What the Waves Know by Tamara Valentine

In the tradition of Sue Monk Kidd and Beth Hoffman comes a compelling debut novel about a young woman's quest to find herself—and her voice—on the island where she lost both. The tiny state of Rhode Island is home to even tinier Tillings Island—which witnessed the biggest event of Izabella Rae Haywood's life. For it was there, on Iz's sixth birthday, that her father left...and took her voice with him.

Eight years later in the summer of 1974, Iz’s mother is through with social workers, psychiatrists and her daughter's silence. In one last attempt to return Iz’s voice, the motley pair board the ferry to Tillings in hopes that the journey will help Izabella heal herself by piecing together splintered memories of the day her words fled.

But heartbreak is a difficult puzzle to solve, and everyone in Tillings seems to know something Iz does not. Worse, each has an opinion about Izabella's dreamer of a father, the undercurrents of whose actions have spun so many lives off course.

Now, as the island's annual Yemayá festival prepares to celebrate the ties that bind mothers to children, lovers to each other, and humankind to the sea, Izabella must unravel the tangled threads of her own history and reclaim a voice gone silent…or risk losing herself—and any chance she may have for a future—to the past. What the Waves Know is a moving, magical novel that asks us to consider the stories which tell the truth and the stories we tell ourselves.

326 pages (February 2016)

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Title Read-alikes: The Stars are Fire by Anita Shreve; Dreams of Falling by Karen White; Family Tree by Susan Wiggs; Monogamy by Sue Miller; Porch Lights by Dorothea Benton Frank; Where We Belong by Emily Giffin; Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons; The Second Home by Christina Clancy; Rainy Day Sisters by Kate Hewitt; Terrible Virtue by Ellen Feldman; The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach by Pam Jenoff and Mystic Summer by Hannah McKinnon; and The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen.

Half a Life: a memoir by Darin Strauss

Half my life ago, I killed a girl.

So begins Darin Strauss? Half a Life, the true story of how one outing in his father's Oldsmobile resulted in the death of a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author. We follow Strauss as he explores his startling past collision, funeral, the queasy drama of a high-stakes court case and what starts as a personal tale of a tragic event opens into the story of how to live with a very hard fact: we can try our human best in the crucial moment, and it might not be good enough. Half a Life is a nakedly honest, ultimately hopeful examination of guilt, responsibility, and living with the past.

In this powerful, unforgettable memoir, acclaimed novelist Darin Strauss examines the far-reaching consequences of the tragic moment that has shadowed his whole life. In his last month of high school, he was behind the wheel of his dad's Oldsmobile, driving with friends, heading off to play mini-golf. Then: a classmate swerved in front of his car. The collision resulted in her death. With piercing insight and stark prose, Darin Strauss leads us on a deeply personal, immediate, and emotional journey—graduating high school, going away to college, starting his writing career, falling in love with his future wife, becoming a father. Along the way, he takes a hard look at loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and, at last, acceptance. The result is a staggering, uplifting tour de force.

211 pages (September 2010)

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Title Read-alikes: The Day That Went Missing by Richard Beard; Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey; What Lies Between Us by Nayomi Munaweera; Silent Night by Danielle Steel; Kayak Morning by Roger Rosenblatt; A Better Place by Pati Navalta Poblete; Blame by Michelle Huneven; Kadian Journal by Thomas Harding; Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman; Life After Suicide by Jennifer Ashton; My Dead Parents by Anya Yurchyshyn; The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick; and Dancing with the Octopus by Deborah Harding.

A Deadly Wandering: a tale of tragedy and redemption in the age of attention by Matt Richtel

A brilliant, narrative-driven exploration of technology’s vast influence on the human mind and society, dramatically-told through the lens of a tragic “texting-while-driving” car crash that claimed the lives of two rocket scientists in 2006.

In this ambitious, compelling, and beautifully written book, Matt Richtel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, examines the impact of technology on our lives through the story of Utah college student Reggie Shaw, who killed two scientists while texting and driving. Richtel follows Reggie through the tragedy, the police investigation, his prosecution, and ultimately, his redemption.

In the wake of his experience, Reggie has become a leading advocate against “distracted driving.” Richtel interweaves Reggie’s story with cutting-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains, proposing solid, practical, and actionable solutions to help manage this crisis individually and as a society.

A propulsive read filled with fascinating, accessible detail, riveting narrative tension, and emotional depth, A Deadly Wandering explores one of the biggest questions of our time—what is all of our technology doing to us?—and provides unsettling and important answers and information we all need.

403 pages (September 2014)

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Title Read-alikes: Alone Together by Sherry Turkle; More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer; The Organized Mind by Daniel J. Levitin; Now You See It by Cathy N. Davidson; The Shallows by Nicholas Carr; Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz; Life in Code by Ellen Ullman; The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson; Abundance by Peter H. Diamandis; The Four by Scott Galloway; The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain;  and Pilgrim's Wilderness by Tom Kizzia.

Bettyville: a memoir by George Hodgman

A witty, tender memoir of a son’s journey home to care for his irascible mother—a tale of secrets, silences, and enduring love.

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living?

When hell freezes over. He can’t bring himself to force her from the home both treasure—the place where his father’s voice lingers, the scene of shared jokes, skirmishes, and, behind the dusty antiques, a rarely acknowledged conflict: Betty, who speaks her mind but cannot quite reveal her heart, has never really accepted the fact that her son is gay.

As these two unforgettable characters try to bring their different worlds together, Hodgman reveals the challenges of Betty’s life and his own struggle for self-respect, moving readers from their small town—crumbling but still colorful—to the star-studded corridors of Vanity Fair. Evocative of The End of Your Life Book Club and The Tender Bar, Hodgman’s debut is both an indelible portrait of a family and an exquisitely told tale of a prodigal son’s return.

278 pages (March 2015)

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Title Read-alikes: Mama's Boy: a story from our Americas by Dustin Lance Black; Dangerous When Wet: a memoir of booze, sex, and my mother by Jamie Brickhouse; Like Crazy: life with my mother and her invisible friends by Dan Mathews; All Gone by Alex Witchel; Moving Miss Peggy: a story of dementia, courage, and consolation by Robert Benson; This Is How You Say Goodbye: a daughter's memoir by Victoria Loustalot; Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast; Another Country: navigating the emotional terrain of our elders by Mary Pipher; Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; Learning to Sit in the Silence: a journal of caretaking by Elaine Marcus Starkman; Happens Every Day: an all-too-true story by Isabel Gillies; I'll Be Seeing You: a memoir by Elizabeth Berg; and Blue Nights by Joan Didion.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

A stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall.

In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where his path converges with Marie-Laure.

Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is his most ambitious and dazzling work.

531 pages (May 2014)

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Title Read-alikes: Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans; The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder; Simon the Fiddler by Paulette Jiles; The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje; In the Wolf's Mouth by Adam Foulds; Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark T. Sullivan; The Summer Guest by Alison Anderson; Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi; Jacob's Oath by Martin Fletcher; The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel; The Paris Hours by Alex George; The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah; and The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.

My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me: a black woman discovers her family's Nazi past by Jennifer Teege

The internationally bestselling memoir hailed as "unforgettable" (Publishers Weekly) and "a stunning memoir of cultural trauma and personal identity" (Booklist).

When Jennifer Teege, a German-Nigerian woman, happened to pluck a library book from the shelf, she had no idea that her life would be irrevocably altered. Recognizing photos of her mother and grandmother in the book, she discovers a horrifying fact: Her grandfather was Amon Goeth, the vicious Nazi commandant chillingly depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List—a man known and reviled the world over.

Although raised in an orphanage and eventually adopted, Teege had some contact with her biological mother and grandmother as a child. Yet neither revealed that Teege's grandfather was the Nazi "butcher of Plaszów," executed for crimes against humanity in 1946. The more Teege reads about Amon Goeth, the more certain she becomes: If her grandfather had met her—a black woman—he would have killed her.

Teege's discovery sends her, at age 38, into a severe depression—and on a quest to unearth and fully comprehend her family's haunted history. Her research takes her to Krakow—to the sites of the Jewish ghetto her grandfather "cleared" in 1943 and the Plaszów concentration camp he then commanded—and back to Israel, where she herself once attended college, learned fluent Hebrew, and formed lasting friendships. Teege struggles to reconnect with her estranged mother Monika, and to accept that her beloved grandmother once lived in luxury as Amon Goeth's mistress at Plaszów.

Teege's story is cowritten by award-winning journalist Nikola Sellmair, who also contributes a second, interwoven narrative that draws on original interviews with Teege's family and friends and adds historical context. Ultimately, Teege's resolute search for the truth leads her, step by step, to the possibility of her own liberation.

229 pages (April 2015)

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Title Read-alikes: Stalin's Daughter by Rosemary Sullivan; The Perfect Nazi by Martin Davidson; The Other Madisons by Bettye Kearse; On Hitler's Mountain by Irmgard A. Hunt; A Guest at the Shooter's Banquet by Rita Gabis; Castro's Daughter by Alina Fernandez Revuelta; Inge's War by Svenja O'Donnell; The Choice by Edith Eva Eger; Belonging by Nora Krug; The Takeaway Men by Meryl Ain; When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew by Hedrika de Vries; History of a Disappearance by Filip Springer; and Irena's Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

The Boys in the Boat: nine Americans and their epic quest for gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel Brown

For readers of Laura Hillenbrand's Seabiscuit and Unbroken, the dramatic story of the American rowing team that stunned the world at Hitler's 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown's robust book tells the story of the University of Washington's 1936 eight-oar crew and their epic quest for an Olympic gold medal, a team that transformed the sport and grabbed the attention of millions of Americans. The sons of loggers, shipyard workers, and farmers, the boys defeated elite rivals first from eastern and British universities and finally the German crew rowing for Adolf Hitler in the Olympic games in Berlin, 1936.

The emotional heart of the story lies with one rower, Joe Rantz, a teenager without family or prospects, who rows not for glory, but to regain his shattered self-regard and to find a place he can call home. The crew is assembled  by an enigmatic coach and mentored by a visionary, eccentric British boat builder, but it is their trust in each other that makes them a victorious team. They remind the country of what can be done when everyone quite literally pulls together—a perfect melding of commitment, determination, and optimism.

Drawing on the boys' own diaries and journals, their photos and memories of a once-in-a-lifetime shared dream, The Boys in the Boat is an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times—the improbable, intimate story of nine working-class boys from the American west who, in the depths of the Great Depression, showed the world what true grit really meant. It will appeal to readers of Erik Larson, Timothy Egan, James Bradley, and David Halberstam's The Amateurs.

741 pages (June 2013)

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Title Read-alikes: Touch the Top of the World: a blind man's journey to climb farther than the eye can see by Erik Wehenmayer; Games of Deception: the true story of the first U.S. Olympic basketball team at the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany by Andrew Maraniss; Outcasts United: the story of a refugee soccer team that changed a town by Warren St. John; Dust Bowl Girls: the inspiring story of the team that barnstormed its way to basketball glory by Lydia Reeder; The Three-Year Swim Club: the untold story of Maui's Sugar Ditch Kids and their quest for Olympic glory by Julie Checkoway; Olympic Gold 1936: how the image of Jesse Owens crushed Hitler's evil myth by Michael Burgan; What a Kick by Emma Carlson Berne; 1776 by David McCullough; Into Thin Air: a personal account of the Mount Everest disaster by Jon Krakauer; Course Correction: a story of rowing and resilience in the wake of Title IX by Ginny Gilder; Bucking the Sun by Ivan Doig; The Last Amateurs: to hell and back with the Cambridge boat race crew by Mark de Rond; and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

It is 1960 in North Carolina and the lives of Ivy Hart and Jane Forrester couldn’t be more different. Fifteen-year-old Ivy lives with her family as tenants on a small tobacco farm, but when her parents die, Ivy is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew. As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
 

When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she is given the task of recommending which of her clients should be sterilized without their knowledge or consent. The state’s rationalization is that if her clients are poor, or ill, or deemed in some way "unfit," they should not be allowed to have children. But soon Jane becomes emotionally invested in her clients’ lives, causing tension with her new husband and her supervisors. No one understands why Jane would want to become a caseworker for the Department of Public Health when she could be a housewife and Junior League member. As Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm --- secrets much darker than she would have guessed. Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing a life-changing battle.

Necessary Lies is the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy. Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: How can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong?

343 pages (September 2013)

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Title Read-alikes: Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate; Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout; God Help the Child by Toni Morrison; The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips; The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin; Some Luck by Jane Smiley; The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray; Nightwoods by Charles Frazier; Betty by Tiffany McDaniel; Cold Rock River by J. L. Miles; Unfit by Lara Cleveland Torgeson; The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult;  and 28 Summers by Erin Hilderbrand.

The Seven Good Years: a memoir by Etgar Keret

A brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller.

The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.

What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love that tie a family together forever. This wise, witty memoir—Etgar’s first nonfiction book published in America, and told in his inimitable style—is full of wonder and life and love, poignant insights, and irrepressible humor.
 

171 pages (June 2015)

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Title Read-alikes: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast; Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen; The Longest Trip Home by John Grogan; The Rainbow Comes and Goes by Anderson Cooper; The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion; Dimestore by Lee Smith; Reading My Father by Alexandra Styron; Riding with the Ghost by Justin Taylor; A Place of Exodus by David Biespiel; Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua; A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz; A Table for One by Aharon Appelfeld; and The Hilltop by Assaf Gavron.