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Reading Challenge A debut novel |
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On Earth we're briefly gorgeous
by Ocean Vuong
A portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling. On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born--a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam--and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.
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Amy and Isabelle
by Elizabeth Strout
When Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student, falls in love with her math teacher, the love affair threatens the intimate relationship between Amy and her mother, Isabelle, whose feelings are influenced by the shame of her own past.
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The safekeep
by Yael Van Der Wouden
It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother's country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep -- as a guest, there to stay for the season.
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Shuggie Bain: a novel
by Douglas Stuart
A stunning debut novel by a masterful writer telling the heartwrenching story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, whose love is only matched by her pride.
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Burnt sugar
by Avni Doshi
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless 'artist' - all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. This is a love story and a story about betrayal. But not between lovers - between mother and daughter.
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The god of small things
by Arundhati Roy
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale.... Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen. With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it."
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The white tiger
by Aravind Adiga
At the heart of the novel is Balram Halwai, the so-called "white tiger"--a rare creature who rises against the odds. Born in a poor Indian village, Balram becomes a driver for a wealthy family in Delhi before reinventing himself as a self-made Bangalore entrepreneur. As he recounts his journey in a letter to the visiting president of China, Balram exposes the contradictions of Indian society, where deep-rooted traditions of servitude and inequality collide with the promise of global business and outsourcing. Wickedly funny, brutally honest, and deeply provocative, The White Tiger reveals the stark realities of class, corruption, and opportunity in contemporary India.
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The correspondent
by Virginia Evans
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.
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Great Black hope by Rob Franklin
| An arrest for cocaine possession in the Hamptons on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a young queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not... He flees to his hometown of Atlanta, but the weight of expectations from his family of doctors, lawyers, and college presidents only pushes him further into his downward spiral. |
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Sleep
by Honor Jones
After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of suburban life, and of girlhood, slip away. Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She's newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover... Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to make a child feel safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
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Awake in the floating city
by Susanna Kwan
An utterly transporting debut novel about the unexpected relationship between an artist and the 130-year-old woman she cares for--two of the last people living in a flooded San Francisco of the future, the home neither is ready to leave. matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.
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Woodworking
by Emily St James
Erica Skyberg is thirty-five years old, recently divorced, and trans. Not that she's told anyone yet. Mitchell, South Dakota, isn't exactly bursting with other trans women. Instead, she keeps to herself, teaching by day and directing community theater by night. That is, until Abigail Hawkes enters her orbit. Abigail is seventeen, Mitchell High's resident political dissident and Only Trans Girl. It's a role she plays faultlessly, albeit a little reluctantly. She's also annoyed by the idea of spending her senior year secretly guiding her English teacher through her transition. But Abigail remembers the uncertainty--and loneliness--that comes with it. Besides, Erica isn't the only one struggling to shed the weight of others' expectations. As their unlikely friendship evolves under the increasing scrutiny of their community, both women, and those closest to them, will come to realize that sometimes there is nothing more radical than letting the world see who you really are.
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Discipline
by Larissa Pham
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she's seeking answers--about how to live a good life and what it means to make art--through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends. But when the antagonist of her novel--her old painting professor--reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it.
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Under water
by Tara Menon
After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his wife's research, whisks her across the globe to Thailand. There she meets Arielle, and a fairytale friendship takes hold. During the week, the girls live at the resort owned by Arielle's parents; on the weekends they join the tight-knit community of researchers on a nearby island. Together the girls discover the fragile wonders of its reefs, forests, and beaches. Together they learn to dive into the deep, holding their breath for minutes at a time, as effortlessly synchronized as the manta rays they come to know by name. Together they learn to swim their way out of danger. But then comes a wave Arielle can't outpace, leaving Marissa gutted with loss. Years later, Marissa is back in New York, adrift and haunted by the memory of her friend. Over the course of two fateful days, as another cataclysm approaches the city and the past comes flooding back, she discovers how to sustain herself in a precarious world.
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Disappearing Earth
by Julia Phillips
One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
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The house at Riverton
by Kate Morton
Grace Bradley went to work at Riverton House as a servant when she was just a girl, before the First World War. For years her life was inextricably tied up with the Hartford family, most particularly the two daughters, Hannah and Emmeline. In the summer of 1924, at a glittering society party held at the house, a young poet shot himself. The only witnesses were Hannah and Emmeline and only they -- and Grace -- know the truth. In 1999, when Grace is ninety-eight years old and living out her last days in a nursing home, she is visited by a young director who is making a film about the events of that summer. She takes Grace back to Riverton House and reawakens her memories. Told in flashback, this is the story of Grace's youth during the last days of Edwardian aristocratic privilege shattered by war, of the vibrant twenties and the changes she witnessed as an entire way of life vanished forever.
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There there
by Tommy Orange
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame in Oakland. Dene Oxedrene is pulling his life together after his uncle's death and has come to work the powwow and to honor his uncle's memory. Edwin Frank has come to find his true father Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil Red Feather; Orvil has taught himself Indian dance through YouTube videos, and he has come to the Big Oakland Powwow to dance in public for the very first time. This is a multi-generational story about violence and recovery, hope and loss, identity and power, dislocation and communion, and the beauty and despair woven into the history of a nation and its people.
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Shark heart : a love story
by Emily Habeck
For Lewis and Wren, their first year of marriage is also their last. A few weeks after their wedding, Lewis receives a rare diagnosis. He will retain most of his consciousness, memories, and intellect, but his physical body will gradually turn into a great white shark. As Lewis develops the features and impulses of one of the most predatory creatures in the ocean, his complicated artist's heart struggles to make peace with his unfulfilled dreams. At first, Wren internally resists her husband's fate. Is there a way for them to be together after Lewis changes?
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Lungfish
by Meghan Gilliss
Tuck is slow to understand the circumstances that have driven her family to an uninhabited island off the coast of Maine, the former home of her deceased grandmother where she once spent her childhood summers. Squatting there now, she must care for her spirited young daughter and scrape together enough money to leave before winter arrives-or before they are found out. Relying on the island for sustenance and answers-bladderwrack, rosehips, tenacious little green crabs; smells held by the damp walls of the house, field guides and religious texts, a failed invention left behind by her missing father--Tuck lives moment-by-moment through the absurdity, beauty, paranoia, and hunger that shoots through her life, as her husband struggles to detox. Exquisitely written and formally daring, Lungfish tells the story of a woman grappling through the lies she has been told-and those she has told herself-to arrive at the truth of who she is and where she must go.
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After you'd gone
by Maggie O'Farrell
A young woman named Alice Raikes boards a train to Scotland to visit her family. But when she arrives, she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London that very minute. Only a few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt.With Alice's life hanging in the balance, her family gathers at her bedside. As they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions rise to the surface. The more they talk, the more, it seems, they conceal from each other. Alice, meanwhile, sliding between different levels of consciousness, recalls her past and a recent love affair.
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We need new names
by Noviolet Bulawayo
A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: the unflinching and powerful story of a young girl's journey out of Zimbabwe and to America. Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo's belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America's famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few.
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The bluest eye
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison's acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove--an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Ashland
by Dan Simon
A deeply moving family story unfolding in richly evocative prose during the final decades of the American century, Ashland is a book of metamorphoses--of the dance between permanence and transformation. The story takes place in Ashland, New Hampshire, a former mill town in the lakes region, and is told in six voices, among them Carolyn, a twenty year old writer at a turning point in her life; Gordon, who arrives in Ashland in the twilight of his years; Andy, a local boy; Geoff, Carolyn's writing teacher at Plymouth State; and Edith, Gordon's wife, who is inadvertently Carolyn's spiritual guide and friend. Then there is Jennie, Carolyn's aunt, who seems to offer her a model for how to live. But things aren't always what they seem, and Carolyn must discover her own rules and make her own way.Ashland is a debut novel of great intensity, beautifully told in the voices of many vivid characters and, through them, in the voice of Ashland itself.
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Remarkably bright creatures
by Shelby Van Pelt
A novel about a widow's unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium--and the truths she finally uncovers about her son's disappearance 30 years ago.
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Greenteeth
by Molly O'Neill
In Greenteeth, a monster with sharp teeth lurks in a lake, until a witch named Temperance is thrown in, sparking an unlikely alliance. Despite their differences, they embark on a magical quest to defeat an evil pastor threatening Jenny's lake, Temperance's family, and the soul of Britain.
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Losing the moon
by Patti Callahan Henry
Like most mothers, Amy Reynolds has anticipated the moment when her son brings home his first serious girlfriend. But she's shocked to meet the girl's father. Nick Lowry was the college boyfriend who captivated her heart and soul and then, without a word of explanation or warning, disappeared. She still wonders what took him away from her. Amy's marriage is satisfying, her teenage children thriving. She loves her beautifully restored home and her work teaching at the local college. She has long since buried her memories of Nick. But now that he is back in her life, she can't help recalling the beach where they pledged their destinies together twenty years ago. She can't help missing the young woman she was then, full of passion and promise. And she can't help being tempted by the life she might have lived...might still live--even though making that choice would betray all she holds dear.
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