This was a powerful book about the impacts of slavery, and for me it was another book of summer that completely lived up to the hype. Gyasi writes of two sisters, living in two different African villages. One marries a white slaver and remains in what is today Ghana, and the other is captured at…
Just as with One Day, Nicholls surprised me. This book was so much more than I expected, even though Nicholls tells you in the first couple of pages exactly what it’s about. Us is the story of Douglas, in his fifties, whose wife wakes him up in the middle of the night to tell him…
There’s a lot to like about this short novel by Sarah Salway. It plays with unreliable narrators and tells its story entirely through emails, letters, and voice mail messages. Interestingly, its main character is deceased at the time the story begins. Some time in the 60s, Maureen goes with a friend of hers to a…
Please Look After Mom is a widely acclaimed Korean novel by Kyung-Sook Shin, which tells the story of a family who lose their mother in a Seoul subway station. Park So-Nyo is an elderly wife and mother of five who gets separated from her husband in a crowded station and disappears. The family’s efforts to…
C.H. Zhu’s first novel, Descent, is a story about a young man from China who struggles with his sexual identity and the weight of his parents’ expectations. While Dr. Wu Rong has built a successful career as a scientist, he cannot come to terms with the fact that he’s gay, and what that will mean…
The Book Stop 