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Updated February 2008
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Beneath a Marble Sky
by John Shors
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| Journey to dazzling seventeenth-century Hindustan, where the reigning emperor, consumed with grief over the tragic death of his beloved wife, commissions the building of the Taj Mahal as a testament to the marvel of their love. Princess Jahanara, their courageous daughter, recounts their mesmerizing tale, while sharing her own parallel tale of forbidden love with the celebrated architect of the Taj Mahal. This impressive novel sweeps readers away to a historical Hindustan brimming with action and intrigue in an era when, alongside the brutalities of war and oppression, architecture and the art of love and passion reached a pinnacle of perfection.
If
you enjoyed this book, you might enjoy:
The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
The Glass Castleby Jeanette Walls
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Five Quarters of the Orange
by Joanne Harris |
Returning to the small Loire village of her childhood, Framboise Dartigen is relived when no one recognizes her. Decades earlier, during the German occupation, her family was driven away because of a tragedy that still haunts the town.
Framboise has come back to run a little cafe serving the recipes her mother recorded in a scrapbook. But when her cooking receives national attention, her anonymity begins to shatter. Seeking answers, Framboise begins to see ther her mother's scrapbook is more than it seems. Hidden among the recipes for crepes and liquors are clues that will lead Framboise to the truth of long ago.
If
you enjoyed this book you should also try:
Death in the Garden by Elizabeth Ironside
Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich
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A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
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| By now, nearly every habitual news watcher knows that child soldiers are being used as human pawns in dozens of conflicts around the world. Indeed, the figures are staggering: As many as 300,000 children are currently fighting in wars. Behind these distressing figures, of course, are real-life children, some as young as 8. Journalistic reconstructions can take us only so far into the lives of these boys; we had to wait for this firsthand account by Sierra Leone native Ishmael Beah to truly understand this ghastly, life-shattering practice. Beah was only 13 when he was handed an AK-47 and sent off to the killing fields. A bracing memoir about a survivor in a world gone mad.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
What is the What by David Eggers
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
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One Small Boat
by Kathy Harrison |
This story of one little girl's journey through our foster-care system forms an intimate portrait of foster care in America and the children whose lives are forever shaped by it.
Augusten Burroughs called Kathy Harrison's memoir Another Place at the Table a "riveting and profoundly moving story of a hero, disguised as an everyday woman." In One Small Boat, Harrison tells the story of one little girl who arrived on her doorstep, and describes how caring for this child was an experience that challenged everything she thought she knew about foster-care parenting and the needs of the children she shelters.
Daisy was five when she arrived in Harrison's bustling home. Mother of three children by birth and three by adoption, and with a handful of foster kids always coming and going, Harrison had ten children under her roof at any given time. But Daisy was in many ways unique. Daisy's birth mother wasn't poor, uneducated, or drug addicted. She simply couldn't bring herself to take care of her little girl, and the effects on the child were heartrending. Daisy was unwilling to eat-even frightened of it-and seemed to have a severe speech impediment. After two weeks in Kathy's loving home, however, Daisy began to thrive. What had happened to her? And how can a foster-care parent give back all that has been taken from a child like Daisy-knowing that she might leave one day very soon? Harrison had seen many children pass through her doors, but this one touched her in a way she didn't immediately understand.
One Small Boat will be of deep interest to anyone who has nurtured and cared for a child or anyone interested in the intricate web that is our social welfare system.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
My Friend Leonard by James Frey
Strange Piece of Paradise by Terri Jentz
Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison.
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The Double Bind
by Chris Bohjalian
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In Chris Bohjalian's astonishing novel, nothing is what it at first seems. Not the bucolic Vermont back roads college sophomore Laurel Estabrook likes to bike. Not the savage assault she suffers toward the end of one of her rides. And certainly not Bobbie Crocker, the elderly man with a history of mental illness whom Laurel comes to know through her work at a Burlington homeless shelter in the years subsequent to the attack.
In his moments of lucidity, the gentle, likable Bobbie alludes to his earlier life as a successful photographer. Laurel finds it hard to believe that this destitute, unstable man could once have chronicled the lives of musicians and celebrities, but a box of photographs and negatives discovered among Bobbie's meager possessions after his death lends credence to his tale. How could such an accomplished man have fallen on such hard times? Becoming obsessed with uncovering Bobbie's past, Laurel studies his photographs, tracking down every lead they provide into the mystery of his life before homelessness — including links to the rich neighborhoods of her own Long Island childhood and to the earlier world of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, with its larger-than-life characters, elusive desires, and haunting sorrows.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Body Surfing by Anita Shreve
Whitethorn Woods by Maeve Binchy
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Up High in the Trees
by Kiara Brinkman |
| An exquisite debut novel about a family in turmoil told in the startling, deeply affecting voice of a nine-year-old, autistic boy. Following the sudden death of Sebby’s mother, his father takes Sebby to live in the family’s summerhouse, hoping it will give them both time and space to recover. But Sebby’s father deteriorates in this new isolation, leaving Sebby struggling to understand his mother’s death alone, dreaming and even re-living moments of her life. He ultimately reaches out to a favorite teacher back home and to two nearby children who force him out of the void of the past and help him to exist in the present. In spare and gorgeous prose buoyed by the life force of its small, fearless narrator, Up High in the Trees introduces an astonishingly fresh and powerful literary voice.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
All the Way Home by Lore Segal
The New Yorkers by Cathleen Schine
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There is No Me Without You
by Melissa Fay Greene
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| Two-time National Book Award nominee Melissa Fay Greene puts a human face on the African AIDS crisiswith this powerful story of one woman working to save her country’s children. After losing her husband and daughter, Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman of modest means, opened her home to some of the thousands of children in Addis Ababa who have been left as orphans. There Is No Me Without You is the story of how Haregewoin transformed her home into an orphanage and day-care center and began facilitating adoptions to homes all over the world, written by a star of literary nonfiction who is herself an adoptive parent. At heart, it is a book about children and parents, wherever they may be, however they may find each other. Winner of Elle magazine’s 2006 readers’ award in nonfiction.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
A Three Dog Life
by Abigail Thomas
Blind Willow Sleeping Women by Haruki Murakami
Rise and Shine by Ana Quindlen
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Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Moshin Hamid |
| At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an uneasy American stranger. As dusk deepens to night, he begins the tale that has brought them to this fateful meeting…
Changez is living an immigrant’s dream of America. At the top of his class at Princeton, he is snapped up by the elite “valuation” firm of Underwood Samson. He thrives on the energy of New York, and his infatuation with elegant, beautiful Erica promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family back in Lahore.
But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his position in his adopted city suddenly overturned, and his budding relationship with Erica eclipsed by the reawakened ghosts of her past. And Changez’s own identity is in seismic shift as well, unearthing allegiances more fundamental than money, power, and maybe even love.
If you enjoyed this book you should also try:
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
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