Cultural genre books (33)


21.
Night of the Living Rez

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty EN

Rating: 4.6     9 Votes
Description:
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a de... continue

22.

Of Women and Salt : A Novel by Gabriela Garcia EN

Rating: 3.5     12 Votes
Country: North America / Cuba flag Cuba
Description:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK WINNER of the Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Award, She Reads Best of 2021 Awards • FINALIST for the 2022 Southern Book Prize • LONGLISTED for Crook’s Corner Book Prize • NOMINEE for 2021 Goodreads Choice Award in Debut Novel and Historical Fiction A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction.... continue
Recommended: 23 Jun 2022

23.
Out of Havana

Out of Havana : Memoirs of Ordinary Life in Cuba by Araceli Alonso EN

Rating: 4     1 Vote
Country: North America / Cuba flag Cuba
Description:
Out of Havana provides an uncommon ordinary woman's insight into the last half century of Cuba's tumultuous recent history. More powerfully than an academic study or historical account, it allows us intimately to grasp the enthusiasm, commitment and sense of promise that defined many average Cubans' experience of the 1959 Revolution and the first triumphant decades of the Castro regime. As the story shifts into the final decades of the last century (the 1980s Mariel Boatlift, the so-called "special period in time of peace" [from 1991 to the end of the decade], and the 1994 Balseros or Rafters ... continue
Recommended: 14 Apr 2023

24.

Probably Ruby : A Novel by Lisa Bird-Wilson EN

Rating: 3.7     3 Votes
Description:
An Indigenous woman adopted by white parents goes in search of her identity in this unforgettable debut novel about family, race, and history. “Engaging . . . Ruby never disappoints with her big heart and outrageous sense of humor—and her resilient search for her own history.”—The New York Times Book Review “A passionate exploration of identity and belonging and a celebration of our universal desire to love and be loved.”—Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. When we first meet Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties, her life... continue
Recommended: 31 Mar 2023

25.
The Birds of Opulence

The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson EN

Rating: 4.5     2 Votes
Description:
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight agai... continue

26.
The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison EN

Rating: 3.5     110 Votes
Description:
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtly and grace. In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its... continue

27.

The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy EN

Rating: 4     1 Vote
Description:
'Inventive, excellent ... a pure pleasure to read' THE TIMES In this compelling debut, an unknowable legacy passes through generations of one family living on the beautiful island of Barbados. In this compelling debut, an unknowable legacy passes through generations of one family living on the beautiful island of Barbados. There is Iapetus, a lonely soul haunted by the memory of his father; his son Atlas, dreaming of a life far removed from his reality; Atlas's daughter Calypso, struggling to find her place in an unforgiving society; and her son Nautilus, grappling with various parts of a comp... continue
Recommended: 03 Sep 2023

28.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline EN

Rating: 4     4 Votes
Description:
In this futuristic dystopian novel for teens, the Indigenous people of North America are on the run in a fight for survival.
Recommended: 27 Dec 2022

29.
The Seed Keeper

The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson EN

Rating: 4.4     9 Votes
Description:
"Compelling . . . The Seed Keeper invokes the strength that women, land, and plants have shared with one another through the generations." --ROBIN WALL KIMMERER
Recommended: 27 Dec 2022

30.
The Sentence

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich EN

Rating: 4     45 Votes
Description:
In this powerful and timely novel, National Book Award winning author Louise Erdrich explores how the burdens of history, and especially identity, appropriation, exploitation, and violence done to human beings in the name of justice, manifest in ordinary lives today. Revolving around a small independent bookstore in contemporary Minneapolis, The Sentence follows a turbulent year in the life of a strong though vulnerable Ojibwe woman named Tookie. After serving part of an outrageously long sentence, Tookie, who "learned to read with murderous attention" while in prison, naturally gravitates tow... continue
Recommended: 27 Dec 2022


Mastodon logo