Many of us were taught as children that life isn’t fair. I never accepted this; shouldn’t we do all we can to make life fair? I grew up to be a lifelong activist and a writer for social justice organizations. As a reader and writer, I love books about women’s lives, especially women who realize that the world around them shapes their own experiences. Sometimes history is happening right here, right now—and you know it. Those transformative moments spark the best stories, illuminating each book I’ve recommended.
I love quiet novels that pack a punch, particularly when the writing is gorgeous and wise, as in this case. The book takes place in the real Las Vegas, where people live and work, and it pulls us deep into a community and its fault lines.
Four very different characters are drawn together as they are propelled into situations where the stakes are high yet intimately human. They must face the crucial issues of their time—war, poverty, sanctuary—and the most terrifying question: what kind of person am I?
“Your heart will break…then soar” (Redbook) when, far from the neon lights of the Vegas strip, three lives collide in a split-second mistake and a child’s fate hangs in the balance.
Avis thought her marriage had hit a temporary rut. But with a single confession in the middle of the night, her carefully constructed life comes undone. After escaping a tumultuous childhood and raising a son, she now faces a future without the security of the home and family she has spent decades building.
Luis only wants to make the grandmother who raised him proud. As a soldier, he was…
I’d always assumed that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a natural disaster. Nope. The scouring dust storms that destroyed thousands of lives and millions of farms in five states didn’t have to happen. They were the predictable—and predicted!—result of short-sighted human decisions, such as the government handing tracts of formerly Indian land to white settlers to tear out the nourishing native grasses and plant wheat instead.
The human hand behind extreme weather might seem obvious to us now, but it was eye-opening for me in 2006 when I read this riveting nonfiction drama of families trapped in a living nightmare. I have never forgotten its impact or its lessons.
In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
With its taut, beautiful writing and ever-rising tension, this novel kept me reading late into the night. In 2008 Belfast, “the Troubles” are very much alive, and sisters Tessa and Marian have grown into adulthood in a combustible atmosphere of menace.
When Tessa discovers that her sister has been involved in the IRA and has now become an informer against it, she plunges into the world of spies to help Marian end the ceaseless cycle of violence and retribution. The novel is more than a hold-your-breath thriller. I loved its exploration of what “terrorism” means when the terrorists are your neighbors and family and how much two women are willing to risk for peace—and each other.
Any book in which a journalist and a librarian are the heroes gets a gold star from me. In this gripping novel, a Black journalist from Detroit who writes about the Black Lives Matter movement goes to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2019 on a personal and professional quest.
Her great-grandfather was, she believes, killed there by a white policeman 90 years ago, and she’s determined to find out the truth. She also thinks his story can illuminate what’s happening nationwide today. Based on this compelling premise, the novel is a mystery, a love story, a history, and an examination of racial justice rolled into one. I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes view of exactly how a journalist builds a story.
A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago—inspired by the author’s own family history
Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter, has just moved to Alabama to pursue a job opportunity, bringing along his pregnant wife and young daughter. Birmingham is in its heyday, known as the “Magic City” for its booming steel industry, and while Robert and his family find much to enjoy in the city’s busy markets and vibrant nightlife, it’s also a stronghold for the Klan. And with…
Aspiring author Dr. Myaisha Douglas joined the Greensboro Women of Color Writing Group hoping to publish her writing, and never expecting to play amateur sleuth in a real-life murder mystery. When someone murders a friend and member of the group, Myaisha believes she can help the police solve the crime.…
What I loved most about this book is true of all Louise Erdrich novels: she creates such warm, complicated, fully human characters that I delight in their presence and grieve when I have to leave them at the book’s end.
In this novel, history hit home in a devastating way when the U.S. government in the 1950s decided to solve its “Indian problem” by simply reclassifying Native people as no longer Indian—a kind of paper genocide that wiped out Indigenous people’s cultural identity and tribal rights, such as land rights.
Sadly, this is all historical fact; the fiction comes in when Erdrich re-imagined in riveting detail the (also true) story of how one small tribe in North Dakota fought back.
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill; but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal?
Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie…
For thirty years, Della Brown has tried to forget her service as a U.S. Army nurse treating horrific battlefield injuries in Vietnam. But now, an unexpected message arrives that propels her into harrowing memories of the past. Ambushed by her own history, Della must confront the fissures in her family life, the mystery of her father’s disappearance, the things mothers and daughters cannot—maybe should not—know about one another and the lifelong repercussions of a single mistake.
My book is an unflinching depiction of war and its personal costs. It is a portrait of a woman in midlife—a mother, a nurse, and long ago a soldier.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaigned…
Embark on a riveting journey into Washington State’s untamed Olympic Peninsula, where the threads of folklore legends and historical icons are woven into a complex ecological tapestry.
Follow the enigmatic Petr as he fearlessly employs his pirate radio transmitter to broadcast the forgotten and untamed voices that echo through the…
