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Beautifully written books
Exceptional books with gorgeous prose and hauntingly vivid imagery that will stay with you long after you finish them.
Published on August 28, 2023
Shelter: A Love Letter to Trees
Ada LimónU.S. poet laureate Limón’s essay — told in brief and poignant vignettes — pays respect to the power, beauty, and mystery of our strong and silent companions. From the valley oaks of California to the Sitka spruce of Washington, Limón traces the story of her life using the trees that bore witness to some of her most important and cherished memories.
Trust Your Heart: Lead Your Journey to Self-Discovery From Within
Najwa ZebianHave your past heartbreaks made you wary when you approach new relationships? Activist and author Zebian provides helpful advice on how to heal from past traumas with partners, parents, and friends to foster a healthy relationship with the most important person in your life — yourself. “Trust Your Heart” is a spiritual journey of self-discovery that will help you turn heartbreak and pain into self-love and acceptance.
Bluets
Maggie NelsonNelson’s short, achingly beautiful semi-narrative of heartbreak, centered around the loss of a partner, is brilliantly structured around the color blue. Her lyrical exploration of love, longing, and suffering mingles academic examinations and personal associations.
Freshwater
Akwaeke EmeziThis powerful debut has drawn near universal praise for its brave and imaginative depiction of a young woman battling a mental illness that threatens to destroy her at every turn. A well-written and moving story that upends plenty of insidious assumptions.
Run Me to Earth
Paul YoonYoon tells a story of war-torn Laos; his descriptions of bombed-out buildings and landscapes and his clarity around absence makes readers feel the characters’ acute sense of being unmoored — of the destruction of time and space, safety and self. It’s an enlightening and enthralling tale.
Women Talking
Miriam ToewsAfter learning about horrifically real violence against many women in a Mennonite colony, Toews took up the seemingly impossible task of fictionalizing both the terror and the hope those women experienced. Through a remarkably mundane framing device, Toews masterfully captures the power and resilience of a community shrouded in silence.
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy“All the Pretty Horses” was the late McCarthy’s first breakthrough success, a quintessential mix of his poetic run-on sentences, contemplations on inevitability and fate, and displays of violence. In it, 16-year-old John Grady Cole leaves Texas behind in search of a new adventure in Mexico, only to discover the painful realities of adulthood. Despite its grim nature, the Wild West saga is steeped in an undeniable dark beauty. Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is the first of “The Border Trilogy.”
The Kite Runner
Khaled HosseiniThis award-winning novel is the definition of a contemporary classic. Following the childhood friendship between two young boys of different classes, readers are transported to 1970s Afghanistan, just as the country is on the brink of falling into war and chaos. Amir is wealthy and craves the approval of his father, while his companion Hassan is a servant. When Hassan is brutally attacked and Amir does nothing to save him, the two drift apart. What follows is an exploration of the pain of betrayal and a journey towards redemption.
All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel
Anthony DoerrDoerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is sensational — the rare book that takes a well-worn subject and adds an unforgettable spin. It follows the twin narratives of Marie-Laure, a blind French girl, and Werner, a German orphan recruited to the military, at the height of World War II. The story is haunting, the imagery of war-torn France beautiful, and the characters so rich in depth that devouring every page feels inevitable.
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Carmen Maria MachadoMachado’s collection of stories is so wonderfully weird and startling. Genre-bending, uncanny, and often very funny, each of these unusual stories has something poignant to say about being a person and about being an artist, and in particular about what it’s like inhabiting a female body.
Persuasion
Jane Austen“Persuasion” is the moving story of 27-year-old Anne Elliott, who’s often regarded as one of Austen’s most mature and self-reflective heroines. The last novel fully completed by Austen (in 1817, before her death), this melancholy second chance story is about women embracing their feelings in a time when strong emotions were often dismissed as hysteria.
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-MohtarThis Hugo Award-winning novella contains the chaos of all of time and space within its beautifully short, never-ending love story. Through a series of letters sent via tea and lava and other delightful delivery systems, protagonists Red and Blue fall for each other, and combine for some of the best purple prose around.