Just Mercy : a story of justice and redemption by Bryan Stevenson

A powerful true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix our broken system of justice—from one of the most brilliant and influential lawyers of our time

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need: the poor, the wrongly condemned, and women and children trapped in the farthest reaches of our criminal justice system. One of his first cases was that of Walter McMillian, a young man who was sentenced to die for a notorious murder he insisted he didn’t commit. The case drew Bryan into a tangle of conspiracy, political machination, and legal brinksmanship—and transformed his understanding of mercy and justice forever.

Just Mercy is at once an unforgettable account of an idealistic, gifted young lawyer’s coming of age, a moving window into the lives of those he has defended, and an inspiring argument for compassion in the pursuit of true justice.

336 pages (October 2014)

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Title Read-alikes: Beneath a Ruthless Sun by Gilbert King; Convicting the Innocent by Stanley Cohen; What the Eyes Don't See by Mona Hanna-Attisha; Confessions of an Innocent Man by David R. Dow; The Work by Wes Moore; On the Run by Alice Goffman; A Knock at Midnight by Brittany K. Barnett; Deep Delta Justice by Matthew Van Meter; The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander; Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates; Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck; Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance; and Anatomy of Injustice by Ramond Bonner.

All the Wrong Places: a life lost and found by Philip Connors

The prize-winning author of Fire Season returns with the heartrending story of his troubled years before finding solace in the wilderness.

In his debut Fire Season, Philip Connors recounted with lyricism, wisdom, and grace his decade as a fire lookout high above remote New Mexico. Now he tells the story of what made solitude on the mountain so attractive: the years he spent reeling in the wake of a family tragedy.

At the age of twenty-three, Connors was a young man on the make. He'd left behind the Minnesota pig farm on which he'd grown up and the brother with whom he'd never been especially close. He had a magazine job lined up in New York City and a future unfolding exactly as he’d hoped. Then one phone call out of the blue changed everything. All the Wrong Places is a searingly honest account of the aftermath of his brother's shocking death, exploring both the pathos and the unlikely humor of a life unmoored by loss.

Beginning with the otherworldly beauty of a hot-air-balloon ride over the skies of Albuquerque and ending in the wilderness of the American borderlands, this is the story of a man paying tribute to the dead by unconsciously willing himself into all the wrong places, whether at the copy desk of the Wall Street Journal, the gritty streets of Bed-Stuy in the 1990s, or the smoking rubble of the World Trade Center. With ruthless clarity and a keen sense of the absurd, Connors slowly unmasks the truth about his brother and himself, to devastating effect. Like Cheryl Strayed's Wild, this is a powerful look back at wayward years—and a redemptive story about finding one's rightful home in the world.

243 pages (February 2015)

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Title Read-alikes: The Splendid Things We Planned by Blake Bailey; Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene; Blue Nights by Joan Didion; After Visiting Friends: a son's story by Michael Hainey; Levels of Life by Julian Barnes; Spoiler Alert by Michael Ausiello; Life After Suicide by Jennifer Ashton; Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg; Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger; The Light of the World: a memoir by Elizabeth Alexander; Bastards by Mary Anna King; What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas; and Missing: a memoir by Lindsay Harrison.

The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens

College student Joe Talbert has the modest goal of completing a writing assignment for an English class. His task is to interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. With deadlines looming, Joe heads to a nearby nursing home to find a willing subject. There he meets Carl Iverson, and soon nothing in Joe's life is ever the same.

Carl is a dying Vietnam veteran--and a convicted murderer. With only a few months to live, he has been medically paroled to a nursing home, after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.

As Joe writes about Carl's life, especially Carl's valor in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the despicable acts of the convict. Joe, along with his skeptical female neighbor, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is hamstrung in his efforts by having to deal with his dangerously dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

Thread by thread, Joe unravels the tapestry of Carl’s conviction. But as he and Lila dig deeper into the circumstances of the crime, the stakes grow higher. Will Joe discover the truth before it’s too late to escape the fallout?

303 pages (October 2014)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Title Read-alikes: The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller; No Book But the World by Leah Hager Cohen; Safe Keeping by Barbara Taylor Sissel; A Dance of Ghosts by Kevin Brooks; Night Passage by Robert B. Parker; The Sins of the Fathers by Lawrence Block; Be Safe I Love You by Cara Hoffman; Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle; Me Before You by Jojo Moyes; Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger; Before the Fall by Noah Hawley; and Finding Laura Buggs by Stanley Gordon.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead.

That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.

Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: "Because survival is insufficient." But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all.

A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it. 

333 pages (September 2014)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Title Read-alikes: A Beginning at the End by Mike Chen; The Book of M by Peng Shepherd; Find Me by Laura Van Den Berg; The Dog Stars by Peter Heller; After the Flood by Kassandra Montag; On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee; Bannerless by Carrie Vaughn; Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter; The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker; Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy; The Lightest Object in the Universe by Kimi Eisele; Doomsday Book by Connie Willis; and Hyperion by Dan Simmons.

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger

New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new, young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.

 Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy unexpectedly strikes his family—which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother—he finds himself thrust into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a maturity and gumption beyond his years.

Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

307 pages (March 2013)

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To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)

 

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Ordinary Grace was our "One County, One Book Choice" for 2014 (thecountylibrary):

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Title Read-alikes: Montana 1948 by Larry Watson; Nothing More Dangerous by Allen Eskens; A Painted House by John Grisham; Unspeakable Things by Jess Lourey; Dodging and Burning by John Copenhaver; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield; Setting Free the Kites by Alex George; The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt; The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall; and The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley; News of the World by Paulette Jiles; and The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout.