Rough Sleepers: Dr. Jim O’Connell’s Urgent Mission to Bring Healing to Homeless People
by Tracy Kidder, 2023 Tracy Kidder, a literary journalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Soul of a New Machine in 1981, has written a compassionate and personal account of the homeless community in Boston, Massachusetts, and the medical doctor who is determined to treat them wherever they are—under a pile of dirty blankets, […]
Say Nothing—A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
by Patrick Radden Keefe, 2019 Spurred on by reading the 2013 obituary of Dolours Price in the New York Times, the author, a journalist for The New Yorker, became intrigued enough by her story to start researching for Say Nothing. Ms. Price, formerly a central figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), had been the […]
Demon Copperhead
by Barbara Kingsolver, 2022 Demon Copperhead tells the raw, emotional tale of a 10-year-old boy’s heartbreaking childhood and adolescence scarred by drug addiction, sudden death, child abuse, and being bounced around through the foster system in a small Virginia town. Damon Fields is the boy’s real name; “Demon Copperhead” becomes his nickname, and it sticks. […]
Winter Work
by Dan Fesperman, 2022 Winter Work is a mesmerizing mix of fact and fiction, and as a reader you have the fun of trying to figure out which is which. Just a few months after the Berlin Wall came down in early 1990, the East German Stasi, their foreign intelligence service, was frantically destroying evidence. […]
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
by Danial Silva, 2022 I had the good fortune to hear Daniel Silva speak in Houston earlier this summer while on his book tour for Portrait of an Unknown Woman. It was such a rare opportunity to see someone in person when you’ve read all his books and have formed an impression of who they […]
Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders
by Kathryn Miles, 2022 Just released on May 3, 2022, I’ve blasted through Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders within 5 days of its release date. This is a true account of two female backpackers who were murdered in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park in May 1996. They were there for a week-long […]
The Burning Light of Two Stars: A Mother-Daughter Story
By Laura Davis, 2021 I’m a member of a Facebook group that focuses on memoir writing, and this author, Laura Davis, is a regular contributor. I’ve seen her post helpful comments to other writers on occasion, and I’ve come to learn that she has been teaching the craft of writing for a living her entire […]
HumanKind: Changing the World One Small Act At a Time
by Brad Aronson, 2020 Brad wrote HumanKind after helping his wife through a leukemia diagnosis and treatment, and being overwhelmed by all the acts of kindness and generosity his family experienced from friends, family, and colleagues. He started writing down and collecting these stories, and tells how small acts can make a massive difference in […]
Never Simple: A Memoir
by Liz Scheier, 2022 There are mother-daughter stories, and then there are jaw-dropping mother-daughter stories, where you read them and think, can this possibly be real? Surely this is made up? Liz Scheier learns in her freshman year of college that she doesn’t have a birth certificate. No, it’s not a simple matter of the […]
Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner, 2021 Michelle Zauner has written a heartwarming story of love, loss, and food in her memoir Crying in H Mart, which came out in 2021. She is the only child of a Korean mother and an American father, and tells of her deep and abiding love of her mother whom she lost […]
Mercy Street
by Jennifer Haigh, 2022 Mercy Street is a novel about a women’s clinic in Boston, Massachusetts. The real name of the clinic, “Women’s Options,” hangs above the door, but everyone calls it “Mercy Street.” Here is where you go for contraceptives, well-woman visits, STD testing, and yes, abortion counseling and services. The focus of the […]
Notes on an Execution
by Danya Kukafka, 2022 Notes on an Execution had such an eerie, true-to-life feeling for me that at one point as I was listening to the audiobook, I had to stop and double-check what I’d purchased: was this fiction or nonfiction? Because it’s been a long, long time since I’ve listened to a book where […]
Razorblade Tears: A Novel
by S. A. Cosby, 2021 Sometimes I want to just dive into something trashy and escapist, and that’s when I reach for some good ol’ fashioned crime fiction. Let the bodies pile up! Razorblade Tears: A Novel is about two married gay men, Isiah and Derek, who get murdered. One is Black, one is white, […]
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency
by Tove Ditlevsen, 2021 The New York Times Book Review editors were wildly enthusiastic about The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency, and because I usually agree with their assessments, I dived in. But the deeper I got into this, I have to admit, the less I liked this author. This is a series of three […]
A Town Called Solace
by Mary Lawson, 2021 A Town Called Solace was longlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, and is quite different than most of the others I’ve read so far. Far from being a heavy drama, it’s an enjoyable, old-fashioned mystery where the author weaves together the lives of three seemingly disparate and unrelated individuals, all […]
The Fortune Men: A Novel
by Nadifa Mohamed, 2021 The Fortune Men was shortlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, and is a novel based on a true story set in Cardiff, Wales in the 1950s. A young Somali sailor by the name of Mahmood Mattan is falsely accused of murdering a shopkeeper named Lily Volpert (her name is changed […]
How Beautiful We Were: A Novel
by Imbolo Mbue, 2020 How Beautiful We Were: A Novel was listed as one of the 10 best books of 2021 by the New York Times Book Review editors. Set in a fictional village in Africa named Kosawa, it opens in October 1980 at a community meeting between three representatives of the American oil company […]
The Promise
by Damon Galgut, 2021 The Promise won the Man Booker Prize for Literary Fiction in 2021, and for the first time in a long time, I agree. This was an outstanding book that kept my attention from start to finish. The book centers around a White South African family named Swart, and the story opens […]
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, The Mirror & The Light
by Hilary Mantel, 2009, 2012, 2019 Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror & The Light I list together, as they are a trilogy by Hilary Mantel about the life of Thomas Cromwell, from the time he rose to power in Tudor England, in Henry VIII’s court, until his execution on the order […]
The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom, 2019 The Yellow House was the 2019 National Book Award Winner for Nonfiction. A memoir about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans, Louisiana, and how, in particular, it affected the poor. The “yellow house” is the house the author grew up in, the damage it sustained, and how it […]