other buildings requiring vertical transportation in the form of elevators. The time, never identified explicitly, is one when black people are called "colored" and integration is a current topic. The protagonist is Lila Mae Watson, an elevator inspector of the "Intuitionist" school. The Intuitionists practice an inspecting method by which they ride in an elevator and intuit the state of the elevator and its related systems. The competing school, the "Empiricists", insists upon traditional instrument-based verification of the condition of the elevator. Watson is the second black inspector and the first black female inspector in the city.

The story begins with the catastrophic failure of an elevator which Watson had inspected just days before, leading to suspicion cast upon both herself and the Intuitionist school as a whole. To cope with the inspectorate, the corporate elevator establishment, and other looming elements, she must return to her intellectual roots, the texts (both known and lost) of the founder of the school, to try to reconstruct what is happening around her.

✅ 81. The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead. His latest novel.



From Amazon--As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as good as anyone." Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, whose mission statement says it provides "physical, intellectual and moral training" so the delinquent boys in their charge can become "honorable and honest men."
In reality, the Nickel Academy is a grotesque chamber of horrors where the sadistic staff beats and sexually abuses the students, corrupt officials and locals steal food and supplies, and any boy who resists is likely to disappear "out back." Stunned to find himself in such a vicious environment, Elwood tries to hold onto Dr. King's ringing assertion "Throw us in jail and we will still love you." His friend Turner thinks Elwood is worse than naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.

The tension between Elwood's ideals and Turner's skepticism leads to a decision whose repercussions will echo down the decades. Formed in the crucible of the evils Jim Crow wrought, the boys' fates will be determined by what they endured at the Nickel Academy.

Based on the real story of a reform school in Florida that operated for one hundred and eleven years and warped the lives of thousands of children, The Nickel Boys is a devastating, driven narrative that showcases a great American novelist writing at the height of his powers.

Well, Nickel Boys is already on my list, but The Intuitionist sounds great!

Yeah, I am hoping to get the The Intuitionist more sooner than later. : )

82. The Shadow King: A Novel by Maaza Mengiste



INDIEspensable Books: From the opening pages of Maaza Mengiste’s monumental new novel, we sensed we had come across a remarkable book — one that would dramatically illuminate a place, people, and series of events grievously ignored in history books. The Shadow King takes a sweeping view of the invasion of Ethiopia by Fascist Italy — an atrocity generally known (if at all) as merely a footnote in the lead-up to World War II. The story unfolds through the perspective of a kaleidoscopic array of characters, including Ettore, an Italian Jew tasked with photographing the occupation; Kidane, a powerful Ethiopian fighter; Fucelli, a vengeful colonel in Mussolini’s army; and fierce Hirut and Aster, who step forward to mobilize Ethiopian women in supporting the resistance and, ultimately, take up arms themselves. Through these many viewpoints, The Shadow King weaves together the story of an epic struggle for power, one that, in foreshadowing the events to come in Europe, devolves into shocking brutality. But as difficult as it is to read at times, the operatic beauty of The Shadow King and its valiant warriors will leave you awestruck.

83. The Topeka School by Ben Lerner



INDIEspensable Books: Set in the Topeka, Kansas, of the late nineties, Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School shifts through time and a range of perspectives to tell the coming-of-age story of high school debate champion Adam Gordon, his family, and Darren, a local teen outcast. Adam’s parents work at The Foundation, an insular mental health institute, where his father works with troubled boys like Darren and his mother is frequently targeted for her celebrated career as a feminist scholar. The novel explores the ways American conceptions of masculinity loop through the characters’ life stories, bringing inherited behavioral patterns into sharp relief. Lerner plays with form and language — borrowing questions from the staff at The Foundation, transcripts from home videos and recordings, and the point-scoring rubric for high school debate — highlighting the ways personal patterns, memories, and cultural conditions can make actions feel inevitable instead of chosen. Lerner’s insightful prose shows how horrific truths, like the act of violence hanging over the novel, are built and revealed within communities and individuals.

83. Eden Mine by S.M. Hulse (uncorrected proof)



Amazon: In Eden Mine, the award-winning author of Black River examines the aftershocks of an act of domestic terrorism rooted in a small Montana town on the brink of abandonment, as it tears apart a family, tests the faith of a pastor and the loyalty of a sister, and mines the deep rifts that come when the reach of the government clashes with individual freedom

Jo Faber is packing up the home she and her brother Samuel inherited. For generations, the Fabers have lived near Eden Mine, but Jo and Samuel will be the last. Their family home has been seized by the state through eminent domain.

At the moment she hears the news of the bombing on the radio, Jo knows nothing, but she also knows that something isn’t right. The arrival of their friend and unofficial guardian, Sheriff Hawkins, confirms her suspicions. Samuel said he was going to find work. But soon it’s clear that he’s not gone, but missing―last seen by a security camera near the district courthouse at Elk Fork. And a nine-year-old girl, the daughter of a pastor of a storefront church, is in critical condition.

This isn’t the first time Jo and Samuel have seen the ravages of violence visit their family. Last time, they lost their mother and Jo lost her ability to walk. Samuel took care of her, outfitted their barn with special rigging so she could keep riding their mule. But he was never the same, falling in with a separatist group, getting a tattoo he’d flaunt, then spending years hiding. She thought he had finished with all that. But now he’s missing, and she can’t talk to the one person she trusts.

A timely story of the anger and disaffection tearing apart many communities in this country, S.M. Hulse's Eden Mine is also a beautiful novel of the West, of a deep love for the land, of faith in the face of evil, and of the terrible choices we make for the ones we love.

The Shadow King looks good.

84. Little Gods by Meng Jin



"On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind's arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother's ashes to China - to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya's memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya's own sense of displacement."--Provided by publisher

✅ 85. Actress by Anne Enright



"Everything Enright describes in Actress rings true: the alcohol-fueled parties filled with recitals, calculated and impromptu; the financial necessity, even for successful actors, of always working; the soul-crushing conformity of the Hollywood studio system; the cruel winnowing of work and respect for middle-aged actresses; the irritating, performative nature of actors; and the difficulty of living with someone who simultaneously thinks the world of herself, yet needs constant reassurance. Enright nails it all, weaving her story of the great actress Katherine O’Dell into the equally fascinating history of the Troubles. Stuck in the middle — and telling the tale— is O’Dell’s devoted daughter, Norah, who comes of age in an Ireland made both vibrant and terrifying by the violence on the national stage and the domestic theater of her mother’s increasingly erratic behavior. Captivating, wry, and so intimate that it feels like biography, Actress is a beautifully wrought novel by a master stylist." -- Powell's INDIEspensable Books

85. The Voyage of the Morning Light by Marina Endicott



"Kay and Thea are half-sisters, separated in age by almost twenty years, but deeply attached. When their stern father dies, Thea travels to Nova Scotia for her long-promised marriage to the captain of the Morning Light. But she cannot abandon her orphaned young sister, so Kay too embarks on a life-changing journey to the other side of the world.

"At the heart of The Voyage of the Morning Light is a crystallizing moment in Micronesia: Thea, still mourning a miscarriage, forms a bond with a young boy from a remote island and takes him on board as her own son. Over time, the repercussions of this act force Kay, who considers the boy her brother, to examine her own assumptions--which are increasingly at odds with those of society around her--about what is forgivable and what is right.

"Inspired by a true story, Marina Endicott shows us a now-vanished world in all its wonder, and in its darkness, prejudice, and difficulty, too. She also brilliantly illuminates our present time through Kay's examination of the idea of "difference"--between people, classes, continents, cultures, customs and species. The Voyage of the Morning Light is a breathtaking novel by a writer who has an astonishing ability to bring past worlds vividly to life while revealing the moral complexity of our own." -- Powell's INDIEspensable Books

#86. Unseen by Roy Jacobsen



"In the critically acclaimed The Unseen, Norwegian author Roy Jacobsen shares the intergenerational story of the Barrøy family of the remote Barrøy island in the Arctic Circle. The novel’s chief subject is Ingrid, whom we first meet as a precocious preschooler and follow through her coming-of-age as the island’s budding matriarch. Jacobsen’s riveting decision to explore island life through Ingrid’s eyes grants the reader a child’s blanket acceptance of her environment, no matter how harsh or unusual, and the chance to participate in her dawning consciousness of her family members’ sorrows and dreams.

"The result is a story and a family that feel at first distant and inscrutable, but whose strength, love, and ingenuity swiftly draw the reader into a vivid world where freedom is predicated on the ability to respond swiftly to change. Frozen sheep and arctic gales aside, the natural and societal challenges the Barrøys face in determining the direction of their lives transcend place and time, making The Unseen a rare, beautiful novel that will always speak to the present." Powell's INDIEspensable Books.

#86. Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley



"From basement rec rooms to midnight railway tracks, Action Transfers to Smarties boxes crammed with joints, from Paul McCartney on the kitchen radio to their furious teenaged cover of The Ramones, Aubrey McKee and his familiars navigate late adolescence amidst the old-monied decadence of Halifax. An arcana of oddball angels, Alex Pugsley’s long-awaited debut novel follows rich-kid drug dealers and junior tennis brats, émigré heart surgeons and small-time thugs, renegade private school girls and runaway children as they try to make sense of the city into which they’ve been born. Part coming-of-age-story, part social chronicle, and part study of the myths that define our growing up, Aubrey McKee introduces a breathtakingly original new voice." Amazon

The Unseen looks really good.

Say, TwinK, I am going to read The Shadow King when I finish Bring up the Bodies. Interested?

Do you mean >45 Berly: Book #82? If so, YES!!! And I'd love to ZOOM talk about it. : )

Yes I do. I'm halfway through Bring Up the Bodies and will probably finish it on Monday. Then I'll plan to start The Shadow King. Does that work for you?

I'll make it work! ; )

!!!👍

#87
The Color of Air
by Gail Tsukiyama

Never received???

#88 A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi



From Kirkus Review: Makumbi’s latest book is a luminous and sprawling bildungsroman set in Uganda under the rule of Idi Amin. Kirabo, a smart and willful girl, is growing up with her grandparents in a rural village. Her father is off in the city, and Kirabo doesn’t know who her mother is. Worse, no one is willing to tell her. Kirabo starts visiting the local witch, Nsuuta, hoping to learn something. There’s another issue to address, too. Sometimes Kirabo seems to fly outside her own body, to observe herself from without. “Listen,” Nsuuta tells her. “You fly out of your body because our original state is in you.” What is that original state? Nsuuta tells Kirabo that it was “the way women were in the beginning,” when “we were not squeezed inside, we were huge, strong, bold, loud, proud, brave, independent. But it was too much for the world and they got rid of it.” The novel is a magnificent blend of Ugandan folklore and more modern notions of feminism. Eventually, Kirabo finds herself admitted to an elite girls school, where she learns from the older pupils not to shrink inside herself but to take pride in herself and in her body. Kirabo is a wonderful character, as are her best friend and Nsuuta. But Sio, the boy in whom Kirabo takes an interest, never comes fully to life. Occasionally, dialogue between the characters can feel flat, as though the author were inserting her own political beliefs into their mouths. These are relatively minor flaws: As a whole, the novel is a vivid, rambling delight. Makumbi’s prose can be musical and rhythmic or calmly informative, as her narrative requires.

In its depiction of both singular characters and a village community, this book is a jewel.

✅ #89 Leave the World Behind by Rumann Alam



From Powells: In Rumaan Alam's enthralling Leave the World Behind, a family vacation serves as the backdrop for the possible end of the world. A family of four have rented a vacation house outside of New York City, but their relaxing week is cut short when an older couple arrives late at night, bearing news of a catastrophic blackout. Without access to the news or Internet, the two families must parse increasingly surreal glimpses of what's happening in the world, while navigating a shared space. This timely novel explores what it means to feel safe, and how personal moments are affected by class, race, and generational factors — and how those meanings are amplified by the tensions of survival.

Want to do some shared reads next year?

I'd like to do one from my shelves. Some ideas:
The Heart's Invisible Furies, The Topeka School or Your Duck Is My Duck are some I own. I wouldn't mind rereading Moonglow, and the Foer book Here I Am sounds good. Let me know when and which one.

>60 BLBera: The Topeka School!! When works for you? March?

Any time.

Any time. You pick.

#90 My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee



"Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

"In the breathtaking, “precise, elliptical prose” that Chang-rae Lee is known for (The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller’s outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future. Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion—on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come." Amazon

✅ #91 Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian



A magical realist coming-of-age story, Gold Diggers skewers the model minority myth to tell a hilarious and moving story about immigrant identity, community, and the underside of ambition.

A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is funny and smart but struggles to bear the weight of expectations of his family and their Asian American enclave. He tries to want their version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.

When he discovers that Anita is the beneficiary of an ancient, alchemical potion made from stolen gold—a “lemonade” that harnesses the ambition of the gold’s original owner—Neil sees his chance to get ahead. But events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart. Years later in the Bay Area, Neil still bristles against his community's expectations—and finds he might need one more hit of that lemonade, no matter the cost.

Sanjena Sathian’s astonishing debut offers a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation into what's required to make it in America.

#92 Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen



Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which award-winning author Rivka Galchen’s writing is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch is a tale for our time—the story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear.

The year is 1619, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katherina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

An illiterate widow, Katherina is known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone jealous, and Katherina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone’s business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katherina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katherina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katherina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Provocative and entertaining, Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society, and a family, undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

#92 Love Like That by Emma Duffy-Comparone



A sharp, witty book about brilliant, broken women that are just the right amount wrong.

Whether diving into complicated relationships or wrestling with family ties, the girls and women who populate this collection—misfits and misanthropes, bickering sisters, responsible daughters, and unhappy wives—don't always find themselves making the best decisions.

A woman struggles with a new kind of love triangle when she moves in with a divorced dad. A lonely teenage beach attendant finds uneasy comradeship with her boss. A high school English teacher gets pushed to her limits when a student plagiarizes. Often caught between desire and duty, guilt and resentment, these characters discover what it means to get lost in love, and do what it takes to find themselves again.

Utterly singular and wholly unforgettable, Emma Duffy-Comparone's stories manage to be slyly, wickedly funny at even their darkest turns and herald the arrival of an irreverent and dazzling new voice.

✅ #92 Beautiful World, Where Are You? by Sally Rooney



Received only an excerpt -- Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood.

Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

#93 What Strange Paradise: A Novel by Omar El Akkad



A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • WINNER OF THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.

More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy.

In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.