Nowhere for Very Long: the unexpected road to an unconventional life by Brianna Madia

In this beautifully written, vividly detailed memoir, a young woman chronicles her adventures in an orange van named Bertha traveling across the deserts of the American West and reflects on an unconventional way of life

A woman defined by motion, Brianna Madia bought a beat-up bright orange van, filled it with her two dogs Bucket and Dagwood, and headed into the canyons of Utah with her husband on a journey of discovery. Nowhere for Very Long is her story of exploration--of the world outside and the spirit within. From the backroads to the breakdowns, married to solo, lost to found, it is the chronicle of a woman in the wild, learning and unlearning.

Brianna knew her road would be the one less traveled from an early age. Rejecting the competitive and capitalistic path set out before her, she chose to seek a truer version of happiness, a road scary, uncertain, and entirely her own. But pursing a life of intention isn't always what it seems. In fact, at times it was downright boring, exhausting, lonely, and even desperate----when the van overheated and she was forced to pull over on a lonely stretch of Wyoming highway; when the weather was bitterly cold and the water jugs froze beneath her we she slept in the parking lot of her office; when she faced tough choices, hard truths, and inevitable regrets; when she worried about money, her marriage, and the looming question mark of her future. But this life was a life of her choosing and that made all the difference.

Nowhere for Very Long isn't about extreme minimalism or tiny house living or #VanLife. It's about cherishing the moment and being a woman living a life true to herself, come what may.

260 pages (April 2022)

 

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12 Best Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Bookclubs

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Title Read-alikes: The Change: My Great American, Postindustrial, Midlife Crisis Tour by Lori Soderlind; Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women by Annabel Abbs; That wild country: An Epic Journey Through the Past, Present, and Future of America's Public Lands by Mark Kenyon;  Bowing to Elephants: Tales of a Travel Junkie by Mag Dimond; Alone Time by Stephanie Rosenbloom; Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World by Rita Golden Gelman; I Have Something to Tell You: a Memoir by Natalie Appleton; Bewildered by Laura Waters; Fly Girl: a Memoir by Ann Hood; Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad; Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir by Delia Ephron; Tracks: a Woman's Solo Trek across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson; and Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger.

Stranger Care: a memoir of loving what isn't ours by Sarah Sentilles

After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system's goal is reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question, evaluate, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their family--even if it means most likely having to give them back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day old baby girl, named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home.

"You were never ours," Sarah tells Coco, "yet we belong to each other."

A love letter to Coco, and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah's discovery of what it means to mother--in this case, not just a vulnerable infant, but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco's story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With "fearless, stirring, rhythmic" (Nick Flynn) prose, Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story, with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect each other? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we're all related--tree, bird, star, person--how might we better live?

404 pages (May 2021)

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13 Book Club Questions to Energize Any Meetup from Bustle

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Title Read-alikes: Rock Needs River: a memoir of a very open adoption by Vanessa McGrady; A Love-Stretched Life: stories on wrangling hope, embracing the unexpected, and discovering the meaning of family by Jilana Goble; Intertwined: a mother's memoir by Kathleen English Cadmus; The Girl in the Red Boots: making peace with my mother by Judith Ruskay Rabinor; You Carried Me: a daughter's memoir by Melissa Ohden; American Baby: a mother, a child, and the shadow history of adoption by Gabrielle Glaser; When the Bough Breaks: true stories of hope and encouragement of mothers who have had to reinvent their relationships with their children by Nancy Ferraro; Don't You Ever: my mother and her secret son by Mary Carter Bishop; Raising Abel by Carolyn Nash; Little Bandaged Days by Kyra Wilder; House of Sticks: a memoir by Ly Tran; Another Place at the Table by Kathy Harrison; and Why Didn't You Tell Me?: a memoir by Carmen Rita Wong.

A Woman of No Importance: the untold story of the American spy who helped win WWII by Sonia Purnell

The never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II, from the author of Clementine: the life of Mrs. Winston Churchill

in 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and--despite her prosthetic leg--helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

Virginia established vast spy networks throughout France, called weapons and explosives down from the skies, and became a linchpin for the Resistance. Even as her face covered wanted posters and a bounty was placed on her head, Virginia refused order after order to evacuate. She finally escaped through a death-defying hike over the Pyrenees into Spain, her cover blown. But she plunged back in, adamant that she had more lives to save, and led a victorious guerilla campaign, liberating swathes of France from the Nazis after D-Day.

Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall--an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance, and personal triumph over shocking adversity. A Woman of No Importance is the breathtaking story of how one woman's fierce persistence helped win the war.

352 pages (April 2019)

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 Virginia Hall: The Courage and Daring of "The Limping Lady" from the CIA

 

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Virginia Hall: The Most Feared Spy of World War II (from Biographics) :

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Title Read-alikes: The Wolves at the Door : the true story of America's greatest female spy by Judith Pearson; The Double Life of Katharine Clark: the untold story of the fearless journalist who risked her life for truth and justice by Katharine Gregorio; D-Day Girls: the spies who armed the resistance, sabotaged the Nazis, and helped win World War II by Sarah Rose; Code Name: the true story of the woman who became WWII's most highly decorated spy by Larry Loftis; Code Name Madeleine: a Sufi spy in Nazi-occupied Paris by Arthur J. Magida; Madame Fourcade's Secret War: the daring young woman who led France's largest spy network against Hitler by Lynne Olson; The Last Goodnight: a World War II story of espionage, adventure, and betrayal by Howard Blum; Agent Jack: the true story of MI5's secret Nazi hunter by Robert Hutton; D-Day girls: the spies who armed the resistance, sabotaged the Nazis, and helped win World War II by Sarah Rose; The Splendid and the Vile: a saga of Churchill, family, and defiance during the blitz by Erik Larson; Flames in the Field: the story of four SOE agents in occupied France by Rita Kramer; and Code Girls: the untold story of the American women code breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy.

Inheritance: a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love by Dani Shapiro

A new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery Shapiro recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden story of her own life.

What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?

In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her.

Inheritance is a book about secrets--secrets within families, kept out of shame or self-protectiveness; secrets we keep from one another in the name of love. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that has been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years, years she had spent writing brilliantly, and compulsively, on themes of identity and family history. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in--a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover.

Timely and unforgettable, Dani Shapiro's memoir is a gripping, gut-wrenching exploration of genealogy, paternity, and love.

247 pages (January 2019)

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Dani Shapiro answers your questions (PBS NewsHour):

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Title Read-alikes: Before My Time: a memoir of love and fate by Ami McKay; The Forgetting River: a modern tale of survival, identity, and the Inquisition by Doreen Carvajal; Go Ask Your Father: one man's obsession with finding his origins through DNA testing by Lennard J. Davis; Wild Game: my mother, her secret, and me by Adrienne Brodeur; Futureface: a family mystery, a search for identity, and the truth about belonging by Alex Wagner; When I Was White: a memoir by Sarah Valentine; Aftershocks: a memoir by Nadia Owusu; Why Didn't You Tell Me?: a memoir by Carmen Rita Wong; The Family Outing: a memoir by Jessi Hempel; Unorthodox: the scandalous rejection of my Hasidic roots by Deborah Feldman; Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain; A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias; and The Tiny One by Eliza Minot.

In Order to Live: a North Korean girl's journey to freedom by Yeonmi Park

Human rights activist Park, who fled North Korea with her mother in 2007 at age 13 and eventually made it to South Korea two years later after a harrowing ordeal, recognized that in order to be "completely free," she had to confront the truth of her past. It is an ugly, shameful story of being sold with her mother into slave marriages by Chinese brokers, and although she at first tried to hide the painful details when blending into South Korean society, she realized how her survival story could inspire others. Moreover, her sister had also escaped earlier and had vanished into China for years, prompting the author to go public with her story in the hope of finding her sister.

Yeonmi Park has told the harrowing story of her escape from North Korea as a child many times, but never before has she revealed the most intimate and devastating details of the repressive society she was raised in and the enormous price she paid to escape.

Park’s family was loving and close-knit, but life in North Korea was brutal, practically medieval. Park would regularly go without food and was made to believe that, Kim Jong Il, the country’s dictator, could read her mind. After her father was imprisoned and tortured by the regime for trading on the black-market, a risk he took in order to provide for his wife and two young daughters, Yeonmi and her family were branded as criminals and forced to the cruel margins of North Korean society. With thirteen-year-old Park suffering from a botched appendectomy and weighing a mere sixty pounds, she and her mother were smuggled across the border into China.

273 pages (September 2015)

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40 Great Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

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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.)

 

In Order to Live at goodreads

 

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Yeonmi Park: ‘I hope my book will shine a light on the darkest place in the world’ (Author Interview) from The Guardian

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Yeonmi Park's North Korean Defector Story (ReasonTV):

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Title Read-alikes: A River in Darkness: one man's escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa; Dear Leader: poet, spy, escapee-- a look inside North Korea by Jin-sung Jang; Escaping North Korea: defiance and hope in the world's most repressive country by Mike Kim; The Girl with Seven Names: a North Korean defector's story by Hyeonseo Lee; The Last Girl: my story of captivity, and my fight against the Islamic State by Nadia Murad; Stars Between the Sun and Moon: one woman's life in North Korea and escape to freedom by Lucia Jang; Escape from Camp 14: one man's remarkable odyssey from North Korea to freedom in the West by Blaine Harden; The Prisoner by Hwang Sok-yong; Refugee by Emmanuel Mbolela; A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea by Eunsun Kim; Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea's Elite by Suki Kim; Long Road Home: Testimony of a North Korean Camp Survivor by Yong Kim;  and Raif Badawi, The Voice of Freedom: My Husband, Our Story by Ensaf Haidar.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe by Sara Seager

In this luminous memoir, an MIT astrophysicist must reinvent herself in the wake of tragedy and discovers the power of connection on this planet, even as she searches our galaxy for another Earth.

Sara Seager has always been in love with the stars: so many lights in the sky, so much possibility. Now a pioneering planetary scientist, she searches for exoplanets—especially that distant, elusive world that sustains life. But with the unexpected death of Seager's husband, the purpose of her own life becomes hard for her to see. Suddenly, at forty, she is a widow and the single mother of two young boys. For the first time, she feels alone in the universe.

As she struggles to navigate her life after loss, Seager takes solace in the alien beauty of exoplanets and the technical challenges of exploration. At the same time, she discovers earthbound connections that feel every bit as wondrous, when strangers and loved ones alike reach out to her across the space of her grief. Among them are the Widows of Concord, a group of women offering advice on everything from home maintenance to dating, and her beloved sons, Max and Alex. Most unexpected of all, there is another kind of one-in-a-billion match, not in the stars but here at home.

Probing and invigoratingly honest, The Smallest Lights in the Universe is its own kind of light in the dark.

308 pages (August 2020)

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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 Disordered Cosmos: a journey into dark matter, spacetime, and dreams deferred by Chandra Prescod-Weinstein; Lab Girl by Hope Jahren; The Inward Empire: mapping the wilds of mortality and fatherhood by Christian Donian; Wired for Love: a neuroscientist's journey through romance, loss, and the essence of human connection by Stephanie Cacioppo; I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust: a memoir of autism and hope by Valerie Gilpeer; Mother Brain: how neuroscience is rewriting the story of parenthood by Chelsea Conaboy; The Perpetual Now: a story of amnesia, memory, and love by Michael D Lemonick; Little Matches: a memoir of grief and light by Maryanne O'Hara; The Seasons of My Mother: a memoir of love, family, and flowers by Marcia Gay Harden; Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison; Unreliable Truth: on memoir and memory by Maureen Murdock; My Stroke of Insight: a brain scientist's personal journey by Jill Bolte Taylor; and Until I Say Good-Bye: my year of living with joy by Susan Spencer-Wendel.

Crying in H Mart: a memoir by Michelle Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

256 pages (April 2021)

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The Best Book Club Questions to Spark Discussion from The Oprah Magazine

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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.)

 

Crying in H Mart at goodreads

 

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Inside the Book Michelle Zauner (from Penguin Random House):

H Mart x Michelle Zauner Collab | Author Interview (from H Mart):

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Title Read-alikes: The Magical Language of Others: a memoir by E.J. Koh;  Tastes Like War: a memoir by Grace M. Cho;  Seeing Ghosts: a memoir by Kat Chow; Dead Mom Walking: a memoir of miracle cures and other disasters by Rachel Matlow; Beautiful Country: a memoir by Qian Julie Wang;  Family in Six Tones: a refugee mother, an American daughter by Lan Cao; All You Can Ever Know: a memoir by Nicole Chung; Speak, Okinawa: a memoir by Elizabeth Miki Brina; House of Sticks: a memoir by Ly Tran; Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?: a memoir by Séamas O'Reilly; A Drop of Midnight: a memoir by Jason Timbuktu Diakité; Dog Flowers: a memoir by Danielle Geller; My Life in the Sunshine: searching for my father and discovering my family by Nabil Ayers.

Memorial Drive: a daughter’s memoir by Natasha D. Trethewey

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.

At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.

With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother's life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.

Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

211 pages (July 2020)

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Book Page at BookBrowse.

Reading Guide from BookMovement.

Reading Guide from ReadingGroupChoices.

 

40 Great Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

The Best Book Club Questions to Spark Discussion from The Oprah Magazine

(General) Memoir Discussion Questions from Reading Group Guides.

 

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.)

 

Memorial Drive at goodreads

 

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Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey faces her mother’s murder in Memorial Drive | Amanpour and Company:

 

The 'existential wound' that fueled poet Natasha Trethewey's acclaimed career (PBS NewsHour):

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Title Read-alikes: Educated: a memoir by Tara Westover; Blood: a memoir by Allison Moorer; After the Eclipse: a mother's murder, a daughter's search by Sarah Perry; Everything is Fine: a memoir by Vince Granata; Dog Flowers: a memoir by Danielle Geller; Somebody's Daughter: a memoir by Ashley C. Ford; The Officer's Daughter: a memoir of family and forgiveness by Elle Johnson; Wild Game: my mother, her lover, and me by Adrienne Brodeur; No One Crosses the Wolf: a memoir by Lisa Nikolidakis; Bright: a memoir by Kiki Petrosino; Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward; Walking Gentry Home: a memoir of my foremothers in verse by Alora Young; and Dear Denise: letters to the sister I never knew by Lisa McNair.

The Sun Is a Compass: a 4,000-mile journey into the Alaskan wilds by Caroline Van Hemert

The gripping story of a biologist's journey from Washington State to high above the Arctic Circle - traveling across remote and rugged terrain solely by human power - to rediscover birds, the natural world, and her own love of science.

During graduate school, as she conducted experiments on the peculiarly misshapen beaks of chickadees, ornithologist Caroline Van Hemert began to feel stifled in the isolated, sterile environment of the lab. Worried that she was losing her passion for the scientific research she once loved, she was compelled to experience wildness again, to be guided by the sounds of birds and to follow the trails of animals.

In March of 2012 she and her husband set off on a 4,000-mile wilderness journey from the Pacific rainforest to the Alaskan Arctic, traveling by rowboat, ski, foot, raft, and canoe. Together, they survived harrowing dangers while also experiencing incredible moments of joy and grace - migrating birds silhouetted against the moon, the steamy breath of caribou, and the bond that comes from sharing such experiences. A unique blend of science, adventure, and personal narrative, the book explores the bounds of the physical body and the tenuousness of life in the company of creatures whose daily survival is nothing short of miraculous. It is a journey through the heart, the mind, and some of the wildest places left in North America.

In the end, The Sun Is a Compass is a love letter to nature, an inspiring story of endurance, and a beautifully written testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

 

308 pages (March 2019)

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40 Great Book Club Discussion Questions for Any Book from Book Riot

 

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Book Trailer:

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Title Read-alikes:

On Call in the Arctic by Thomas J. Sims; Trespassing Across America by Ken Ilgunas; Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North by Blair Braverman; Northernmost by Peter Geye; How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery; Kissed by a Fox by Priscilla Stuckey; On Trails by Robert Moor; My Penguin Year Lindsay McCrae; Fathoms by Rebecca Giggs; The Adventurer's Son: A Memoir by Roman Dial; Lands of the Lost Borders by Kate Harris; A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River by Dan O'Neill; and Into the Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver by Jill Heinerth.