An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward - with hope and pain - into the future.

A 2018 Oprah's Book Club Selection, and winner of the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy's time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy's conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control.

308 pages (February 2018)

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Title Read-alikes: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner; The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray; If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin; Monogamy by Sue Miller; The Mothers by Brit Bennett; Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward; Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson; The Opposite of Everyone by Joshilyn Jackson; Afterlife by Julia Alvarez; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo; Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams; and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett.

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.

A House in the Sky: a memoir by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett

The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the world’s most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity—an exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and grace.

As a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somalia—“the most dangerous place on earth.” On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.

Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives “wife lessons” from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memory—every lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivity—and on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.

Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.

373 pages (September 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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"How journalist Amanda Lindhout's brutal kidnapper was brought to justice" from NBC News

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Amanda Lindhout interview (Citytv):

Title Read-alikes: In the Presence of My Enemies by Gracia Burnham; A Rope and a Prayer by David Rohde; Hostage by Paul Chandler; The Shattered Lens by Jonathan Alpeyrie; The ISIS Hostage by Puk Damsgard; Beneath the Tamarind Tree by Isha Sesay; Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden; The Girl Who Escaped ISIS by Farida Khalaf; The Translator by Daroud Hari; Five Days at Memorial by Sheri Fink; Under an Afghan Sky by Melissa Funk; The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi; From the Ashes by Jesse Thistle; One Day Closer by Lorinda Stewart; and The Price of Life by Nigel Brennan.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: a natural history of four Meals by Michael Pollan

What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

450 pages (April 2006)

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Title Read-alikes: Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer; Foodopoly by Wenonoah Hauter; Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver; What to Eat by Marion Nestle; The Third Plate by Dan Barber; The Jemima Code by Toni Tipton-Martin; Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer; Food and the City by Ina L. Yalof; and 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman's sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer's disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

Reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind, Ordinary People and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Still Alice packs a powerful emotional punch and marks the arrival of a strong new voice in fiction.

293 pages (July 2007)

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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: Losing My Mind by Thomas DeBaggio; The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey; The Echo Maker by Richard Powers; Left by Mary Hogan; Trust No One by Paul Cleave; Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante; My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout; The Children Act by Ian McEwan; and Lost and Wanted by Nell Freudenberger.