en-US Tue, 01 Jul 2025 12:54:59 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 219838837 From the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven, a piercing debut novel following two families in alternative timelines of the Salvadoran civil war—a stunning exploration of the mechanisms of fate, the gravity of the past, and the endurance of love.

“An important voice in U.S. fiction. Ruben Reyes Jr. is a wonder.” — Héctor Tobar

Cambridge, 2018. Ana and Luis’s relationship is on the rocks, despite their many similarities, including their mothers who both fled El Salvador during the war. In her search for answers, and against her best judgement, Ana uses The Defractor, an experimental device that allows users to peek into alternate versions of their lives. What she sees leads her and Luis on a quest through Havana and San Salvador to uncover the family histories they are desperate to know, eager to learn if what might have been could fix what is.

Havana, 1978. The Salvadoran war is brewing, and Neto, a young revolutionary with a knack for forging government papers, meets Rafael at a meeting for the People's Revolutionary Army. The two form an intense and forbidden love, shedding their fake names and revealing themselves to each other inside the covert world of their activism. When their work separates them, they begin to exchange weekly letters, but soon, as the devastating war rages on, forces beyond their control threaten to pull them apart forever.

Ruben Reyes Jr.’s debut novel is an epic, genre-bending journey through inverted worlds—one where war ends with a peace treaty, and one where it ends with a decisive victory by the Salvadoran government. What unfolds is a stunning story of displacement and belonging, of loss and love. It’s both a daring imagining of what might have been and a powerful reckoning of our past.]]> 288 Ruben Reyes Jr. 0063336316 Letitia 0 4.15 2025
author: Ruben Reyes Jr.
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/07/01
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, currently-reading
review:

]]> 216246684 One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, and young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In Audition, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day—partner, parent, creator, muse—and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us best.]]> 205 Katie Kitamura 0593852338 Letitia 0 2025-anticipated-reads 3.36 2025
author: Katie Kitamura
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/22
date added: 2025/06/22
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 61672
La villa est magnifique, l'été brûlant, la Méditerranée toute proche. Cécile a dix-sept ans. Elle ne connaît de l'amour que des baisers, des rendez-vous, des lassitudes. Pas pour longtemps. Son père, veuf, est un adepte joyeux des liaisons passagères et sans importance. Ils s'amusent, ils n'ont besoin de personne, ils sont heureux. La visite d'une femme de cœur, intelligente et calme, vient troubler ce délicieux désordre. Comment écarter la menace ? Dans la pinède embrasée, un jeu cruel se prépare.
C'était l'été 1954. On entendait pour la première fois la voix sèche et rapide d'un « charmant petit monstre » qui allait faire scandale. la deuxième moitié du XXe siècle commençait. Elle serait à l'image de cette adolescente déchirée entre le remords et le culte du plaisir.

Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father's love life leads to tragic consequences.

Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she and her father share, while plotting her own sexual adventures with a "tall and almost beautiful" law student. But the arrival of her late mother's best friend intrudes upon a young girl's pleasures. And when a relationship begins to develop between the adults, Cécile and her lover set in motion a plan to keep them apart...with tragic, unexpected consequences.

The internationally beloved story of a precocious teenager's attempts to understand and control the world around her, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse is a beautifully composed, wonderfully ambiguous celebration of sexual liberation, at once sympathetic and powerfully unsparing.]]> 154 Françoise Sagan 2266127748 Letitia 0 to-read, translations, france 3.77 1954
author: Françoise Sagan
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1954
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/21
shelves: to-read, translations, france
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]]> 217388070 A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home—from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.]]> 320 Emily Hunt Kivel 037461606X Letitia 0 3.86
author: Emily Hunt Kivel
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.86
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
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]]> 22254
In Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, the three dead geniuses who invented the atomic bomb-Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and Enrico Fermi-mysteriously appear in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in 2003, nearly sixty years after they watched history's first mushroom cloud rise over the New Mexico desert in 1945. One by one, they are discovered by a shy librarian, who takes them in and devotes herself to them.

Faced with the evidence of their nuclear legacy, the scientists embark on a global disarmament campaign that takes them from Hiroshima to Nevada to the United Nations. Along the way, they acquire a billionaire pothead benefactor and a growing convoy of RVs carrying groupies, drifters, activists, former Deadheads, New Age freeloaders, and religious fanatics.

In this heroically mischievous, sweeping tour de force, Lydia Millet brings us an apocalyptic fable that marries the personal to the political, confronts the longing for immortality with the desire for redemption, and evokes both the beauty and the tragedy of the nuclear sublime.]]> 532 Lydia Millet 0156031035 Letitia 0 to-read, i-need-to-read-this 3.67 2005
author: Lydia Millet
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
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]]> 223614838 In this follow-up to the critically-acclaimed The Laughter—winner of the Washington State Book Award—a middle-aged woman starts a firestorm when she holds a contest, based on an ancient Indian ritual, in which men must compete to win her affections.

A woman who has left two husbands announces she will celebrate her 55th birthday by holding a swayamvar. Drawn from an ancient custom in her Indian culture, this is an event in which suitors line up to compete in a feat of wills and strength to win a beautiful princess’s hand in marriage. The woman, a renowned and respected intellectual in an American town who had once declared she was “past such petty matters as love,” knows she is now setting herself up for widespread societal ridicule, but her self-esteem and sexual libido are off the charts even as her body withers from disability, fading beauty, and her appetite for cake.

To her surprise, a cast of characters shows up to support her call—a wedding planner looking for the next enchanting thing, a disability rights activist making a documentary film, and even, begrudgingly, her own young adult son. The Men's Rights Movement protests her project, angry at her objectification of men. She is waylaid by visitations from goddesses and princesses past, who either try to slap sense into her or cheer her on. She must also reckon with a brutal love story in her ancestry that was endangered by the caste system—a story that placed a generational curse on those in the family who show an intemperance of spirit. As her whole plan spirals into a spectacle, the woman embarks on a journey to decide what feat her suitor must perform to be worthy of her wrinkling hand. What feat will define a newer, better masculinity? What feat will it take for her to trust in the tenderness of love? 

Intemperance is at once a satirical feminist folktale and a meditation on how we might reach past all sense and still find love.]]> 304 Sonora Jha 0063440849 Letitia 0 4.38 2025
author: Sonora Jha
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.38
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
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review:

]]> 198124368 320 Sonora Jha 0063240262 Letitia 0 to-read 3.96 2023
author: Sonora Jha
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 223362310 The story of a runaway mother’s ten days of freedom—and the pain, desire, longing, and wonder we find on the messy road to enlightenment—from Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes.

April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.

The White Hot takes the form of a letter from mother to daughter about a moment of abandonment that would stretch from ten days to ten years—an explanation, but not an apology. Hudes narrates April’s story—spiritual and sexy, fierce and funny—with delicate lyricismand tough love. Just as April finds in her painful and absurd sojourn the key to freeing herself and her family from a cage of generational trauma, so Hudes turns April’s stumbling pursuit of herself into an unforgettable short epic of self-discovery.]]> 176 Quiara Alegría Hudes 0593732332 Letitia 0 4.29 2025
author: Quiara Alegría Hudes
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
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]]> 224057566 A haunting, unforgettable novel of obsession, pride, and forgiveness, exploring the friendship and rivalry between two gifted boys in harrowing circumstances, from the acclaimed writer ofThe Removed

Milton Muleborn has envied Matthew Echota, a talented young Cherokee artist, ever since they were locked up together in a dangerous juvenile detention center in the late 1980s. Until Matthew escaped, that is.

A novel within a novel, we read here Milton’s account of the story of their childhood even as, years later, he remains jealous of Matthew’s extraordinary abilities and unlikely success. Milton reveals secrets about their friendship, their families, and their nightmarish, sometimes surreal, experience of imprisonment. In revisiting the past, he explores the echoing traumas of racial and institutional violence and the systemic injustices in our systems of incarceration and so-called reform.

Filled with Brandon Hobson’s trademark swirling yet visceral writing, The Devil Is a Southpaw is an ambitious, elegant, and propulsive novel in the spirit of Vladimir Nabokov and Gabriel García Márquez.  ]]> 352 Brandon Hobson 0063259656 Letitia 0 4.18
author: Brandon Hobson
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.18
book published:
rating: 0
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]]> 51196859 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780316422130.

In the title story of Souvankham Thammavongsa's debut collection, a young girl brings a book home from school and asks her father to help her pronounce a tricky word, a simple exchange with unforgettable consequences. Thammavongsa is a master at homing in on moments like this -- moments of exposure, dislocation, and messy feeling that push us right up against the limits of language.

The stories that make up How to Pronounce Knife focus on characters struggling to find their bearings in unfamiliar territory, or shuttling between idioms, cultures, and values. A failed boxer discovers what it truly means to be a champion when he starts painting nails at his sister's salon. A young woman tries to discern the invisible but immutable social hierarchies at a chicken processing plant. A mother coaches her daughter in the challenging art of worm harvesting.

In a taut, visceral prose style that establishes her as one of the most striking and assured voices of her generation, Thammavongsa interrogates what it means to make a living, to work, and to create meaning.

How to pronounce knife --
Paris --
Slingshot --
Randy Travis --
Mani pedi --
Chick-a-chee! --
The universe would be so cruel --
Edge of the world --
The school bus driver --
You are so embarassing --
Ewwrrkk --
The gas station --
A far distant thing --
Picking worms]]> 192 Souvankham Thammavongsa Letitia 0 3.85 2020
author: Souvankham Thammavongsa
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
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]]> 223296091 From Giller Prize and O. Henry Award winner Souvankham Thammavongsa comes a revelatory novel about loneliness, love, labour, and class. An intimate and sharply written book following a nail salon owner as she toils away for the privileged clients who don't even know her true name.

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.
     As the day's work grinds on, the friction between Ning's two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.
     Told over a single day, with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Colour confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa's place as literature's premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.]]> 192 Souvankham Thammavongsa 0316422142 Letitia 0 3.82
author: Souvankham Thammavongsa
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/20
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, books-under-250, plots-set-over-a-short-timeframe
review:

]]> 227956317 For fans of Fernanda Melchor and Tove Ditlevsen, a raw, propulsive novel by an award-winning Afro-Brazillian novelist about a Black mother and daughter who work as live-in maids for a rich family in an unnamed Brazilian city, and the tragedy they unwittingly bear witness to.

Mabel has been staying in the Golden Plate—the most expensive building on the block, in an unnamed city in Brazil—for almost her entire life. Yet her presence there is merely she inhabits a miniscule room with her mother, Eunice, who alongside Mabel provides round-the-clock attention and care for the wealthy family who lives there. As Mabel grows up, her dissatisfaction with the forced smallness of her life becomes difficult to bear, and she is driven to work towards new possibilities for herself.

Eunice does the best that she can—uneducated, and with a daughter and ailing mother both depending solely on her, her life is a series of limitations. She moves through the rooms of the penthouse suite in silent servitude, and though Mabel is ashamed of this invisibility act they've both perfected, the era of slavery is still fresh in the country's
consciousness, and Eunice thinks it best not to dwell too hard on such things. But when tragedy strikes, and a little boy dies, Eunice must decide if she can face the indifference and injustices of the ruling class she has spent so long orbiting.

Told through direct, agile and evocative prose, Solitaria is a liberation novel of the most rousing order. Through the book's awareness of space and whose presence is permissible, the world of the Golden Plate unfurls, and an unflinching portrait emerges of modern-day Brazil, its legacies of colonial violence haunting rooms across the country, both big and small.]]> 240 Eliana Alves Cruz 1662603320 Letitia 0 3.80 2022
author: Eliana Alves Cruz
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/19
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted, translations, currently-reading
review:

]]> 216634841 A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Douglas Stuart in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening.

Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two sixteen year old boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him, like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre, drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.]]> 204 Seán Hewitt 1039056571 Letitia 0 2025-anticipated-reads 3.85 2025
author: Seán Hewitt
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/19
date added: 2025/06/19
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 222419728 The highly anticipated new novel. When a young single woman in Tokyo decides she’s ready to sell anything—even her womb—to escape the precarity of her life, an agency pairs her with a wealthy couple desperate to have a child. The match seems made in heaven. She even looks a little like the wife. But is anything ever that simple?

Nothing has ever gone right for Riki. She left her boring hometown in Hokkaido, where she worked at a nursing home, for a better life in Tokyo. But as a temp in the big city she has no job security, and barely scrapes by. She eats the same old discount boiled egg for lunch every day, sometimes for dinner, too. Many of her peers have to take on a side hustle just to make ends meet. So when her friend discovers an agency offering a hefty sum for egg donation, both leap at the chance for an interview.

Meanwhile, former ballet star Motoi Kusaoke and his wife, Yuko, have been trying to conceive for years. After trying what feels like every available option, it seems futile—until Motoi dives deep into his research and learns that, while surrogacy is technically illegal in Japan, there is a company that’s found a loophole.

Before long, everyone has an opinion on the from Yuko’s sex-obsessed, asexual best friend, to Motoi’s controlling prima ballerina mother, and even the affable sex-worker-slash-therapist that Riki has been to a couple of times, after she accepted a down-payment to be a surrogate.

Acutely funny and addictively page-turning, Swallows pulls at the seams of society, reassessing our understanding of motherhood, self-worth, bodily autonomy, and class. What does it mean to be “in control”? And can money really buy happiness?]]> Natsuo Kirino 0593804090 Letitia 0 3.75 2022
author: Natsuo Kirino
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/16
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, translations
review:

]]> 228690678 Sex sells, but what can it buy? 

Thank You, John is Best American Essays Notable Michelle Gurule’s debut a heartfelt, laugh-out-loud tragi-comedy of errors based on her time spent as an inexperienced sugarbaby in 2010s Denver. 

Michelle, a queer, wanna-be writer exasperated by student loans, bad teeth, and the poor decisions of her loveable sitcom-worthy family, believes a sugar daddy is written in her density as firmly as she believes her idol, Alanis Morissette, holds the musical blueprint to the life she desires most. 

With a salt-of-the-earth Chicano father who's convinced aliens will eventually rule the world, a white mother who maxes out her credit cards on fast food, and a sugar-hyped 7-year-old nephew, Michelle diagnoses herself as self-parentified with a core mistrust in the world’s unreliability. Left to her own devices and barely making ends meet, she turns to the world of stripping until her chance for financial freedom arrives in the form of John, a lonely older man who offers her a weekly pile of cash for lively conversation and sex. She will keep her family, and only her family, availed of all the gritty details. 

Grateful and convinced by the immediate improvement money makes in her life, sugaring takes the role of any other exploitative job in America– the physical wear and tear, competition between colleagues, the crossed personal boundaries, dangerous power imbalances, and the reliance on hierarchy to keep only the rich and powerful rich and powerful–it’s just a lot more intimate. A worthy sacrifice, right? 

Looking back at her time as a 24-year-old stripper and sugarbaby, struggling to pull herself–and her entire family–out of poverty, Gurule grins and bears it all in a tragi-comedy of heartbreak, complete social isolation and self-denial, glares at The Cheesecake Factory, cringey sex, and scheme after scheme for a better life with everything money can buy.

"Your teeth will ache as you read this book, both with pain and with pleasure.” —Celia Laskey, author of Under the Rainbow and So Happy for You ]]> 210 Michelle Gurule 1961884682 Letitia 0 4.73
author: Michelle Gurule
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.73
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/16
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]]> 224082511 Stay True meets Headshot in this intimate, bruising debut novel about the short and tumultuous life of a charismatic and enigmatic table tennis prodigy, as seen through the eyes of those pulled into his orbit.

Ryan Lo begins playing table tennis at age eight, under the tutelage of his brilliant but ruthless coach Kristian, who sees talent in him that might be nurtured into greatness. Throughout an adolescence circumscribed by Kristian's demanding behavior, Ryan forms jealousy-fueled and mutually adoring friendships with his teammates and competitors, falls in love with fellow table tennis star Anabel Yu, and above all, wins championships. 

By twenty-one, Ryan ascends all the way to the German Bundesliga, the highest echelon of international table tennis, just as he was supposed to, but he doesn't stay there. It is clear to all that Ryan Lo was meant to be the greatest in the world. Instead, he abandons competition and is dead before his twenty-fifth birthday. What happened? 

In crisp, evocative prose, Underspin masterfully delves beneath the relentless pressure that forges a champion, considering adolescence, estrangement, and the great injustices committed within our closest relationships. A love letter to an underdog sports circuit and a tender exploration of love, loss and abuse, Underspin is a bildungsroman and literary puzzle for readers of Rita Bullwinkel, Hua Hsu, Susan Choi, and Brandon Taylor.]]> 304 E.Y. Zhao 1662603266 Letitia 0 4.73
author: E.Y. Zhao
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.73
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/16
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]]> 211401550 Witty and winkingly playful, Manuel Betancourt’s Hello Stranger explores modern queer romance and the expansive possibilities of ephemeral intimacies“Hello stranger.” As an opening line, you really can’t ask for better.Hello Stranger is a book about chance encounters—at a bar, through social media, in a bathhouse—and what a stranger can reveal about who we are and who we could still yet be. A stranger, after all, is a site of endless possibilities.As Manuel Betancourt looks back on his past relationships, he turns to characters and narratives that helped him question notions of what monogamy and coupledom (and relationships and marriage) can and should look like. From films like Before Sunrise and Cruising to the poetry of Frank O'Hara and the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, Betancourt uses pop culture to make sense of the alluring prospect of forging intimacies with strangers—even, or especially, the strangers within ourselves.At once a personal excavation and a broad cultural critique, Betancourt grapples with everything from online sexting and real-life cruising to divorces and throuples. Hello Stranger examines the intimacies we crave, value, and oftentimes destroy with rote familiarity.]]> 240 Manuel Betancourt 1646222296 Letitia 0 3.76 2025
author: Manuel Betancourt
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/14
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]]> 217927769 A searing journey through the highs and lows of twenty-first century womanhood from an award-winning journalist beloved for her unflinchingly honest and often comedic appraisals of pop culture, identity, and disillusionment

After a brief fling with corporate stability in her twenty-something cis era, Harron Walker has transitioned into a terminally single freelancer and part-time shopgirl. She's in the throes of her second adolescence and its requisite daily spirals. She wants it all, otherwise known as: basic human rights, a stable job with good pay and healthcare benefits, someone to love, the ability to feel safe and secure, the pursuit of satisfaction and maybe even contentment. And when she starts to acquire those things—well, as The Monkey's Paw famously asked, "What could go wrong?"

In sixteen wholly original essays that blend memoir, cultural criticism, investigative journalism, and a dash of fanfiction, Walker places her own experiences within the larger context of the pressing and underdiscussed aspects of contemporary American womanhood that make up daily life. She recounts an attempt to eviscerate a corporation's attempt at pinkwashing their way into bath bomb sales while simultaneously confronting her “pick me” impulse to do so. She interrogates her relationship to labor, from the irony of working in a transphobic workplace in order to cover gender-affirming surgery to the cruel specter of the girlboss that none of us ever think we'll become. She explores the allure and violence of assimilating into white womanhood in all its hegemonic glory, exposes the ways in which the truth of trans women's reproductive healthcare is erased in favor of reactionary narratives, and considers how our agency is stripped from us—by governments, employers, partners, and ourselves—purely on account of our bodies.

With razor-sharp, biting prose that’s as uncompromising as it is playful, Walker grapples with questions of love, sex, fertility, labor, embodiment, community, autonomy, and body fluids from her particular often at the margins, conditionally at the center.]]> 272 Harron Walker 0593450043 Letitia 0 3.73 2025
author: Harron Walker
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2025
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 214151221 A compelling and timely debut novel following two Black men tasked with overseeing the destruction and gentrification of the predominantly Black neighborhoods surrounding Atlanta before the 1996 Olympics.

The Fantasies of Future Things follows two Black men working for the real estate development company responsible for the revitalization of Summerhill in Atlanta, Georgia, for the 1996 Olympics. But Summerhill is a predominantly Black neighborhood, and real estate agents Jacob and Daniel know that “revitalization” is code for “gentrification”—which means they will be tasked with displacing people from their own community.

Brooklyn-born Jacob, a recent Morehouse graduate, is armed with the hopes of his parents and has big dreams about the life he should be living. Daniel, a native of Atlanta, is tired, angry, and disillusioned with his career and ready for a change. While different in many ways, Jacob and Daniel are coming to grips with many of the same accepting their sexuality, dealing with the pressures of family, wrestling with the conflicting morality of their jobs, and coping with the daily trauma that comes with being Black in America. As we follow the parallel journeys of these two men, and in the face of towering obstacles, Jacob and Daniel must decide what they are willing to do for themselves and for their communities.

This lacerating, bold, and moving novel deftly explores our need for intimacy and the harm of internalized homophobia, the relationships Black men have with family and each other, and the restrictive masculinity so often required of them.]]> 288 Doug Jones 1668016281 Letitia 0 3.81
author: Doug Jones
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.81
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 212923993 A mother and son, estranged but yearning for reunion, reckon at last with the secret that has kept them apart for decades in this highly anticipated novel by "one of the country's most talented writers" (Wall Street Journal​)

At forty, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York City, is overworked and isolated. He spends his days immersed in the struggles of his clients only to return to an empty apartment and occasional hook-ups with a man who wants more than Peter can give. But when the asylum case of a young gay man pierces Peter's numbness, the event that he has avoided for twenty years returns to haunt him.

Ann, his mother, who runs a women's retreat center she founded after leaving his father, is wounded by the estrangement from Peter but cherishes the world she has built. She long ago banished from her mind the decision that divided her from her son. But as Peter’s case plunges him further into the memory of his first love and the night of violence that changed his life forever, he and his mother must confront the secret that tore them apart.

With unsurpassed emotional depth, Mothers and Sons reveals all that is lost by looking away from the past and what might be restored by facing it. In his spellbinding new novel, Adam Haslett demonstrates yet again his mastery of “a rich assortment of literary gifts” (New York Times).]]> 336 Adam Haslett 0316574716 Letitia 0 3.72 2025
author: Adam Haslett
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, to-read
review:

]]> 222658339 "Wonderfully ambitious.... Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book." — Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers

An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife—in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

As these friends move from the late 2000’s into the late 2020’s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.]]> 304 Angela Flournoy 0063318776 Letitia 0 3.92
author: Angela Flournoy
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.92
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, currently-reading
review:

]]> 56816422 An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms.

Toni Morrison herself requested that Dana Williams be the one to tell this story, even giving her the book’s title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.]]> 362 Dana A. Williams 0063012006 Letitia 0 4.00
author: Dana A. Williams
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/14
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, currently-reading
review:

]]> 214537774 For the first time ever, collected here are all three volumes of the diaries of Helen Garner—an Australian literary master, who famously pulled her greatest works straight from the pages of her own journals

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of "ordinary people in difficult times" (New York Times). But the inspiration for it all was her extensive collection of diaries—fastidiously kept, intricately written, and delightfully dishy, unspooling the inner lives of her insular world in bohemian Melbourne.

Now, for the first time, all three volumes of Garner's inimitable diaries are collected into one book. Spanning more than two decades, each finely etched volume reveals Garner like never a fledgling author publishing her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s; in the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s. And all the while, they bear witness to one of the world's great writers hard at work. 

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of resilience, quotidian moments of joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.]]> 832 Helen Garner 0553387499 Letitia 0 4.57 2025
author: Helen Garner
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.57
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/10
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 220160205 A gripping, elegant debut novel about a young Black man caught between worlds of race and class, glamour and tragedy, a friend’s mysterious death and his own arrest, from an electrifying new voice.

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.

It’s just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, a glamorous member of the Black elite, and he’s still reeling from the tabloid spectacle—as well as the lingering questions of how well he really knew his closest friend and what exactly happened to her that night. 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. When his close friend Carolyn goes off the rails, Smith decides to return to New York to find out what happened to her and Elle. But it’s not long before he begins to lose himself to his old life, drawn back into the city’s underworld where his search for answers may end up costing him his freedom and his future.

Smith goes on a dizzying journey through the New York City nightlife circuit, anonymous recovery rooms, Atlanta’s Black society set, police investigations and courtroom dramas, and a circle of friends coming of age in a new era. Great Black Hope is a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiraling downward, and how to find a way back to hope.]]> 320 Rob Franklin 1668077434 Letitia 0
“Though as acts went, it was one for which he was prepared. A lifetime of reading the room, intuiting what it was people wanted from him, what they needed him to be.”

There is no neat diagnosis for Smith and no straightforward solutions. Even in his sobriety journey, he could perceive his diagnosis as ‘a cask to hold his trouble,’ yet Smith recognizes there’s much more at play. He is grappling with time’s unyielding march, grief, addiction, the rat race of New York, family expectations, race, and class consciousness—burdens that drive him to seek distractions. He keeps his pain private to protect others' perceptions of him. However, doing so also hinders him from expressing his frustration and rage, justifiable emotions that feel unsatisfying and draining, especially as he recognizes his position as one of the fortunate.

What makes Great Black Hope special is the nuanced exploration of New York City, the reflection of the intersectionality of Smith’s identities, and the worlds he navigates. New York’s unsettling proximity to tragedy and chaos is perfectly captured, how easily it can make you feel forgotten or consumed, prompting many to question its allure. But it's also redemptive, offering community and opportunity to those who embrace it.

Beneath the intrigue surrounding Smith’s case and the murder investigation of Elle, which serves as a stark reminder of our incomplete understanding of those closest to us, the core focus lies in the intricate systems of politics, race, and class. I underlined so many insightful remarks that underscore the dual consciousness of being Black and middle class in elite environments, the politics of second chances, and the human experience of longing and envy for privileges denied to you but given to others. “Identity was neither destiny nor salvation but a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.”

These realizations can rightly invoke rage, leaving one feeling jaded and disillusioned. Yet, we persist, seeking ways to remain hopeful in a city that allows you to reinvent yourself, with people you can lean on.

After all, what better setting for hope exists than New York?

Thank you, Summit Books, for the arc! Out 6/10. One of my favorites of the year.]]> 3.69 2025
author: Rob Franklin
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/08
date added: 2025/06/09
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:
There are moments in life that unexpectedly shatter our illusions of the world and remind us of our reality. Class and education have limitations that can’t overshadow race and circumstance. This moment of truth is where we meet the protagonist of Rob Franklin’s debut, Great Black Hope. David Smith has been arrested for cocaine possession on a night out in the Hamptons– a nightmare for anyone, but especially for a Black gay man in his twenties from a family with high expectations. Coupled with the grief he is dealing with from the sudden loss of his closest friend, Elle, Smith is thrust into deep self-reflection. Through the unfolding of Smith’s case and the investigation into Elle’s murder, we observe his confrontation with enduring life dilemmas and his bond with the cherished yet complex New York City.

“Though as acts went, it was one for which he was prepared. A lifetime of reading the room, intuiting what it was people wanted from him, what they needed him to be.”

There is no neat diagnosis for Smith and no straightforward solutions. Even in his sobriety journey, he could perceive his diagnosis as ‘a cask to hold his trouble,’ yet Smith recognizes there’s much more at play. He is grappling with time’s unyielding march, grief, addiction, the rat race of New York, family expectations, race, and class consciousness—burdens that drive him to seek distractions. He keeps his pain private to protect others' perceptions of him. However, doing so also hinders him from expressing his frustration and rage, justifiable emotions that feel unsatisfying and draining, especially as he recognizes his position as one of the fortunate.

What makes Great Black Hope special is the nuanced exploration of New York City, the reflection of the intersectionality of Smith’s identities, and the worlds he navigates. New York’s unsettling proximity to tragedy and chaos is perfectly captured, how easily it can make you feel forgotten or consumed, prompting many to question its allure. But it's also redemptive, offering community and opportunity to those who embrace it.

Beneath the intrigue surrounding Smith’s case and the murder investigation of Elle, which serves as a stark reminder of our incomplete understanding of those closest to us, the core focus lies in the intricate systems of politics, race, and class. I underlined so many insightful remarks that underscore the dual consciousness of being Black and middle class in elite environments, the politics of second chances, and the human experience of longing and envy for privileges denied to you but given to others. “Identity was neither destiny nor salvation but a kind of animal trap, useful only if one was deft enough to claim the bait without tripping the door to the cage.”

These realizations can rightly invoke rage, leaving one feeling jaded and disillusioned. Yet, we persist, seeking ways to remain hopeful in a city that allows you to reinvent yourself, with people you can lean on.

After all, what better setting for hope exists than New York?

Thank you, Summit Books, for the arc! Out 6/10. One of my favorites of the year.
]]> 220239067 A theater critic at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe writes a vicious one-star review of a struggling actress he has a one-night stand with in this sharply funny, feminist tinderbox.

Alex Lyons always has his mind made up by the time the curtain comes down at a performance—the show either deserves a five-star rave or a one-star pan. Anything in between is meaningless. On the opening night of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he doesn’t deliberate over the rating for Hayley Sinclair’s show, nor does he hesitate when the opportunity presents itself to have a one-night stand with the struggling actress.

Unaware that she’s gone home with the theater critic who’s just written a career-ending review of her, Hayley wakes up at his apartment to see his scathing one-star critique in print on the kitchen table, and she’s not sure which humiliation offends her the most. So she revamps her show into a viral sensation critiquing Alex Lyons himself—entitled son of a famous actress, serial philanderer, and by all accounts a terrible man. Yet Alex remains unapologetic. As his reputation goes up in flames, he insists on telling his unvarnished version of events to his colleague, Sophie. Through her eyes, we see that the deeper she gets pulled into his downfall, the more conflicted she becomes. After all, there are always two sides to every story.

A brilliant Trojan horse of a book about art, power, misogyny, and female rage, Bring the House Down is a searing, insightful, and often hilarious debut that captures the blurred line between reality and performance.]]> 304 Charlotte Runcie 038555107X Letitia 0 3.83 2025
author: Charlotte Runcie
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/09
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 217387783 A masterful and tender debut collection of stories from the acclaimed author of The Anthropologists, about distance and closeness in the age of connectivity.

"An exceptionally elegant, intelligent, and original writer.” -Sigrid Nunez
"She is an author who simply, and astoundingly, knows." -Bryan Washington
"The rigor of Didion and the tenderness of Sebald." -Catherine Lacey
"One of my favorite writers." -Katie Kitamura

A researcher abroad in Rome eagerly awaits a visit from her long-distance lover, only to find he is not the same man she remembers. An expat meets a childhood friend on a layover and is dismayed by her unexpected contentment. A newly pregnant woman considers the American taboo of sharing the news too soon, but can't resist when an opportunity comes to patch up a damaged friendship.

Long Distance showcases Savas's devastating talent for the short story. Her shrewd encapsulations of contemporary life often center on characters displaced more by choice than circumstance, characters both determined to install themselves in new lives and preoccupied with the people they've left behind.]]> 240 Aysegül Savas 1639733108 Letitia 0 4.26
author: Aysegül Savas
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.26
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/09
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 217387706 Three hypnotic novellas about obsessional love, missed connections, and enduring regret by the bestselling author of Call Me by Your Name.

The short fictions in Room on the Sea deal with the heart-wrenching vicissitudes of amorous ambivalence, in André Aciman's inimitably nostalgic, lyric style.

"The Gentleman from Peru" tells the story of the life-changing encounter of a group of friends with an enigmatic solitary guest in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast. "Room on the Sea" is a dialogue between a man and a woman who meet on jury duty and embark on a complex relationship. "Mariana" is a modern retelling of a famous seventeenth-century novel about a love affair between a nun and a swashbuckling, unreliable aristocrat.

No one writes about the ups and downs, the yeses and nos, of contemporary love like Aciman. As The Times (London) writes: ”You don't so much read André Aciman's novels as tumble breathlessly into them.“]]> 272 André Aciman 0374613419 Letitia 0 3.70 2025
author: André Aciman
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/09
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 215749072 The Marriage Plot meets The Idiot in this brilliant debut, which tells the story of a young Muslim scholar stuck in the mire of adjunct professorship in Los Angeles who decides to give up her career in academia and marry rich, committing herself to 100 dates in the course of a single summer. By midsummer reality hits, taking her—and her project—to Tehran.

The unnamed Iranian-Indian American narrator of Liquid, A Love Story has always believed herself to be the smartest person in the room. And from an early age, she and her best friend—a poet-turned-marketer named Adam—have turned their noses up at other peoples’ riches. But two years after earning a PhD from UCLA, the narrator is no closer to the middle-class comfort promised to her by the prestige of her fancy, scholarship-funded education and the successes of her immigrant parents. Jokingly, Adam suggests she just marry rich.

But our protagonist, whose PhD thesis compared Eastern and Western views of marriage in film and literature, takes the idea seriously. She makes a spreadsheet and outlines a 100 dates with people of all genders and a marriage proposal in hand by the official start of the fall semester. What follows is a whirlwind summer packed with martinis sans vermouth with the lazy scion of an Eastside construction empire; board games with a butch producer who owns a house in the hills and a newly dented Porsche; a Venmo request from a “socialist” trust fund babe; and an evening spent dodging the halitosis of a maxillofacial surgeon from Orange County.

Only a tragedy in Tehran and an overdue familial reckoning can alter the narrator’s increasingly manic trajectory and force her to confront the contradictions of her life in Los Angeles. And as doubts begin to creep in about her marriage project, it suddenly seems possible that the eligible prospect she’s been looking for has been beneath her nose the entire time.

For fans of Kaveh Akbar and Elif Batuman, Liquid, A Love Story delivers a modern tale of romance, loss, and belonging like no other. Mariam Rahmani’s gorgeous high-wire satire explodes off the page with verve and originality in this riveting spin on the classic romantic comedy.]]> 306 Mariam Rahmani 1643756508 Letitia 0 to-read 2.92 2025
author: Mariam Rahmani
name: Letitia
average rating: 2.92
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 218153678 An electrifying story of love, betrayal, and the complicated allure of bougie domesticity.

You can fall in love with an outline, you can even make a home with one, but there will come a time where you can’t deny the bones their flesh. A person is no fewer than two things.

Thirty years old with a lifetime of dysphoria and irritating exes rattling around in her head, Max is plagued by a deep dissatisfaction. Shouldn’t these be the best years of her life? Why doesn’t it feel that way? After taking a spill down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party, she decides to make some changes. First: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.

Max thinks she’s found the answer in Vincent. While his corporate colleagues, trad friends, and Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman, he cares for Max in a way she’d always dismissed as a foolish fantasy. But he is also carrying baggage of his own. When the fall-out of a decades-old entanglement resurfaces, Max must decide what forgiveness really means. Can we be more than our worst mistakes? Is it possible to make peace with the past?

Funny, sharp, and poignant, Disappoint Me is a sweeping exploration of love, loss, trans panic, race, millennial angst, and the relationships—familial and romantic—that make us who we are.]]> 320 Nicola Dinan 0593977874 Letitia 0 2025-anticipated-reads
‘Disappoint Me’ by Nicola Dinan begins at a New Year's Eve party in London, introducing Max, a 30-year-old trans woman who has recently gone through a breakup. As the new year encourages many to reflect, Max, longing for the comforts of domesticity, resolves to start dating again, leading her to meet her future boyfriend, Vincent. Vincent checks all the boxes and provides everything she initially thought was unrealistic: a man who is kind, accepting, and stable. However, through the dual perspectives, we learn about Vincent’s past, which does not align with the version Max perceives him as. While grappling with her complicated relationship with her father's past actions, we embark on a journey of identity, forgiveness, and the struggles of adulthood, including marriage, kids, and career, as well as understanding what it means to recognize someone’s personhood and what to do when someone disappoints you.

“It’s hard to think of it in any more poignant terms than this is just what life does. We all want to do better, but what does better even mean?”

Max is a refreshing character because, unlike in many other stories where protagonists crash or spiral, she remains committed to reasoning and empathizing with the people in her life—specifically the men: her brother, father, and Vincent—even when it is at her own expense.

“This is also the world where people, often women, are doomed to spend much of their lives forgiving the errors of others and suffering for the sake of other people’s growth. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but leave, and sometimes there’s nothing to do but forgive.”

She desires to be a good and moral person, but struggles to understand what that means and how realistic it is when people are flawed and let you down. She does not want to be harsh or unforgiving. She is trying to make sense of the actions taken by the men in her life and reflect on how to perceive them, whether those actions change her feelings about them, if they are bad people, and what to do with those relationships. It's a humbling experience to navigate someone’s personhood. Growing up requires us to figure out our boundaries, limits, what we can or cannot forgive, what we can or cannot empathize with, and which actions truly reflect who people are.

“Life feels harder than it used to”. A story that, despite the gravity of the themes, I enjoyed so much. Cathartic. Honest. Enlightening. A story as great as its cover.

Thank you, Dial Press, for the #gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.
]]> 4.03 2025
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/26
date added: 2025/06/05
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads
review:
“No person is fewer than two things.”

‘Disappoint Me’ by Nicola Dinan begins at a New Year's Eve party in London, introducing Max, a 30-year-old trans woman who has recently gone through a breakup. As the new year encourages many to reflect, Max, longing for the comforts of domesticity, resolves to start dating again, leading her to meet her future boyfriend, Vincent. Vincent checks all the boxes and provides everything she initially thought was unrealistic: a man who is kind, accepting, and stable. However, through the dual perspectives, we learn about Vincent’s past, which does not align with the version Max perceives him as. While grappling with her complicated relationship with her father's past actions, we embark on a journey of identity, forgiveness, and the struggles of adulthood, including marriage, kids, and career, as well as understanding what it means to recognize someone’s personhood and what to do when someone disappoints you.

“It’s hard to think of it in any more poignant terms than this is just what life does. We all want to do better, but what does better even mean?”

Max is a refreshing character because, unlike in many other stories where protagonists crash or spiral, she remains committed to reasoning and empathizing with the people in her life—specifically the men: her brother, father, and Vincent—even when it is at her own expense.

“This is also the world where people, often women, are doomed to spend much of their lives forgiving the errors of others and suffering for the sake of other people’s growth. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but leave, and sometimes there’s nothing to do but forgive.”

She desires to be a good and moral person, but struggles to understand what that means and how realistic it is when people are flawed and let you down. She does not want to be harsh or unforgiving. She is trying to make sense of the actions taken by the men in her life and reflect on how to perceive them, whether those actions change her feelings about them, if they are bad people, and what to do with those relationships. It's a humbling experience to navigate someone’s personhood. Growing up requires us to figure out our boundaries, limits, what we can or cannot forgive, what we can or cannot empathize with, and which actions truly reflect who people are.

“Life feels harder than it used to”. A story that, despite the gravity of the themes, I enjoyed so much. Cathartic. Honest. Enlightening. A story as great as its cover.

Thank you, Dial Press, for the #gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.

]]> 220160272 For readers of Jonathan Franzen and Nathan Hill comes a haymaker of an American novel about a missing teenage boy, cases of fluid and mistaken identity, and the transformative power of boxing.

Austin, It’s the summer of 1998, and there’s a new face on the scene at Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym. Sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Rothstein has never felt comfortable in his own skin, but under the tutelage of a swaggering, Haitian-born ex-fighter named David Dalice, he begins to come into his own. Even the boy’s slightly-stoned uncle, Bob Alexander, who is supposed to be watching him for the summer, notices the change. Nathaniel is happier, more confident—tanner, even. Then one night he vanishes, leaving little trace behind.

Across the city, Charles Rex, now going simply by “X,” has been undergoing a teenage transformation of his own, trolling the phone sex hotline that his mother works, seeking an outlet for everything that feels wrong about his body, looking for intimacy and acceptance in a culture that denies him both. As a surprising and unlikely romance blooms, X feels, for a moment, like he might have found the safety he’s been searching for. But it's never that simple.

More than a decade later, Nathaniel’s uncle Bob receives a shocking tip, propelling him to open his own investigation into his nephew’s disappearance. The resulting search involves gymgoers past and present, including a down-on-his-luck twin and his opportunistic brother; a rookie cop determined to prove herself; and Alexis Cepeda, a promising lightweight, who crossed the US-Mexico border when he was only fourteen, carrying with him a license bearing the wrong name and face.

Bobbing and weaving across the ever-shifting canvas of a changing country, The Slip is an audacious, daring look at sex and race in America that builds to an unforgettable collision in the center of the ring.]]> 496 Lucas Schaefer 1668030705 Letitia 0 4.27 2025
author: Lucas Schaefer
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/06/03
date added: 2025/06/03
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:

]]> 49348747 A wildly original, cross-country novel that subverts a long tradition of family narratives and casts new light on the mythologies--national, individual, and collective--that drive and define us.

On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her freeloading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what's theirs. Except, instead of money, what their father gives them is information--a name--which both reveals a stunning family secret and compels them to come to grips with it. In the face of their new reality, the sisters and their adopted brother each set out on journeys that will test their faith in one another, as well as their definitions of freedom.

Moving from Seattle's underground to the docks of the Far North, from the hideaways of the southern swamps to the storied reaches of the Great Offshore Grounds, Vanessa Veselka spins a tale with boundless verve, linguistic vitality, and undeniable tenderness.]]> 448 Vanessa Veselka 0525658076 Letitia 0 to-read 3.60 2020
author: Vanessa Veselka
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/06/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39927096 You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes--it would all be too awkward--and you can’t say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

If you are Arthur Less.

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?

Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.

A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.]]> 273 Andrew Sean Greer Letitia 0 i-need-to-read-this 3.61 2017
author: Andrew Sean Greer
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/31
date added: 2025/05/31
shelves: i-need-to-read-this
review:

]]> 217388123 From one of Brazil’s most acclaimed new literary stars, a twenty-first-century epic set in Rio’s largest favela.

Brothers Washington and Wesley work part-time at a restaurant as servers for kids’ birthday parties. After helping their mom out with the household expenses, they spend the extra cash on a bit of fun whenever possible, and get high on that good quality weed when it’s available. Douglas, Murilo, and Biel split an apartment, sharing everything from their joints to their chores, just a quick bus ride from the beach on Via Ápia, the main entry point and commercial avenue of the favela Rocinha in Rio de Janeiro.

The lives of these five young people are far from the ease and leisure that many associate with one of Brazil’s most photogenic, well-known cities. Still, they manage, and life on the morro, the hill, is good.

All of this gets upturned when, in November 2011, the UPP, Brazil’s militarized police unit, occupies Rocinha as part of the "pacification" efforts and the so-called war on drugs, in anticipation of the World Cup, the Olympics, and an influx of global tourism in Rio. Via Ápia is divided into three parts: the expectant anxiousness of waiting for the UPP invasion; the chaos born from their installation on the hill; and their silent withdrawal from the favela after one year.

Told in short bursts and marked by the charged chronology of the year and a half of the protagonists’ lives, Geovani Martins’s prodigious debut novel knits together the dramas and dreams of the favela during a peak of violence and unrest. Just like the boomboom-kat of Brazilian funk, the unbridled ambitions and the resolute friendships of his characters blare through Via Ápia, delivering a resonant counternarrative to the notion that violent interventions are the state’s only remedies to social problems. The favela retorts: Life, life is the answer.]]> 352 Geovani Martins 0374612986 Letitia 0 4.33 2022
author: Geovani Martins
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/28
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 62978903 'Bellies announces Nicola Dinan as a genuine literary talent, a gimlet-eyed cartographer of the human heart' Sharlene Teo, author of Ponti'Thoughtful, seductive, and entirely engrossing - Bellies is already a classic' Bryan Washington, author of Memorial and LotIt begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desperately drawn into Ming's orbit, and on the cusp of graduation, he's already mapped out their future together. But, shortly after they move to London to start their next chapter, Ming announces her intention to transition.From London to Kuala Lumpur, New York to Cologne, we follow Tom and Ming as they face the shifts in their relationship in the wake of Ming's transition. Through a spiral of unforeseen crises - some personal, some professional, some life-altering - Tom and Ming are forced to confront the vastly different shapes their lives have taken since graduating, and each must answer the essential is it worth losing a part of yourself to become who you are?]]> 320 Nicola Dinan 0857529242 Letitia 0 to-read 4.11 2023
author: Nicola Dinan
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217388128 A genre-bending story about breaking―both of the heart and form itself―from the author of Biography of X.

Adrift in the winter of 2021 after a sudden breakup and the ensuing depression, the novelist Catherine Lacey began cataloguing the wreckage of her life and the beauty of her friendships, a practice that eventually propagated fiction both entirely imagined and strangely true. She soon realized that she was writing about her relationship with faith. Betrayed by the mercurial partner she had trusted with a shared mortgage and suddenly catapulted into the unknown, Lacey’s appetite vanished completely, a visceral reminder of the teenage emaciation that came when she stopped believing in God. Through relationships, travel, reading, and memories of her religious fanaticism, Lacey charts the contours of faith’s absence and reemergence. Bending form, she and her characters recall gnostic experiences with animals, close encounters with male anger, griefdriven lust, and the redemptive power of platonic love and narrative itself.

A hybrid work across fiction and nonfiction with no beginning or ending, The Möbius Book troubles the line between memory and fiction with an openhearted defense of faith’s inherent danger.]]> 240 Catherine Lacey 0374615403 Letitia 0 3.87 2025
author: Catherine Lacey
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/25
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 220687903 “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds.

Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law.

Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.]]> 336 Michael Clune 0593834429 Letitia 0 4.08
author: Michael Clune
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.08
book published:
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/05/21
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, currently-reading
review:

]]> 220160852 A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel that grapples with grief, motherhood, and myths—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.

A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.

Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.

In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.]]> 208 Katie Yee 166808421X Letitia 0 4.02 2025
author: Katie Yee
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/21
date added: 2025/05/21
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:

]]> 222304731 'Brilliant and powerful' ELIZABETH GILBERT
'So full of wisdom and pleasure that you don’t want it to end' MAGGIE NELSON

In the wake of a disastrous two-year relationship, Melissa Febos decided to take a break – for three months she would abstain from dating, relationships and sex. Her friends were amused. Did she really think three months was a long time? But to Melissa, it was. Ever since her teens, she had been in one relationship or another. It was time to focus on herself and examine the lifelong patterns that had got her to this point. When those three months ended, she decided to extend her celibate period, fearing that she had not yet gained the clarity she was searching for. She knew she was taking on a challenge but had no idea that this year would become the most fulfilling and sensual of her life.

No longer defined by her romantic pursuits, Melissa learned to relish the delights of solitude, the thrill of living on her own terms, the pleasures unmediated by lovers and the freedom to pursue her ideals without distraction or guilt. She began to see her life and her self-worth in a radical new way. Her year of divestment transformed her relationships with friends and peers, her work, creativity – and most of all her relationship to herself.

The Dry Season is a memoir of Melissa’s year of celibacy, and a profound exploration of independence, sexuality and deep self-knowledge.]]> 289 Melissa Febos 1837260109 Letitia 0 4.00 2025
author: Melissa Febos
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/19
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 228895488 A novel of art, desire, intimacy, and mortality, Casanova 20: Or, Hot World is about a young man isolated by his otherworldly beauty, and his strange friendship with an older painter

Cursed by an extreme and unrelenting beauty, Adrian has drawn the frenzied attention of adoring strangers since childhood. As a twenty-nine-year-old in New York City, he spends his days drifting between affairs with women (and occasionally men) who provide him with everything he needs, from spending money to luxurious vacations and even, once, a mini yacht. With this generosity comes a dangerous possessiveness that often puts him at risk of much worse than heartbreak. But as people begin removing their masks in the spring of 2021, Adrian’s aimless sexual availability is interrupted by a shocking He is no longer beautiful.

Across the country, Adrian's best friend and companion, Mark, a world-famous painter, has returned to the family home in rural Northern California. He's faced with his own horrible He’s dying from the same mysterious disease that will soon take his mother and sister.

Despite the depth of their platonic romance, neither man reveals his fate to the other. Feeling as if he’s disappearing from sight, Adrian searches for answers among his thousands of lovers. In a race against his failing body, Mark becomes obsessed with watching fifty-two VHS tapes of unknown origin, left to him by his sister, before it’s too late.

“An astounding writer, seemingly unconstrained by taboos and waist-deep down in the maw of life” (Torrey Peters), Davey Davis presents a modern-day Casanova figure grappling with what it means to find true intimacy when his very existence means constant exposure to the world's violent desire.]]> 304 Davey Davis 1646222830 Letitia 0 5.00 2025
author: Davey Davis
name: Letitia
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/16
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 220239083 “A beautiful meditation on endurance, codependence, and the power of love. A dazzling book.” – Patrick Radden Keefe

The electrifying true story of a young couple shipwrecked at a mind-blowing tale of obsession, survival, and partnership stretched to its limits.

Maurice and Maralyn make an odd couple. He’s a loner, awkward and obsessive; she’s charismatic and ambitious. But they share a horror of wasting their lives. And they dream – as we all dream – of running away from it all. What if they quit their jobs, sold their house, bought a boat, and sailed away?

Most of us begin and end with the daydream. But Maurice began to study nautical navigation. Maralyn made detailed lists of provisions. And in June 1972, they set sail. For nearly a year all went well, until deep in the Pacific, a breaching whale knocked a hole in their boat and it sank beneath the waves.

What ensues is a jaw-dropping fight to survive in the wild ocean, with little hope of rescue. Alone together for months in a tiny rubber raft, starving and exhausted, Maurice and Maralyn have to find not only ways to stay alive but ways to get along, as their inner demons emerge and their marriage is put to the greatest of tests. Although they could run away from the world, they can’t run away from themselves.

Taut, propulsive, and dazzling, A Marriage at Sea pairs an adrenaline-fueled high seas adventure with a gutting love story that asks why we love difficult people, and who we become under the most extreme conditions imaginable.]]> 256 Sophie Elmhirst 0593854284 Letitia 0 4.15 2024
author: Sophie Elmhirst
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/13
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 220160115
Ali “Al” Jafar is a rising star at notorious hedge fund Prism Capital, but fortunes change fast on Wall Street. When his biggest investment goes up in smoke, Al loses $300 million—and his fragile sense of self-worth—in a single afternoon. He’s certain he’ll be fired, but Prism’s obscenely rich and politically connected founder isn’t that merciful. Instead, he gives Al an impossible ultimatum: recover the lost money in three months or become the fall guy for the government’s insider-trading investigation into the firm.

Depressed and desperate, Al turns to high finance’s dark side, where he battles back-stabbing coworkers and cutthroat competitors and digs himself into an even deeper hole. As the clock winds down, and the pressure mounts, Al’s mental health deteriorates. To survive, he’ll have to outfox one of the world’s most powerful men and decide if he values the dearest asset of all: himself.]]> 320 Amran Gowani 166807642X Letitia 0 3.82
author: Amran Gowani
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.82
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/12
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, currently-reading
review:

]]> 224003731 One young woman’s relentless quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut will irrevocably alter the fates of the people she loves most in this tour de force of a debut about ambition, belonging, and family.

My mother took my sister and me, and she drove through the night to a place she felt a claim to, a place on earth she thought we might be safe. I stopped asking questions. I picked little glass pieces from my sister’s hair. I watched the moon.

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was six, her mother, Hannah, fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister, Kayla, in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.

In Steph’s certainty that only her ambition can save her, she will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, at once betraying their love and generosity, and forcing them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. Told through an intricately woven tapestry of narrative, To the Moon and Back is an astounding and expansive novel of mothers and daughters, love and sacrifice, alienation and heartbreak, terror and wonder. At its core, it is the story of the extraordinary lengths to which one woman will go to find space for herself.]]> 448 Eliana Ramage 1668065851 Letitia 0 4.30 2025
author: Eliana Ramage
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/10
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 203099552 After Nancy’s father dies, she is faced with two life-changing revelations.

She has a half-brother she knew nothing about.

Nancy’s world is punched inside out at the discovery of a mysterious new sibling. But she can’t help but feel curious about Oliver, this stranger who shares her DNA. Her sister Rita, on the other hand, is furious and wants nothing to do with their ‘cuckoo’ brother.

She’s pregnant.

The father – Nancy’s not-quite-boyfriend from her not-quite-relationship – doesn’t want to commit any time soon. He isn’t even in the same continent as her right now. And with her mother and sister in shock about Oliver, Nancy’s struggling to find someone to turn to for support.

In a tumult of grief, fear and hope, Nancy pushes herself into an uncertain future as she rethinks what really makes a family. But there’s one more thought in the back of her head…

Is there space in her family for two more? ]]> 342 Nell Frizzell 1473587115 Letitia 0 to-read 3.57
author: Nell Frizzell
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.57
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 217247967 Nine masterful stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence in America–and in American families–against women and the LGBTQ+ community.

A collection filled with surprise, dark humor, and deep compassion, from the author of The Bigness of the World, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

In Lori Ostlund’s exquisite collection, Are You Happy?, she examines the lives of people who have left their place and culture of origin behind. Set in Minnesota, New Mexico, and California, we watch Ostlund’s characters as they try–and often fail–to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and responsibilities.

In deceptively straightforward prose Ostlund delves deep into the interpersonal and grapples with the compulsion to make others happy–and the elusiveness of being happy oneself. As a woman mourns the premature loss of her best friend’s youth, two parents the life of their son, a queer couple their feeling of safety, and a daughter her family’s political integrity, Ostlund paints a distinctly American portrait of violence manifest at its most intimate scale.

Richly layered and structurally complex, these stories have a novelistic feel. Lori Ostlund is a master of the form and Are You Happy? showcases her best work to date.]]> 272 Lori Ostlund 1662603029 Letitia 0 3.88
author: Lori Ostlund
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.88
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/06
date added: 2025/05/06
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, short-stories
review:

]]> 60194162 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780063251922.

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose."

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved in ours. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens' anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can't imagine leaving behind.]]> 560 Barbara Kingsolver Letitia 0 award-winning 4.45 2022
author: Barbara Kingsolver
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.45
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at: 2025/05/05
date added: 2025/05/05
shelves: award-winning
review:

]]> 175622660
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by Good Housekeeping , 카지노싸이트 , Zibby Mag , Newsweek , BookPage , and LitHub

The bestselling poet and author of the “powerful” (People ) and “luminous” ( Newsweek ) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.

“Life, like a poem, is a series of choices.”

In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful , poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes. With the spirit of self-inquiry and empathy she’s known for, Smith interweaves snapshots of a life with meditations on secrets, anger, forgiveness, and narrative itself. The power of these pieces is cumulative: page after page, they build into a larger interrogation of family, work, and patriarchy.

You Could Make This Place Beautiful , like the work of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and Gina Frangello, is an unflinching look at what it means to live and write our own lives. It is a story about a mother’s fierce and constant love for her children, and a woman’s love and regard for herself. Above all, this memoir is an argument for possibility. With a poet’s attention to language and an innovative approach to the genre, Smith reveals how, in the aftermath of loss, we can discover our power and make something new. Something beautiful.]]> 8 Maggie Smith 1797151975 Letitia 0
The structure worked for me, and I found many vignettes and lines I loved. For those unfamiliar, she gained viral fame for a poem called ‘Good Bones,’ the last line, the memoir’s title, perfectly echoes the lasting sentiment. Despite all the pain, disappointment, and frustration she has experienced, there are many sentiments of hope, optimism, and joy. Beautifully written! 

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review. ]]> 3.83 2023
author: Maggie Smith
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves: arcs-gifted, i-need-to-read-this
review:
YOU COULD MAKE THIS PLACE BEAUTIFUL is a memoir told in lyrical vignettes that detail her marriage, divorce, and the process of picking up the pieces afterward. For those who have read Liars by Sarah Manguso, this is the more poetic and less infuriating version. She portrays the foreshadowing, imbalances, and difficulties of her marriage, all the hairline fractures that lead to the irreparable crack, the struggle with work-life balance, motherhood, and how, in the aftermath, she is processing and defining her life.

The structure worked for me, and I found many vignettes and lines I loved. For those unfamiliar, she gained viral fame for a poem called ‘Good Bones,’ the last line, the memoir’s title, perfectly echoes the lasting sentiment. Despite all the pain, disappointment, and frustration she has experienced, there are many sentiments of hope, optimism, and joy. Beautifully written! 

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.
]]> 80089250
Ranita Atwater is “getting short.”

She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children.

My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival.

Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life.

Perfect or fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.]]> 0 Helen Elaine Lee 1797155504 Letitia 0
I saw other readers describe this as a mix of self-help and literary fiction; through that lens, you appreciate the story more. This slower-paced story is not plot-driven, with a neatly packed ending, which made it a more middle-of-the-road reading experience for me. However, I'm glad to have read it, as I found the greater themes impactful and well-explored. I recommend listening to the audiobook! I also love the cover and how it connects to the story. It's ideal for fans of Nightcrawling and Jesmyn Ward. 

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review. ]]> 3.95 2023
author: Helen Elaine Lee
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/30
date added: 2025/04/30
shelves:
review:
POMEGRANATE follows Ranita Atwater, recently released from her four-year sentence for opiate possession, as she is now navigating her sobriety and regaining custody of her two kids. Flipping between the present day and the past, we see how her abuse, incarceration, substance use, parental wounds, and grief have impacted her and her intimate process of healing from them. Ranita is a sympathetic and complex character you root for, and through her time in therapy, we see her transform and come to terms with her identity as a queer woman and find a way towards the life she dreams of.  

I saw other readers describe this as a mix of self-help and literary fiction; through that lens, you appreciate the story more. This slower-paced story is not plot-driven, with a neatly packed ending, which made it a more middle-of-the-road reading experience for me. However, I'm glad to have read it, as I found the greater themes impactful and well-explored. I recommend listening to the audiobook! I also love the cover and how it connects to the story. It's ideal for fans of Nightcrawling and Jesmyn Ward. 

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.
]]> 176450755
Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she’ll decide who may cross her town’s heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it’s the same valley, the same town--except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it’s twenty years behind. The towns repeat in an endless sequence across the wilderness.

When Odile recognizes two visitors she wasn’t supposed to see, she realizes that the parents of her friend Edme have been escorted across the border from the future, on a mourning tour, to view their son while he’s still alive in Odile’s present. Edme––who is brilliant, funny, and the only person to truly see Odile––is about to die. Sworn to secrecy in order to preserve the timeline, Odile now becomes the Conseil’s top candidate, yet she finds herself drawing closer to the doomed boy, imperiling her entire future.]]> 290 Scott Alexander Howard 1668015471 Letitia 0
Time travel is not an original topic, but time traveling to solve deep grief, I’ve never seen explored before. Categorized as a science fiction novel, this leans more towards the literary side, as the details of world-building are kept to a minimum, which I enjoyed. The bulk of the story explores mortality, the tension between individual good and common good, grief, regret, fate, unmet expectations, and the passage of time.

The time travel, centered around grief, evokes feelings of unease, ominousness, and desolation, as not everyone is approved to travel, as it is at the government’s discretion. This raises the idea of measuring one’s grief against another's and the consequences and risks for the greater community, because every time you time travel, you risk being seen, which can alter, in unknown ways, the trajectory of someone else's life. Other aspects I found notable were the limitations of closure and the effects on the psyche of knowing there are other realities where a loved one who has passed can still be alive.

It was easy to immerse yourself in this world, and it never quite went where I thought it would go, especially Odile’s fate. The ending felt earned and honored one of the story's greater takeaways: you can never really know your fate. I recommend it to those who enjoy speculative fiction. I found it pretty readable, and the lulls never lasted long, as a turn would happen in the plot that would grip me all over again. Such an interesting concept that I will be thinking about for quite some time!

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review. ]]> 3.85 2024
author: Scott Alexander Howard
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/27
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves:
review:
Imagine a place where time travel is possible, but only to alleviate profound grief. In Scott Alexander Howard’s debut novel, ‘The Other Valley’, we are taken to ‘the valley’ where we meet Odile, sixteen, in her apprenticeship year, which will decide her future career. She is vying for the coveted spot on the Conseil that determines who gets to cross the town’s heavily guarded borders between the past and the future. As she’s navigating the typical teenage woes, she witnesses something she wasn’t supposed to see – the parents of her friend Edme from the future on a mourning tour, which means Edme is going to die. What ensues is a journey that reveals how this affects Odile’s future, how seeing a glimpse of your future impacts your present, and the actions taken when you have nothing to lose.

Time travel is not an original topic, but time traveling to solve deep grief, I’ve never seen explored before. Categorized as a science fiction novel, this leans more towards the literary side, as the details of world-building are kept to a minimum, which I enjoyed. The bulk of the story explores mortality, the tension between individual good and common good, grief, regret, fate, unmet expectations, and the passage of time.

The time travel, centered around grief, evokes feelings of unease, ominousness, and desolation, as not everyone is approved to travel, as it is at the government’s discretion. This raises the idea of measuring one’s grief against another's and the consequences and risks for the greater community, because every time you time travel, you risk being seen, which can alter, in unknown ways, the trajectory of someone else's life. Other aspects I found notable were the limitations of closure and the effects on the psyche of knowing there are other realities where a loved one who has passed can still be alive.

It was easy to immerse yourself in this world, and it never quite went where I thought it would go, especially Odile’s fate. The ending felt earned and honored one of the story's greater takeaways: you can never really know your fate. I recommend it to those who enjoy speculative fiction. I found it pretty readable, and the lulls never lasted long, as a turn would happen in the plot that would grip me all over again. Such an interesting concept that I will be thinking about for quite some time!

Thank you to the publisher for the gifted copy in exchange for my honest review.
]]> 48715812 here.

Tiffy and Leon share an apartment. Tiffy and Leon have never met.

After a bad breakup, Tiffy Moore needs a place to live. Fast. And cheap.

Desperation makes her open-minded, so she answers an ad for a flatshare. Leon, a night-shift worker, will take the apartment during the day, and Tiffy can have it nights and weekends. He’ll be there only when she’s at the office. In fact, they’ll never even have to meet.

Of course, since they live together, sometimes they do need to share information. Tiffy and Leon start writing each other notes—first about what day is garbage day, then politely establishing which leftovers are up for grabs and debating the evergreen question of whether the toilet seat should stay up or down. Soon, they're sharing details of their lives: their work, their families, their romances. And it's amazing how much they learn about their flatmate just by sharing a space.

Even though they are complete opposites, Tiffy and Leon soon become friends. And then maybe more.

But falling in love with your roommate is probably a terrible idea . . . especially if you've never met. What happens when you finally bump into each other?

A joyful, quirky romantic comedy, The Flatshare is a feel-good novel about finding love in the most unexpected of places—under the same roof.]]> 328 Beth O'Leary 1250295637 Letitia 4
We follow Tiffy and Leon who are both looking for a roommate. Tiffy needs a cheap flat fast to escape her ex-boyfriend while Leon needs the cash to help pay for his imprisoned brother’s legal fees. Tiffy and Leon are opposites in every way and share a room without ever seeing each other which leaves you wondering how this situation will bring the two together.

What I thought would just be about how two people by proximity end up falling for each other, ended up also being about how to overcome an abusive relationship and being resilient when fighting for a loved one.

Even though it is described as a rom-com, I actually didn’t think it was. Tiffy is funny and quirky but I wouldn’t consider it similar to ‘The Unhoneymooners’ which I consider a solid rom-com. Due to the more serious storylines both characters are experiencing, I wasn’t laughing throughout the book but that is what made the story more meaningful and less corny/cliche.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I read this as a buddy read and she loved it as well. It was such an easy read with some unexpected plot twists. I would recommend it to those who love romance books. I also have ‘The Switch’ by Beth so I’m looking forward to reading it next.]]> 3.98 2019
author: Beth O'Leary
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.98
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/20
date added: 2025/04/23
shelves:
review:
This was a charming romance with some surprisingly deep storylines.

We follow Tiffy and Leon who are both looking for a roommate. Tiffy needs a cheap flat fast to escape her ex-boyfriend while Leon needs the cash to help pay for his imprisoned brother’s legal fees. Tiffy and Leon are opposites in every way and share a room without ever seeing each other which leaves you wondering how this situation will bring the two together.

What I thought would just be about how two people by proximity end up falling for each other, ended up also being about how to overcome an abusive relationship and being resilient when fighting for a loved one.

Even though it is described as a rom-com, I actually didn’t think it was. Tiffy is funny and quirky but I wouldn’t consider it similar to ‘The Unhoneymooners’ which I consider a solid rom-com. Due to the more serious storylines both characters are experiencing, I wasn’t laughing throughout the book but that is what made the story more meaningful and less corny/cliche.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one. I read this as a buddy read and she loved it as well. It was such an easy read with some unexpected plot twists. I would recommend it to those who love romance books. I also have ‘The Switch’ by Beth so I’m looking forward to reading it next.
]]> 217223460 From the author of the "delightful" (New York Times Book Review) Mary Jane, a new novel of found family, growing up, and the best and worst of the 1980s, revolving around San Francisco's most exclusive department store, I. Magnin.

Nineteen-year-old Zippy can hardly believe it: she's the newest and youngest salesgirl at I. Magnin, "San Francisco's Finest Department Store." Every week, she rotates her three spruced-up Salvation Army outfits and Vaseline-shined pumps; still, she's thrilled to walk those pumps through the employee entrance five days a week as she saves to buy something new. For a girl who grew up in a one-bedroom apartment above a liquor store with her mother and her mother's madcap boyfriend, Howard; a girl who wanted to go to college but had no help in figuring out how; I. Magnin represents a real chance for a better and more elegant life. Or, at the very least, a more interesting one.

Zippy may not be in school, but she's about to get an education that will stick with her for decades. Her fellow salesgirls (lifetime professionals) run the gamut from mean and indifferent to caring and helpful. The cosmetics ladies on the first floor share both samples and advice ("only date a man with a Rolex"); and her new roommate, Raquel, an ambitious lawyer, tells Zippy she can lose ten pounds easy if she joins Raquel in eating only every other day. Just when Zippy thinks she's getting a handle on how to be an adult woman in 1985, two surprises threaten both her sense of self and her coveted position at I. Magnin.

Set in the Day-Glo colors of 1980s San Francisco, Shopgirls is an intoxicating novel of self-discovery, outrageous fashion, and family both biological and found.]]> 272 Jessica Anya Blau 0063052350 Letitia 0 to-read 3.60 2025
author: Jessica Anya Blau
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 54870208
The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, IMPEACHMENT: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): The doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.

Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be. ]]> 320 Jessica Anya Blau 0063052296 Letitia 0 to-read 4.09 2021
author: Jessica Anya Blau
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.09
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 210223811 Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own.

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.]]> 400 R.F. Kuang Letitia 0 to-read 3.93 2025
author: R.F. Kuang
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/11
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 205478780 Quarterlife is] by a distance the best debut of the year." —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

India’s literary novel of the year—an enthralling, award-winning debut from a “blazingly original voice” (Vauhini Vara).

“In the fashion of the big novels by Salman Rushdie or Amitav Gosh” (Biblio), Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. When the Bharat Party comes to power after a divisive election, Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant, is lured home to Mumbai. With him is Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to embody her ideals through a teaching fellowship in a Muslim-majority slum. Meanwhile, Naren’s charismatic brother Rohit, an amateur filmmaker, sets out to explore his roots and befriends the fiery young men of the Hindu nationalist machine. Their journeys lead them into an astonishing milieu of brutal debates and infatuations as fraught as they are addictive, feeding into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets—where the simmering unrest erupts. Hailed as “a landmark novel” (Indian Express), Quarterlife is a brilliantly innovative work that tests the limits of what the novel can achieve.]]> 416 Devika Rege 1324095490 Letitia 0 to-read 3.63
author: Devika Rege
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.63
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/10
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214557373 A daring novel that spans one hundred years of American history, about parents and children, the drive to create even in times of crisis, and the inheritance of grand western dreams

It’s 2024, and Tobey Harlan—college dropout, temporary waiter, recently dumped—steals from the wall of his father’s house three paintings by the venerated and controversial artist Di Stiegl. Tobey’s just lost everything he owns to a Northern California wildfire, and if he can sell the paintings (albeit in a shady way to a notorious tech bro) he can start life anew in a place no one will ever find him, perhaps even Oregon.

A hundred years before, Klaus Aaronsohn—German-Jewish immigrant, resident of the Lower East Side—inveigles his way into a film studio in Astoria, Queens. In love with silent cinema, Klaus restyles himself "Klaus von Stiegl," a mysterious aristocratic German film director. In true Hollywood fashion he will court fame, fortune, romance, and betrayal, and end his career directing Brackett, a radical, notorious 60s-era detective show.

Weaving between the stories of Tobey and Klaus is that of Diane “Di” Stiegl: Klaus’s granddaughter, raised in Palm Springs, who carves out a career as an artist in gritty 1980s New York City. As America yields the presidency to a Hollywood cowboy, as Diane’s grifter father and free-spirited mother move in and out of her life, Diane will reflect America’s most urgent and hypocritical years back to itself, uneasily finding critical adoration as well as great fame and wealth.]]> 384 Brian Castleberry 0063213338 Letitia 0 3.04 2025
author: Brian Castleberry
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.04
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/04
date added: 2025/04/04
shelves:
review:

]]> 228394781 160 Vincent Delecroix 1913109372 Letitia 0 to-read, translations 4.10
author: Vincent Delecroix
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.10
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/02
shelves: to-read, translations
review:

]]> 60784312
Is it enough?

Does he respond to texts? Honor his commitments? Make advance plans? Sometimes, rarely, and no, not at all. But when he shines his light on her, the world makes sense, and Adelaide is convinced that, in his heart, he’s fallen just as deeply as she has. Then, when Rory is rocked by an unexpected tragedy, Adelaide does everything in her power to hold him together—even if it means losing herself in the process.

When love asks too much of us, how do we find the strength to put ourselves first?

With unflinching honesty and heart, this relatable debut from a fresh new voice explores grief and mental health while capturing the timeless nature of what it’s like to be young and in love—with your friends, with your city, and with a person who cannot, will not, love you back.]]> 304 Genevieve Wheeler 1250280842 Letitia 0 to-read, romance 3.93 2023
author: Genevieve Wheeler
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.93
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, romance
review:

]]> 123242869 Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov’s reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature.]]> 304 Georgi Gospodinov 1474623077 Letitia 0 to-read, translations 3.56 2020
author: Georgi Gospodinov
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/31
shelves: to-read, translations
review:

]]> 211004813 The Accidentals is the brilliant new book from International Booker-shortlisted duo Guadalupe Nettel and Rosalind Harvey.]]> 144 Guadalupe Nettel 1639734929 Letitia 0 3.91 2023
author: Guadalupe Nettel
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/29
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, short-stories
review:

]]> 218569917
Lina and her father have arrived at an enclave called The Sea, a staging-post between migrations, with only a few possessions. In this mysterious and shape-shifting place, a building made of time, pasts and futures collide. Lina befriends her neighbors: Bento, a Jewish scholar in seventeenth-century Amsterdam; Blucher, a philosopher in 1930s Germany fleeing Nazi persecution; and Jupiter, a poet of Tang Dynasty China. Under the tutelage of these great thinkers, Lina equips herself to face her ailing father’s troubling admissions about his role in their family’s tragic past. Lina’s encounters with her intellectual and personal forebearers force her to reckon with difficult questions of guilt, responsibility, and the possibility of redemption.

Profound, exquisitely written and with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records explores the role of fate in history, the migratory nature of humanity, our search for home, and the place of faith and humanity in our world.]]> 368 Madeleine Thien 1324078650 Letitia 0 3.54 2025
author: Madeleine Thien
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.54
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 31549906
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking answers in the fragile layers of their collective story. Her quest will unveil how Kai, her enigmatic father, a talented pianist, and Ai-Ming’s father, the shy and brilliant composer, Sparrow, along with the violin prodigy Zhuli were forced to reimagine their artistic and private selves during China’s political campaigns and how their fates reverberate through the years with lasting consequences.

With maturity and sophistication, humor and beauty, Thien has crafted a novel that is at once intimate and grandly political, rooted in the details of life inside China yet transcendent in its universality.]]> 474 Madeleine Thien 039360988X Letitia 0 to-read 3.90 2016
author: Madeleine Thien
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 220161437 A haunting and seductive tale of a young career woman who slides quickly into the role of stepmother, in a life that may still belong to someone else. “Vivid, addictive, and crackling with life (yes, even the ghost), House of Beth asks us to consider how and why we make the lives we make” (Lynn Steger Strong).

After a heart-wrenching breakup and a shocking incident at her job as an overworked assistant at a literary agency, Cassie retreats to her hometown in New Jersey, along the Delaware River. There, she reconnects with her high school best friend, Eli, now a widowed father of two. Their bond reignites, and within a few short months, Cassie is trading her bustling New York City life for homeschooling, nature walks, and cooking lessons with her reserved neighbor, Joan.

But Cassie’s fresh start is anything but peaceful. She still misses her ex-girlfriend and she grapples with harm OCD, her mind haunted by graphic and gory images. In their secluded house nestled in the woods, she tries to find solace. But the shadow of Beth, Eli’s late spouse, a committed homemaker and traditional wife, looms large, permeating every corner of their home—from the décor to the rhythms of daily life.

Soon, Cassie starts hearing a voice narrating the house’s secrets. This mysterious presence grows stronger, guiding Cassie down a path to uncover the truth about Beth’s untimely death.

House of Beth is a beautifully crafted novel that blends modern literary charm with gothic mystery and speculative elements. Perfect for fans of Bunny by Mona Awad or Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, this thought-provoking novel probes the boundaries of our minds and bodies, the stories we tell ourselves about who we’re meant to be, and the thoughts, beliefs, and desires we aren’t always brave enough to name.]]> 240 Kerry Cullen 1668074591 Letitia 0 4.23 2025
author: Kerry Cullen
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/23
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 211934956 A bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?

Since her canonical 2017 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a public intellectual straight out of the 1960s. With devastating wit and polemical clarity, she defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, instead modeling how the left might brave the culture wars without throwing in with the cynics and doomsayers. Authority brings together Chu’s critical work across a wide range of media—novels, television, theater, video games—as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of literary essays first published in n+1. As a critic, Chu places The Phantom of the Opera within a centuries-old conflict between music and drama; questions the enduring habit of reading Octavia Butler’s science fiction as a parable of slavery; teases out the ideology behind Hillary Clinton’s (fictional) sex life; and charges fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with a complacent humanism.

Criticism is in a crisis of authority—or rather, that’s what critics have been saying ever since the Enlightenment. In a magisterial new essay, Chu offers a revised intellectual history of this supposed crisis, tracing the surprisingly political contours of criticism from its origins in eighteenth-century aesthetics all the way to its present form in the age of social media. Rather than succumbing to an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the genuine crises, from authoritarianism to genocide, that confront us today.]]> 288 Andrea Long Chu 0374600333 Letitia 0 3.79 2025
author: Andrea Long Chu
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 214537757 A prismatic, mind-bending family epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible.

Everyone had been survived into different futures and I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.
 
In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
 
Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband, who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelganger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend and eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; and, finally, Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be Sonja. Through their stories, we come to see how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.
 
Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the boundary between desire and reality; this is a singular work that masterfully considers the possibility of magic, and the dangerous and impossible hope for a different history.]]> 464 Stuart Nadler 0593475461 Letitia 0 3.72 2025
author: Stuart Nadler
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.72
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:

]]> 215362651
The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents’ story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited.

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.]]> 448 Eric Puchner 0385550669 Letitia 0 3.56 2025
author: Eric Puchner
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/14
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:
Almost DNF. Will compile my thoughts. It’s a good book but I wasn’t connecting to it which also made it feel very very long
]]> 62039166 From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under―but rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewelry on eBay, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil―can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written―is there still time to find a happy ending?]]> 645 Paul Murray 0374600309 Letitia 5
‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray follows the Barnes family as their life, as they know it, is falling apart. Their family’s car business, which provided them wealth and luxury and insulated them from many of life’s struggles, is now going under for reasons beyond the recession. And no one is taking it worse than the mother, Imelda. But as we follow the perspectives of each Barnes, Cass, the moody, self-absorbed and insecure teenage daughter, PJ, the innocent and naive twelve-year old son, Imelda, the irritable and resentful mom and Dickie, the resigned and culpable father, we learn the secrets and reasons which have led to their troubles as we meet them in present day.

If there were one word I could use to describe my reading experience it would be TENSE. I devoured this 650-page novel in 4 days, which shows how absorbing it is from start to finish. As I finished each POV, the clarity I gained from the character was immediately replaced with stress, worry, and anxiety.

So much that happens within a family is deceiving, including the tales we tell about the stinging of a bee… But one of the biggest takeaways and a common thread among family sagas, is how little we truly know of the lives of the people closest to us. Parents have experienced trauma, misfortune, and suffering that the kids will never understand. And kids have heartache, discovery, and confusion that parents are not privy to. As a reader, it makes for a thought-provoking, distressing, and engrossing journey.

The debated ending I fully support. I kid you not, by the end, I was as relieved as someone who finishes a marathon—a true crescendo. Spending over 600 pages with the Barnes family gave deep clarity in their intentions, which is all we need to know and perfectly fulfills and honors the tension throughout the story. The aim wasn’t to solve problems; just showcase them with honesty, humor and chaos.

Thank you FSG for the gifted copy and Dua Lipa for getting me to read [and my friends for telling me this would be my taste, you are right as always].]]> 3.91 2023
author: Paul Murray
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2023
rating: 5
read at: 2025/02/18
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: irish-lit, 2023-releases, arcs-gifted, family-drama
review:
“We’re all that kind of person … We all have problems. But often instead of accepting the truth about ourselves, we cover it up. We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.”

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray follows the Barnes family as their life, as they know it, is falling apart. Their family’s car business, which provided them wealth and luxury and insulated them from many of life’s struggles, is now going under for reasons beyond the recession. And no one is taking it worse than the mother, Imelda. But as we follow the perspectives of each Barnes, Cass, the moody, self-absorbed and insecure teenage daughter, PJ, the innocent and naive twelve-year old son, Imelda, the irritable and resentful mom and Dickie, the resigned and culpable father, we learn the secrets and reasons which have led to their troubles as we meet them in present day.

If there were one word I could use to describe my reading experience it would be TENSE. I devoured this 650-page novel in 4 days, which shows how absorbing it is from start to finish. As I finished each POV, the clarity I gained from the character was immediately replaced with stress, worry, and anxiety.

So much that happens within a family is deceiving, including the tales we tell about the stinging of a bee… But one of the biggest takeaways and a common thread among family sagas, is how little we truly know of the lives of the people closest to us. Parents have experienced trauma, misfortune, and suffering that the kids will never understand. And kids have heartache, discovery, and confusion that parents are not privy to. As a reader, it makes for a thought-provoking, distressing, and engrossing journey.

The debated ending I fully support. I kid you not, by the end, I was as relieved as someone who finishes a marathon—a true crescendo. Spending over 600 pages with the Barnes family gave deep clarity in their intentions, which is all we need to know and perfectly fulfills and honors the tension throughout the story. The aim wasn’t to solve problems; just showcase them with honesty, humor and chaos.

Thank you FSG for the gifted copy and Dua Lipa for getting me to read [and my friends for telling me this would be my taste, you are right as always].
]]> 227786718 A provocative novel about intimacy, love, and consent, following an increasingly obsessive radio host who tests boundaries she didn’t know existed

Olive is desperate to get close to Theo—really, really close. She’s always struggled to connect with people. And now she’s in her thirties, single, and so flustered by relationships that she secretly records her conversations, hoping to decipher social clues and find a way to be less alone.

Then Theo turns up for a shift at the same food pantry where she volunteers. He’s a surgeon fascinated by human organs, a former soccer player, and possibly as weird as Olive. For the first time, someone seems to crave and understand her. Every recording Olive makes of Theo is a balm, which just makes her more afraid of losing him. The only solution seems to be to bind him to her forever. Luckily, the gap between Theo’s front teeth is just wide enough for something—or someone—to slip inside.

Arresting and immersive, Open Wide explores the boundaries of love and the body, as universal human impulses bleed into the surreal.]]> 272 Jessica Gross 1419778986 Letitia 0 4.22 2025
author: Jessica Gross
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/11
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 182506562 Wickedly dark with a mystical edge, this story of an Italian love affair gone bad captures the irresistible pull of toxic relationships—from the acclaimed author of Carnality.

A woman arrives in Florence, overwhelmed by the strange, warm city so different from her home. Amidst the Renaissance architecture and amorous couples, she finds an unexpected love of her own. With his dark, ugly looks, people might stop and stare, wondering what someone like her was doing with someone like him. But he’s the Mickey to her Minnie, and she can fix him—they can fix each other. She feels bound to him, body and soul.

It’s not long before the lying starts. Other women have begun to notice him, and she spirals into paranoia. Soon they’re both cheating and lashing out, and she becomes more and more convinced he’s not merely a violent there’s a demon inside him, and inside her too. Their grip on each other is so strong, it might be impossible to break, even after she puts an ocean between them, following another man to New Orleans.

Heady, unsettling, and shockingly funny with its dead-on descriptions of codependent and abusive relationships, The Devil’s Grip takes us on a breathless journey with the shadow selves we can’t escape.]]> 288 Lina Wolff 1635424208 Letitia 0 to-read, translations 3.46 2022
author: Lina Wolff
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.46
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/10
shelves: to-read, translations
review:

]]> 196845471 From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty, power, and capital’s influence on art and those who devote their lives to creating it.

Once, Jay was an artist. Shortly after graduating from his London art school, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career already taking shape before him. Now, undocumented in the United States, he lives out of his car and makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. The pandemic is still at its height—the greater public panicked in quarantine—and though he has returned to work, Jay hasn’t recovered from the effects of a recent Covid case.

When Jay arrives at a house set in an enormous acreage of woodland, he finds the last person he ever expected to see Alice, a former lover from his art school days. Their relationship was tumultuous and destructive, ultimately ending when she ghosted him and left for America with his best friend and fellow artist, Rob. In the twenty years since, their fortunes could not be more as Jay teeters on the edge of collapse, Alice and Rob have found prosperity in a life surrounded by beauty. Ashamed, Jay hopes she won’t recognize him behind his dirty surgical mask; when she does, she invites him to recover on the property—where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well—setting a reckoning decades in the making into motion.

Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time to deliver an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.]]> 272 Hari Kunzru 0593801377 Letitia 0 to-read 3.81 2024
author: Hari Kunzru
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 222837218 A haunting, unforgettable collection of tales from the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature winner and three-time Booker finalist, Samanta Schweblin.

Once a decade a story collection rips a hole in the sky and we remember how it feels to have a spell cast upon us. From Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River to Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son to the earthquake stories of Haruki Murakami, these books are often short, but unforgettable. Samanta Schweblin’s Good and Evil is such a book. Sculpted and lucid, strange and uncanny, here is a masterpiece of suggestiveness. Step by step these six stories lure us into the shadows to confront the monsters of everyday life—ourselves.

In one tale, a mother surfaces from the depths of the lake behind her house, where she saw something awful yet alluring, to go home to her family, only to wish she could go back. In another, a sorrowful father finds himself unable to communicate with his son after a life-changing misfortune occurs under his supervision. In yet another, a dying woman calls a friend she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years—not since an accident which forever changed them both.

Guilt, grief, and relationships severed permeate this collection—but so do unspeakable bonds of family, love, and longing, each sinister and beautiful. When something seismic happens in our lives, the waves keep coming for years after, with warning or without. Sometimes, all we can do is wait around the corner, ear pressed to the phone receiver, for them to arrive.

Fantastical and subtly terrifying, these stories draw on magical realism, psychological fiction, and the dark side of fairy tales inherited from literary predecessors like the Brothers Grimm and Jorge Luis Borges. Yet, far from antiquated or closed off, Schweblin’s worlds invite us in, like quicksand or a strong river’s current. These stories will insinuate themselves into your heart, and your bloodstream.]]> Samanta Schweblin 0593803116 Letitia 0 to-read 3.00 2025
author: Samanta Schweblin
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.00
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/07
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 60806778 From the bestselling author of Ohio, a masterful American epic charting a near future approaching collapse and a nascent but strengthening solidarity.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the world is convulsing, its governments mired in gridlock while a patient but unrelenting ecological crisis looms. America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. In California in 2013, Tony Pietrus, a scientist studying deposits of undersea methane, receives a death threat. His fate will become bound to a stunning cast of characters—a broken drug addict, a star advertising strategist, a neurodivergent mathematician, a cunning eco-terrorist, an actor turned religious zealot, and a brazen young activist named Kate Morris, who, in the mountains of Wyoming, begins a project that will alter the course of the decades to come.

From the Gulf Coast to Los Angeles, the Midwest to Washington, DC, their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos as they summon courage, galvanize a nation, fall to their own fear, and find wild hope in the face of staggering odds. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future? A singular achievement, The Deluge is a once-in-a-generation novel that meets the moment as few works of art ever have.]]> 896 Stephen Markley 1982123095 Letitia 0 to-read 4.19 2023
author: Stephen Markley
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 58311987 288 Zarqa Nawaz 0358621232 Letitia 0 to-read 3.74 2022
author: Zarqa Nawaz
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 9328
The House of the Spirits is an enthralling saga that spans decades and lives, twining the personal and the political into an epic novel of love, magic, and fate.]]> 448 Isabel Allende 0553383809 Letitia 0 4.26 1982
author: Isabel Allende
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.26
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read, translations, family-drama
review:

]]> 180357146 From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala's Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.]]> 715 Abraham Verghese 0802162177 Letitia 0 to-read, family-drama 4.34 2023
author: Abraham Verghese
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.34
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read, family-drama
review:

]]> 213870133 A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following an academic who flees from heartbreak and lands in Iraq with a one-of-a-kind job offer—only to be forced to do the work of confronting herself.

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025*

When Nadia Amin, a witty and bighearted PhD, publishes an article on deradicalization, everything changes. The United Nations comes calling with an opportunity to put her theory into practice and lead a rehabilitation program for women caught in the crosshairs of harmful ideology. And why not? Abandoned by her mother and devastated by unrequited love, she leaps at the chance.

In Iraq, Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. The UN is a mess of competing interests, and her team consists of Goody Two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms about perpetually scrolling through Grindr. But then Nadia meets Sara, a hilarious, foul-mouthed East Londoner who was pulled into radicalism at just fifteen. The two are kindred spirits, and Nadia vows to get Sara home.

As the rehabilitation program picks up traction, Sara reveals a secret that upends everything, forcing Nadia to make a drastic choice. In the fallout, Nadia’s brown-savior fantasies crumble, leaving her to wonder if she can save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.

A fierce, wildly funny, and razor-sharp exploration of radicalism, family, and the quest for belonging, Fundamentally boldly inspects one of the defining controversies of our age and introduces a fearless new voice in contemporary fiction.]]> 352 Nussaibah Younis 0593851382 Letitia 0
In Nussaibah Younis’ debut novel ‘Fundamentally’ we follow Dr. Nadia Amin, a British academic as she’s just been hired by the United Nations to lead a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Recovering from heartbreak and disownment by her mother, Nadia leaps at the opportunity but quickly realizes how unprepared she was for life in Iraq and with the UN. Her hope dwindles until she meets Sara, a young and precocious Londoner who joined ISIS at 15 years old. She becomes drawn and fixated on saving Sara despite the consequences. A chaotic, entertaining, funny, and thoughtful journey ensues as we discover what lengths you can save a person, the double-edged sword of faith and how invaluable connection and familial support are.

I absolutely loved the voice of Nadia. She and the entire cast made me laugh so much, making a seemingly high-brow, intense setting accessible and light-hearted from her unserious coworkers and the lack of professional boundaries to jokes about Saddam Hussein to a Sheikh named Jason from Berkeley, California, who suggests guided meditation and role-playing skits to help with deradicalization.

Satire remains one of my favorite literary tools. Between the laughs, many purposeful topics were touched on, such as the misconceptions and biases foreigners have, how much luck and timing play into fate, corruption, co-dependence, love [conditional and unconditional] the savior complex, and the different perspectives on faith/religion and how broadening and restrictive it can be.

Alignment with a story’s moral vision is always a bonus for me. Once Nadia lost her faith, she also lost her mother, which created a huge void in her life. I appreciated the sentiment about the importance of family, specifically how crucial a mother’s love and conversely abandonment/rejection can affect one’s life.

It's original, fun, thoughtful, and memorable. It's perfect for fans of Disorientation and The Bandit Queens. Thank you for the #gifted copy!
]]> 3.74 2025
author: Nussaibah Younis
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.74
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/12
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted, humor
review:
“-And I understood — I’d once felt the same way; faith had nourished and sustained me. But over time, it had curdled, my insides recoiling as I continued to ram it into myself.”

In Nussaibah Younis’ debut novel ‘Fundamentally’ we follow Dr. Nadia Amin, a British academic as she’s just been hired by the United Nations to lead a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Recovering from heartbreak and disownment by her mother, Nadia leaps at the opportunity but quickly realizes how unprepared she was for life in Iraq and with the UN. Her hope dwindles until she meets Sara, a young and precocious Londoner who joined ISIS at 15 years old. She becomes drawn and fixated on saving Sara despite the consequences. A chaotic, entertaining, funny, and thoughtful journey ensues as we discover what lengths you can save a person, the double-edged sword of faith and how invaluable connection and familial support are.

I absolutely loved the voice of Nadia. She and the entire cast made me laugh so much, making a seemingly high-brow, intense setting accessible and light-hearted from her unserious coworkers and the lack of professional boundaries to jokes about Saddam Hussein to a Sheikh named Jason from Berkeley, California, who suggests guided meditation and role-playing skits to help with deradicalization.

Satire remains one of my favorite literary tools. Between the laughs, many purposeful topics were touched on, such as the misconceptions and biases foreigners have, how much luck and timing play into fate, corruption, co-dependence, love [conditional and unconditional] the savior complex, and the different perspectives on faith/religion and how broadening and restrictive it can be.

Alignment with a story’s moral vision is always a bonus for me. Once Nadia lost her faith, she also lost her mother, which created a huge void in her life. I appreciated the sentiment about the importance of family, specifically how crucial a mother’s love and conversely abandonment/rejection can affect one’s life.

It's original, fun, thoughtful, and memorable. It's perfect for fans of Disorientation and The Bandit Queens. Thank you for the #gifted copy!

]]> 216748860 Cautery offers us two women (one real, one imagined) who share one final vision of true happiness—burning it down and beginning again.]]> 236 Lucía Lijtmaer 1917260067 Letitia 0 3.73 2022
author: Lucía Lijtmaer
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.73
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/01
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, translations
review:

]]> 51792100
Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely--an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor--has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear.

Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.]]> 304 Megha Majumdar 0525658696 Letitia 0 to-read 3.67 2020
author: Megha Majumdar
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.67
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 211953309 A dazzling debut novel set in 1980s New York, when cocaine is as easy to get as ice cream, about one young woman’s summer of infinite possibility—and looming danger.

It was the summer of 1986, when the girl was found dead in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum—half-naked, legs splayed, arms flung over her head. Larynx crushed.

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed, whom every girl wants to sleep with and every guy wants to be. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.]]> 368 Cynthia Weiner 0593798848 Letitia 0 2025-anticipated-reads 3.68
author: Cynthia Weiner
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/25
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 213395487 A fast-moving, heartbreaking collection of linked stories that evokes the joy and alienation between generations and classes in the era of mass overwhelm.

From Lydia Millet—“the American writer with the funniest, wisest grasp on how we fool ourselves” (Chicago Tribune)—comes an inventive new collection of short fiction. Atavists follows a group of families, couples, and loners in their collisions, confessions, and conflicts in a post-pandemic America of artificially lush lawns, beauty salons, tech-bro mansions, assisted-living facilities, big-box stores, gastropubs, college campuses, and medieval role-playing festivals.

The various “-ists” who people these linked stories—from futurists to insurrectionists to cosmetologists—include a professor who’s morbidly fixated on an old friend’s Instagram account; a woman convinced that her bright young son-in-law is watching geriatric porn; a bodybuilder who lives an incel’s fantasy life; a couple who surveil the neighbors after finding obscene notes in their mailbox; a pretentious academic accused of plagiarism; and a suburban ex-marathoner dad obsessed with hosting refugees in a tiny house in his backyard.]]> 256 Lydia Millet 1324074418 Letitia 0 3.80 2025
author: Lydia Millet
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.80
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/23
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, short-stories
review:

]]> 139401969 A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life in the highly anticipated debut novel from one of The New Yorker’s rising stars.

I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency. When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator’s idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he’ll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States’ first Black president.

Great Expectations is about David’s eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood—that force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.

Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, marking the arrival of a major new writer.]]> 254 Vinson Cunningham 0593448243 Letitia 0 2024-anticipated-reads 3.43 2024
author: Vinson Cunningham
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/21
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: 2024-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 217593457 From the acclaimed author of Yes, Daddy; It's Not the End of the World is a terrifying climate thriller, a vicious takedown of the uber-wealthy, and a queer family saga that isn't afraid to punch back.

It's 2044 and life is bleak for many Americans, but not for Mason Daunt. Safe in his Los Angeles mansion, Mason can remain blissfully unaware of the relentless wildfires engulfing California, the proliferation of violent right-wing militias, and the rampant authoritarianism destroying American society. He's so rich, in fact, that he and his partner Yunho Kim are throwing a 100-person, $100,000 baby shower to celebrate their newborn-on-the-way. When a potentially apocalyptic event hits Los Angeles on the day of their celebration, though, the wealthy gay couple refuses to cancel their party. Surely it's not the end of the world? But as Mason runs a few last-minute errands, a staggering twist thrusts him into the mounting chaos, and threatens the lives of everyone he holds dear.

Shot through with biting wit, brutal gore, primal sex, and unexpected catharsis, It's Not the End of the World is a nerve-shredding roller coaster of a novel that will leave readers shocked, heartbroken, and inspired to question their most firmly held convictions. What happens when our current battles with climate change, capitalism, and white supremacy are pushed to their breaking points? And how can we find hope?]]> 384 Jonathan Parks-Ramage 163973614X Letitia 0 3.48 2025
author: Jonathan Parks-Ramage
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/21
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 205125812 161 Roque Larraquy 1913867900 Letitia 0 to-read, translations 3.36 2020
author: Roque Larraquy
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.36
book published: 2020
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read, translations
review:

]]> 205393410
Stevens's women throw disastrous parties in the post-party era, flirt through landscapes of terror and war, and find themselves unrecognizable after waking up with old flames in new cities. They navigate the labyrinths of history, love, and ethics in a fractured American present, seeing first-hand how history influences the ways in which we care for—or neglect—one another.

With each story exemplifying Stevens's ability to examine the big questions through the microscope of a shambolic human perspective, Ghost Pains  is a triumphant statement of purpose from one of our greatest young writer-thinkers.]]> 198 Jessi Jezewska Stevens 1913505847 Letitia 0 to-read, short-stories 3.56 2024
author: Jessi Jezewska Stevens
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/20
shelves: to-read, short-stories
review:

]]> 223876435 "Tinx brings us her fiction debut packed with glamorous escapism, scandal, and sexual tension. Hotter in the Hamptons is the romance for a new generation." - Chelsea Handler  

Travel to the heart of the Hamptons in an irresistible summer fling from New York Times bestselling author Tinx!

As New York City's fashion it-girl, Lola has been living her dream. But when her career comes to a screeching halt after a very public snafu, everything Lola has worked for – her loyal following, her designer closet, her perfect boyfriend – starts to go up in flames. And when notorious culture critic Aly Ray Carter lights the final match by writing a scathing exposé, it feels as if Lola has lost it all. 

When Lola flees to the Hamptons to escape her mistakes, she expects to spend her summer drinking Minuty by the pool while carefully rebuilding both her confidence and her brand. Instead, she looks over the trimmed hedges to see none other than her rival and newest Aly Ray Carter.

As summer blazes on, Lola is swept into an intoxicating situation with the woman who ruined her life, marred by chaos and confusion as she tries to pinpoint why Aly has her so captivated. She thought the Hamptons would be the perfect place to outrun her mess, but quickly realizes there's no place to run.]]> 335 Tinx 146424538X Letitia 0 to-read 3.16
author: Tinx
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.16
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/19
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 214175077 An extraordinary and urgent debut by a prize-winning Irish writer, Nesting introduces an unforgettable new voice in fiction.

On a bright spring afternoon in Dublin, Ciara Fay makes a split-second decision that will change everything. Grabbing an armful of clothes from the washing line, Ciara straps her two young daughters into her car and drives away. Head spinning, all she knows for certain is that home is no longer safe.

This was meant to be an escape. But with dwindling savings, no job, and her family across the sea, Ciara finds herself adrift, facing a broken housing system and the voice of her own demons. As summer passes and winter closes in, she must navigate raising her children in a hotel room, searching for a new home and dealing with her husband Ryan’s relentless campaign to get her to come back. Because leaving is one thing, but staying away is another.

What will it take for Ciara to rebuild her life? Can she ever truly break away from Ryan’s control – and what will be the cost?

Tense, beautiful, and underpinned by an unassailable love, hope and resilience, this is the story of one woman’s bid to start over.]]> 400 Roisín O’Donnell 1643755706 Letitia 0 4.26 2025
author: Roisín O’Donnell
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.26
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 215020997
This is a story about hunger.
1532. Santo Domingo de la Calzada.
A young girl grows up wild and wily—her beauty is only outmatched by her dreams of escape. But María knows she can only ever be a prize, or a pawn, in the games played by men. When an alluring stranger offers an alternate path, María makes a desperate choice. She vows to have no regrets.

This is a story about love.
1827. London.
A young woman lives an idyllic but cloistered life on her family’s estate, until a moment of forbidden intimacy sees her shipped off to London. Charlotte’s tender heart and seemingly impossible wishes are swept away by an invitation from a beautiful widow—but the price of freedom is higher than she could have imagined.

This is a story about rage.
2019. Boston.
College was supposed to be her chance to be someone new. That’s why Alice moved halfway across the world, leaving her old life behind. But after an out-of-character one-night stand leaves her questioning her past, her present, and her future, Alice throws herself into the hunt for answers . . . and revenge.

This is a story about life—
how it ends, and how it starts. ]]> 535 V.E. Schwab 1035064642 Letitia 0 4.19 2025
author: V.E. Schwab
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 216497102 From a blistering new voice in dark literary fiction, an unsettling portrait of loneliness, obsession, and identity which asks: if a stranger was left alone in your house, how well could they truly get to know you—enough to fall in love with you?

Alice and Tom are made for each other. Deeply connected, they share a flat in London, go to galleries together, enjoy the same books and wine. They even share a toothbrush. It’s all picture perfect.

Except Alice and Tom have never met.

Alice has been cleaning Tom’s apartment every Wednesday for a year. With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every multivitamin counted in the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation, imagining a love so powerful it might erase a lifetime of self-hatred and loneliness.

But as Alice prepares for the moment when she and Tom will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was. Instead, their coming together sets off a chain of events that shatters everything Alice thought she knew and burns her world to the ground.

Told in Alice’s compelling, deliciously acidic voice, Creep is a literary study of unreliability and unlikability. Exploring alienation and loneliness, class and race, it's a skilled debut with resonance in the way that we view women, mental health, and the lost in society.]]> 256 Emma van Straaten 0063411016 Letitia 0 to-read 3.48 2025
author: Emma van Straaten
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.48
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/17
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 221440192 For readers of Sweetbitter and The Paris Novel, an intoxicating debut novel set in the glamorous, exclusive, and unexpectedly raucous world of wine.

Four wine experts receive a mysterious invitation to an exclusive weekend tasting at a famous French vineyard. Avery is a cash-strapped sommelier and wine social media influencer; Sonny, a rich American who owns a popular but unimpressive wine brand; Maëlys, a French food and drink critic; and Cosmo, a sommelier who is one of the youngest Masters in the world.

It seems at first that these four have little in common except for their love of wine and their belief in its transformative power. But, as the quartet awaits the penultimate night of the trip, when they will taste the only bottle of one of the rarest wines in the world, it becomes clear that each of them grapples with a private crisis and projects their ultimate hopes and fears onto the contents of this bottle, a bottle rendered divine by age and scarcity.

Unfolding over several days of indulgence in delicious food and drink, raucous debauchery, and transformative truths that will leave each character changed forever, Lush is a sensuous tour of the wine industry's extreme pleasures and pains, a captivating summer read that, like a fine vintage, will linger long after you've finished turning the pages.]]> 336 Rochelle Dowden-Lord 163973659X Letitia 0 3.33 2025
author: Rochelle Dowden-Lord
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.33
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 217223430 Daisy Jones and the Six meets Patricia Highsmith in this addictive, intense novel about the brutal and ferocious road to glory, from the award-winning author of My Husband. 

Ever since she was a child, Cléo, the French-American daughter of two academics, has had only one becoming a famous singer. Over the years, to everyone’s surprise but her own, she overcomes every obstacle and becomes a global superstar with millions of dollars, countless awards, and several Los Angeles villas to her name. But as any celebrity will tell you, getting to the top is one thing; staying there is another.

Now thirty-three years old, Cléo is taking her first real vacation in years, on a remote island with no one else in sight. With the never-ending spin cycle of her life finally on pause and no paparazzi peeking out from behind the coconut palms, she can work on her fourth album in peace. Except that with so much time to think, she can’t help but ruminate on her past—including how, just six months earlier, things started to go very, very wrong . . .

Taking place between New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and the South Pacific, How to Become a Celebrity is a brilliant sophomore novel from Maud Ventura that dives intoxicatingly deep into the machinations of one woman’s complicated mind, and her relentless pursuit of fame.


]]> 352 Maud Ventura 0063427516 Letitia 0 3.68 2024
author: Maud Ventura
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]> 218373924 From the author of the beloved debut Boys Don't Cry - an unforgettable story of love and loss and how the ones we love never really leave us.

He's leaning in. I'm leaning in. 'The future is ours to make, Shauns,' he says, lips almost touching.

Summer, 1991.


sun-stung and sticky with cool ice-pop juice, walks to the middle of The Green to get a good gawk at the new salon. And at the owner's kid. Hands deep in his pockets, his jet-black mop of hair hides the tension in his face at the thought of going back home.


stands well hid behind her ma - her eyes dark and haunted like the rest of her. The salon is theirs, a fresh start. The smell of her ma's Body Shop perfume clings to her jumper - Shauna can't be anywhere else other than here.


Instantly inseparable, their friendship blooms. But as time passes and tell-tale blushes and school fights develop into something deeper, conflicting responsibilities threaten to pull Shauna and Dean apart.


When all seems lost, will they find each other under the same blue sky?]]> 234 Fíona Scarlett 0571390935 Letitia 0 to-read, irish-lit, romance 4.02
author: Fíona Scarlett
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read, irish-lit, romance
review:

]]> 134221617
Funny and touching, Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America.

Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode: The wealthy Ammar family employs young Maysoon Baladi, whose family struggles financially, to clean up after their spoiled teenagers. Meanwhile, Marcus Salameh, whose aunt married into the wealthy Ammar family, confronts his father in an effort to protect his younger sister for “dishonoring” the family. Only a trip to Palestine, where Marcus experiences an unexpected and dramatic transformation, can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

Behind You Is the Sea faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.]]> 256 Susan Muaddi Darraj 0063324237 Letitia 0 to-read 4.06 2024
author: Susan Muaddi Darraj
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/16
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 204640602 From bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a kaleidoscopic novel about human nature in the face of enormous change—and the warring impulses between light and dark that live in all of us

Shapeshifting visitors, unsolved murders in the forest, black metal bands, and an online bank of thousands of people’s dreams—the star is back. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star kept readers up all night, immersed with nine characters whose individual lives are heightened by the sudden appearance of a blazing new star, and The Wolves of Eternity portrayed the intimate experiences of two estranged half-siblings decades before the star rises. In The Third Realm, the effects of the star are felt around the world, as people start to reckon with what it might possibly mean.

With this next novel, the limitless scale and ambition of Knausgaard’s new universe are clear. This is life, death, the human condition, and the real-time creation of an epic and utterly immersive world.]]> 512 Karl Ove Knausgård 0593655214 Letitia 0 to-read 4.29 2022
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 206179696 Elly and Enzo love each other.
Elly and Enzo are breaking up.
Now, everything must go.

When Enzo suddenly walks out on Elly after ten years together, she finds herself marooned in an expensive East London flat, surrounded by all their belongings. She is shell-shocked. Inconsolable. She can't bear to look at the objects that she and Enzo collected together, those innocuous items that define the key moments of every relationship.

Now she's listing it all on the table they found in Italy. The bike he bought for her birthday. Records, luggage, a vintage velvet couch. Anything that tells a story she'd rather forget. Elly thinks that selling these items to total strangers will help her move on from Enzo and heal her devastated heart. But she's about to get a lot more than she bargained for.

All the Beautiful Things You Love is a vivid and vibrant exploration of the things that bring us together and tear us apart, and those keepsakes that populate the wide-open spaces between where love ends and starts again.


PRAISE FOR ALL THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS YOU LOVE

'A pitch-perfect delivery of the clutter and noise our times bring to long-term relationships and their ends - insightful and hugely entertaining.' - Nick Earls

'Seidler's characters are so real, so vibrant I could swear they're in my contacts. A sheer delight from cover to cover, masterfully soundtracked with the author's trademark mashup of music and text. I inhaled it with all my senses and never want to let it go.' - Nadine Cohen]]> 207 Jonathan Seidler 1761561642 Letitia 0 to-read 3.58
author: Jonathan Seidler
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.58
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 39335566 The Handmaid’s Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men.

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has laid the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.

But when their father, the only man they’ve ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day three strange men wash ashore. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?

A haunting, riveting debut about the capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.]]> 288 Sophie Mackintosh 0385543875 Letitia 0 to-read 3.21 2018
author: Sophie Mackintosh
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.21
book published: 2018
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 61771675
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?]]> 416 Ann Napolitano Letitia 0 to-read, i-need-to-read-this 4.13 2023
author: Ann Napolitano
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/14
shelves: to-read, i-need-to-read-this
review:

]]> 199635125
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.

In “The Feminist,” a young man’s passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn’t getting him laid. A young woman’s unrequited crush in “Pics” spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in “Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” a shy late bloomer’s flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other’s dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.

These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.]]> 272 Tony Tulathimutte 0063337878 Letitia 0 3.84 2024
author: Tony Tulathimutte
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at: 2025/01/28
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves:
review:

]]> 205436018 Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history.

One winter morning, Kyungha receives an urgent message from her friend Inseon to visit her at a hospital in Seoul. Inseon has injured herself in an accident, and she begs Kyungha to return to Jeju Island, where she lives, to save her beloved pet—a white bird called Ama. A snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon’s house at all costs, but the icy wind and squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save the animal—or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn’t yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness that awaits her at her friend’s house.

Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades—bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence—and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.]]> 256 Han Kang 0593595459 Letitia 0 3.81 2021
author: Han Kang
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2021
rating: 0
read at: 2025/02/13
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:

]]> 217387713 Mia’s secret comedy career, forbidden office crush, and a long-guarded family secret take center stage, threatening her newfound confidence and her one shot at fame in this hilarious, heartfelt coming-of-age story perfect for fans of Curtis Sittenfeld and Etaf Rum.

Mia Almas has a secret. By day, she works at a respectable job as a media fact checker—a position her conservative, Arab grandparents approve of—and, by night, she takes to the stages of New York City comedy clubs. She holds herself back in a lot of ways, especially in the romance department, but being on stage lights her up and makes being a wallflower the rest of the time more bearable. That is, until Phaedra, her stylish and bold new neighbor, inspires Mia to take a few risks.

As Mia pursues a forbidden romance with her boss, her standup gets better and bolder, leading to a surprise spotlight that exposes her secret gig. Horrified and worried that her rebellious act could mean big consequences for her reserved Palestinian-American family, Mia frantically dives into damage control. But all of her efforts to pull back from the spotlight expose a family scandal from the 1940s that could change everything…

Equal parts funny and tender, What Will People Think? is a heart-bursting exploration of what it means to discover and embrace the hidden parts of yourself, and how love in all forms can make you whole.]]> 336 Sara Hamdan 1250329817 Letitia 0 3.81 2025
author: Sara Hamdan
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.81
book published: 2025
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads, arcs-gifted
review:

]]> 177058906 Want to know what chaos theory can teach us about human events? In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small, chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic writer Brian Klaas.

If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and then press play, would everything turn out the same? Or could making an accidental phone call or missing an exit off the highway change not just your life, but history itself? And would you remain blind to the radically different possible world you unknowingly left behind?

In Fluke, myth-shattering social scientist Brian Klaas dives deeply into the phenomenon of random chance and the chaos it can sow, taking aim at most people’s neat and tidy storybook version of reality. The book’s argument is that we willfully ignore a bewildering but for a few small changes, our lives—and our societies—could be radically different.

Offering an entirely new lens, Fluke explores how our world really works, driven by strange interactions and apparently random events. How did one couple’s vacation cause 100,000 people to die? Does our decision to hit the snooze button in the morning radically alter the trajectory of our lives? And has the evolution of humans been inevitable, or are we simply the product of a series of freak accidents?

Drawing on social science, chaos theory, history, evolutionary biology, and philosophy, Klaas provides a brilliantly fresh look at why things happen—all while providing mind-bending lessons on how we can live smarter, be happier, and lead more fulfilling lives.]]> 335 Brian Klaas Letitia 0 to-read, self-help 4.08 2024
author: Brian Klaas
name: Letitia
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2024
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/13
shelves: to-read, self-help
review:

]]> 124029281 In Claudia Dey’s Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life—and art—of her own.

To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.

So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress, and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona’s childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father’s crimes and ejected from the family.

Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.

Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.]]> 272 Claudia Dey 0374609705 Letitia 0 to-read 3.92 2023
author: Claudia Dey
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.92
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/12
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 219430717 Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, a novel about forgiveness, grief, and what it means to be good, from the award-winning author of The Weekend.

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of rural Australia. She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Meditative, moving, and finely observed, Stone Yard Devotional is a seminal novel from a writer of rare power, exploring what it means to retreat from the world, the true nature of forgiveness, and the sustained effect of grief on the human soul.]]> 304 Charlotte Wood Letitia 0 3.85 2023
author: Charlotte Wood
name: Letitia
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/11
shelves: to-read, 2025-anticipated-reads
review:

]]>