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
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa storiesâall reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argueâŚ
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
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extortsâŚ
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 peersâŚ
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
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, remembersâŚ
Big Ideas... For Small Businesses
by
John Lamerton,
Big Ideas⌠for Small Businesses is a straight-talking, no-nonsense guide to growing a small business without sacrificing your lifestyle. Written by a former civil servant turned entrepreneur, the book challenges hustle culture and instead champions the idea of an "ambitious lifestyle business" - one that provides freedom and financial stability,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.
I loved this book because it was another daughter reminiscing about her relationship with her father following his death.
I could empathize with the emptiness Schultz felt in the midst of her fatherâs absence, but also feel the joy she experienced when remembering him. Also, I like reading books written by other lesbians, especially books about family.
In hard times, we rely on family to support us emotionally, and Schulz, through her relationship with her partner, demonstrated that beautifully.Â
'Extraordinary . . . a profound and beautiful book . . . a moving meditation on grief and loss, but also a sparky celebration of joy, wonder and the miracle of love . . . Witty, wise, beautifully structured and written in clear, singing prose' - Sunday Times
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's beloved father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery - fromâŚ
I grew up in central Arkansas, which means I experienced first-hand the fiction I describe here. The South in these books - its religion, poverty, and beauty, not to mention its capacity for real ugliness - is not simply an atmosphere these authors have used to decorate their sets. The South in these books is a place where real people live, in exactly the ways these writers have described. My novella, Six Mile Store, is my own take on the real South. These are the books that showed me that these kinds of Southern stories are worth telling.
Ree Dolly is seventeen, raising her little brothers because her mother is too mentally unwell to do it herself, while her meth-cooking father has gone missing. His disappearance will ruin her already impoverished family if Ree cannot figure out what has happened.
Woodrell's Ozarks are in the same territory as my own debut, in pretty much every way: geographically, culturally, and in terms of the drug epidemic that continues to destroy American communities, especially in the South. Ree and Honey would probably never meet. But the same forces shaped them both, and the same neglect threatens them.
This is the book I would assign as required reading for anyone who is interested in what my book is trying to do.
This is a fiercely original tale of love, heartbreak and resilience in the lonely wastes of the American Midwest. The last time Ree saw her father, he didn't bring food or money but promised he'd be back soon with a paper sack of cash and a truckload of delights. Since he left, she's had to look after her mother - sedated and losing her looks - and her two younger brothers. Ree hopes the boys won't turn out like the others in the Ozark mountains - hard and mean before they've learnt to shave. One cold winter's day, Ree discoversâŚ
A wise (and wily) Jedi once said that âmany of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view,â and Iâm fascinated by storytelling that gives you more than one point of view or voice to ponder. Even as a kid, I searched for books that delved into the minds of more than one character. Iâve explored this in my own writing but also as a teacher working with undergraduate students who were finding their own voices while exploring the literary voices of others. I also love so-called genre fictionâthe fantasy, sci-fi, and romance of it allâwhich is definitely reflected in this list, well!
Iâve seen this book described in terms of confectionery repeatedly, and sureâitâs a sweet love story. Itâs also a story about grief and loss, family secrets, and deepening a connection between mother and daughter across time and place. And did I mention the sweet love story? Because Iâm a sucker for a good (and believable) romance, and this is an A-plus entry in the genre.
Added bonus: it definitely made me want to travel to Italy even more than I already did.
The dying wish of 16-year-old Lina's mother was for her daughter to live in Tuscany and get to know her father, whom Lina has never met. "Howard is the best man I've ever known," her mother says, "he'll keep you safe." Why did her mother wait so long to tell her about him? Lina has a happy life in Seattle and doesn't want to leave. Shortly after she arrives at Howard's home, Lina meets Sonya, who gives Lina a diary that belonged to Lina's mother, the oneâŚ
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicitâŚ
Iâm a bit fairy tale obsessed. I love how the characters go into the woods and face wolves, witches, stepmothers, and ogres. But despite the abuse and neglect and trauma, they somehow emerge whole. These five books each have a unique heroine, not with a sword, but with her own quiet strength. Each one is a cathartic but reassuring guide into the woods and out again, acknowledging that though there will be hurt and heartbreak, transformation and healing will follow. If you love fairy tales for the same reasons I do, come, step onto the path. The magic of hope and healing awaits.
Before reading Deerskin, I wouldnât have believed any author could get away with writing a retelling of the "Donkeyskin"/"All Kinds of Fur" taleâand yet, Robin McKinley does a superb job.
McKinley keeps readers at a bit of a remove from this triggering tale (the one in which a lecherous king wants to marry his daughter), giving it a bit of a darkly dreamlike, dissociative quality. I love the way she focuses on the heroineâs healing rather than the trauma or its perpetrator.
Itâs the tale of a long, dark teatime of the soul, and a quiet, very spiritual book.Â
âA fierce and beautiful story of rage and compassion, betrayal and loyalty, damage and love...A fairy tale for adults, one you'll never forget.ââAlice Hoffman, New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Magic
The only daughter of a beloved king and queen, Princess Lissar has grown up in the shadow of her parentâs infinite adoration for each otherâan infatuation so great that it could only be broken by the queenâs unexpected passing. As Lissar reaches womanhood, it becomes clear to everyone in the kingdom that she has inherited her late motherâs breathtaking beauty. But on the eve of herâŚ
