Here are 100 books that A Hard Silence fans have personally recommended if you like
A Hard Silence.
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I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
I found Timâs deep dive into American evangelicalism hauntingly familiar.
Itâs a rare book that manages to speak with empathy and honesty about a movement I know all too well. Tim doesnât just expose extremism; he reminds us of the messy, human hearts inside itâhearts that once belonged to me, too.
His work nudged me to remember that even in the shadows of dogma, love and beauty can still find a way to flourish.
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizingâand least understoodâpeople living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints anâŚ
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to runâŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Gerardâs reflections on a fractured America resonate so deeply with me.
He writes with the same kind of searching spirit I tried to bring to my book: an effort to find a moral center in a world that often seems to have lost its way.
Gerardâs book helped me see that even when everything feels like itâs falling apart, there are still spaces for wonder and decency to take root. And thatâs what keeps me writingâand hoping.
AMERICAN BREAKDOWN dissects how, in the space of a generation, the pillars that sustained the once-dominant superpower have been dangerously eroded. From government to business, from media to medicine-the strength and security of the American experiment have been weakened by a widening gap between the elites who control these institutions and the public.
At the root of this breakdown is a precipitous fall in Americans' trust in their political, business and cultural leaders. As Baker writes, "This pathology of distrust across American society is eating the country away from the inside." Millions of Americans say they have little faith inâŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Christianâs book doesnât just chart the decline of faithâit asks the bigger question: what might remain?
Like me, he wrestles with the paradox of caring deeply about spiritual life while no longer buying into the old formulas.
Reading his work expanded my own sense that love, art, and simple acts of grace are the true spiritual inheritance we can still pass downâno matter how loudly the old structures crumble.
Traditional religion in the United States has suffered huge losses in recent decades. The number of Americans identifying as "not religious" has increased remarkably. Religious affiliation, service attendance, and belief in God have declined. More and more people claim to be "spiritual but not religious." Religious organizations have been reeling from revelations of sexual and financial scandals and cover-ups. Public trust in "organized religion" has declined significantly. Crucially, these religious losses are concentrated among younger generations. This means that, barring unlikely religious revivals among youth, the losses will continue and accelerate in time, as less-religiousâŚ
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someoneâs lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier selfâand soâŚ
I was born into the heart of American religious fundamentalism and spent years helping build the Religious Right before walking away from it. My book tells the story of that journey: from certainty to doubt, from dogma to paradox, from fear to love.
Iâve lived at the crossroads of faith, politics, family, and artâand these recommendations reflect the questions that still haunt me: How do we live with compassion in a divided world? How do we raise our children with tenderness in the absence of certainty? These books moved me because they donât preach. They search. They speak in the voice of those of us who are done with black-and-white thinking, but still believe in grace.
Ruthâs gentle, funny, and deeply wise reflections on raising boys struck a nerve in me as a father.
Itâs not just a parenting bookâitâs about nurturing tenderness and a sense of wonder in a world that too often demands toughness.Â
Ruth gave me fresh language for something Iâve long felt: that creating beauty and giving loveâespecially to the next generationâis the most radical kind of spirituality there is.
Combining painfully honest memoir, cultural analysis, and reporting, BoyMom is a humorous and heartbreaking deep dive into the complexities of raising boys in our fraught political moment.
âRapist, school-shooter, incel, man-child, interrupter, mansplainer, boob-starer, birthday forgetter, frat boy, dude-bro, homophobe, self-important stoner, emotional-labor abstainer, non-wiper of kitchen counters. Trying to raise good sons suddenly felt like a hopeless task.â   As the culture wars rage, and masculinity has been politicized from all sides, feminist writer and mother of three boys Ruth Whippman finds herself conflicted and scared. While the right pushes a dangerous vision of fantasy manhood, her feminist peers oftenâŚ
I have loved reading since I was a child. Books can take you places you will never go otherwise. Thatâs why itâs so important to have good, clean books that take you places you want to go and books that donât strand you somewhere you donât want to be. As a YA author myself, I am passionate about providing literature for teens that is adventurous and relatable, without the spice that often flavors todayâs books. I hope you love diving into this list of clean recommendations!
When Thea comes with her dad to the Double R Guest Ranch to help Tully open the place back up, she doesnât expect to find a decades-old mystery hidden among the old records. She also doesnât expect to reconnect with horses, the beautiful animals her mother used to train.
This novel is a fantastic coming-of-age story, with grief, loss, and reconciliation sprinkled throughout. An engaging mystery flavors it further, making this book hard for me to put down.Â
Thea and her dad are always on the move, from one small Cariboo town to another, trying to leave behind the pain of Thea's mom's death.
They never stay long enough in one place for Thea to make friends, but when her dad gets work renovating a guest ranch on Gumboot Lake, she dares to hope that their wandering days are over. At the ranch she makes friends with Van, a local boy, and works hard to build the trust of an abused horse named Renegade. When Thea unearths the decades-old story of a four-year-old girl who disappeared from theâŚ
I am a descendant of William Bradford and Myles Standish, of Pilgrim fame. I was raised in a Massachusetts farmhouse where the commission of James Churchill as a Captain in the militia still hangs, signed by John Hancock. I have lived and breathed this stuff since first opening my eyes. My wife, MaryLu, is a retired elementary teacher who helps bring life to the young characters. Together, through the medium of novels they would actually enjoy reading, we seek to inspire American youth with the principles of our founding, so that they may be more effective in preserving and defending them.
Many an idealistic young law student like me felt that jolt in our spine early on when we saw up in the balcony of that courthouse a sleepy Scout being told, âStand up, Jean Louise. Your fatherâs passinâ.â
The movie is as faithful to the novel as the medium would allow. The novel is told entirely from Scoutâs POV and not only focuses upon the racism of the time and place, but also upon her coming of age as a tomboy and being told to act âAs a little girl should.â
The book offers more to those of us for whom the rule of law and not of men is a passion, especially in Finchâs closing: âThere is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of Rockefeller, a stupid man the equal of Einstein⌠That institution, gentlemen, is a court.âÂ
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steepedâŚ
Donât mess with the hotheadâor he might just mess with you. Slater IbĂĄĂąez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side ofâŚ
Iâm a writer who grew up in the Midwest, moved away for a while, and has now raised my own kids here. I love reading other writers' takes on what kinds of stories they see unfolding here. As I get older, I realize that great stories can grow out of the ground anywhere, with the right amount of sunshine, darkness, and water.
I'm not usually much for food writing. (I mean, it's good, or it's bad, right ?). But this novel, which centers around food and what it means to us, kept me riveted all the way through.Â
It's hard to explain exactly why the book is so compelling, but it's by turns funny and moving, and the plot sort of spirals inward in a way Iâve never seen before.Â
âAn impressive feat of narrative jujitsu . . . that keeps readers turning the pages too fast to realize just how ingenious they are.ââThe New York Times Book Review, Editorâs Pick
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota, Kitchens of the Great Midwest is a novel about a young woman with a once-in-a-generation palate who becomes the iconic chef behind the countryâs most coveted dinner reservation.  When Lars Thorvaldâs wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wineâand a dashing sommelierâheâs left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own.âŚ
I grew up in a family of readers who valued humor above all else. Iâve always sought out novels that werenât full of themselves or too serious. For example, I donât actually like literature for the most part (sacrilege?) As a result, Iâve veered toward upmarket genre books that amuse me. My list reflects what I discovered as I explored this realm. It also led me to write mysteries and thrillers that are infused with my version of humor, which I must admit will never match the authors on my list. These guys are amazing.
Fforde takes literary characters and brings them to life in a mystery format. Inside jokes about them and well-constructed absurd situations kept me amused. I admire the creativity and imagination a book like this requires. The plot is also ingenious, with unexpected twists and turns.
Iâd say I never read a book like it, but Iâve read others by him, and he continues to create fun novels with literary and fairy tale characters. I recommend all of them.
Meet Thursday Next, literary detective without equal, fear or boyfriend
Jasper Fforde's beloved New York Times bestselling novel introduces literary detective Thursday Next and her alternate reality of literature-obsessed England-from the author of The Constant Rabbit
Fans of Douglas Adams and P. G. Wodehouse will love visiting Jasper Fforde's Great Britain, circa 1985, when time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously: it's a bibliophile's dream. England is a virtual police state where an aunt can get lost (literally) in a Wordsworth poem and forging ByronicâŚ
In 2015, I moved to Michiganâs Upper Peninsula, a world all its own. I live only four blocks from Lake Superior, and I canât imagine living anywhere without that lake. I pay much more attention to the weatherâthose waves really crash during Winter stormsâand Iâve become more interested in things like geology and local history since moving to such a unique place. Everything I notice eventually enters my poetry, which has become filled with water, shorelines, copper, and white deer. And best of all, our long winters give me a lot of time to read.
This book appealed to me because of its strong central character, Helena, whoâs carrying around a big secret. Letâs face itâwe all have secrets. But most of our secrets are comparatively minor. Helenaâs is anything but. Helenaâs past is complicated, which makes the plot complicated, just the way I like plots, but the book is still easy enough to follow.
I was interested to see how Helena appreciated some aspects of her past life, even if most people would consider her present life much better. I kept wanting to know more about this imagined place in the U.P., which seemed so strange even though itâs not that far from St. Ignace or Sault Ste. Marie or even the Mackinaw Bridge.Â
You'd recognise my mother's name if I told it to you. You'd wonder, briefly, where is she now? And didn't she have a daughter while she was missing?
And whatever happened to the little girl?
Helena's home is like anyone else's. With a husband and two daughters, and a job she enjoys. But no one knows the truth about her childhood.
Born into captivity and brought up in an isolated cabin until she was 12, Helena was raised to be a killer by the man who kept her captive - her own father.âŚ
COVID killed my father early on during the pandemic. Every day, I blogged about him. First, when he was in the ICU and I was begging the universe to save him. Then, after he died, as I grieved in a world that seemed cold and lonely. I wrote about Dad, telling stories of happier times, to keep him alive through my memories and to share his life with others. Soon, friends started recommending books about grief. In reading, feeling, and absorbing the pain of others, I somehow felt less alone.
Even though Adichieâs father did not die from COVID, it happened during the pandemic when the world shut down. To this, I could relate all too well.
I spent the pandemic, and months afterward, grieving my fatherâs death, and I found comfort reading the stories of other daughters whose dads have died.Â
A personal and powerful essay on loss from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the bestselling author of Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun.
'Grief is a cruel kind of education. You learn how ungentle mourning can be, how full of anger. You learn how glib condolences can feel. You learn how much grief is about language, the failure of language and the grasping for language'
On 10 June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria.
In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father.âŚ
