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Read: March 2026

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Kin: A Novel

by Tayari Jones

Tayari Jones, the bestselling and award-winning author of An American Marriage, has crafted a magnificent new novel titled Kin. This unforgettable story sparkles with wit, intelligence, and deep emotion as it explores the lives of two lifelong friends whose paths intersect after many years apart, brought together by a devastating tragedy. The New York Times has listed it as one of “The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.”

Vernice and Annie, two daughters raised without mothers in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since childhood. However, they lead very different lives. Vernice, cared for by a strong aunt who aims to provide her with stability after her mother’s death, leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen to attend Spelman College. There, she joins a powerful sisterhood of Black women and enters a world of affluence, manners, ambition, and inequality.

In contrast, Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child, is obsessed with finding her mother and filling the emptiness left by her absence. Her quest leads her into a life filled with danger and challenges, as well as love and adventure, ultimately culminating in a fight for her survival.

Kin is a novel that explores the themes of motherhood, friendship, sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South. It is an exuberant, emotionally rich, and unforgettable work by one of contemporary fiction’s most compelling voices. Kin delves into themes of motherhood and daughterhood, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South.

Tayari Jones is the author of four novels, including her most recent work, An American Marriage. This novel was selected for Oprah’s Book Club and featured on Barack Obama’s summer reading list and his year-end roundup. It has won several prestigious awards, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and an NAACP Image Award, and published in two dozen countries. Jones serves as the C.H. Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and resides in Atlanta.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

Read: February 2026

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American Bulk: Essays on Excess

by Emily Mester

In a series of deeply personal essays, Emily Mester‘s “American Bulk” examines how the things we buy, eat, accumulate, and discard become integral parts of our lives. We often guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, sift through countless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the familiar comfort of a chain restaurant. With humor and sharp insight, Mester reflects on the joys and anxieties of Costco trips, how a seasonal job at Ulta Beauty taught her the subtle art of sales, and what it means to feel “mall sad.”

In a nuanced exploration of diet culture and body image, Mester shares her experience at a fat camp during her teenage summer and the unexpected sense of liberation she discovered there. Finally, she travels to Storm Lake, Iowa, to confront her grandmother’s abandoned hoard, unraveling the dysfunction at the heart of her family’s obsession with material possessions. American Bulk introduces readers to an impressive new literary voice from the American heartland, urging us to view consumption not with guilt, but with grace and empathy.

Emily Mester is a writer from the suburban Midwest, where her family shopped at Costco every Sunday. She earned an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa, where she received the Prairie Lights Nonfiction Prize. Currently, she resides in New York.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

Read: October 2019

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Stony the Road

by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a must-read book, especially with white nationalism on the rise.

I read this book when Jan began her chemotherapy. Although the book’s subject – the retreat from reconstruction – was one I studied in college, at times, I found it hard to focus on the material and my wife’s health at the same time. I stayed on the stony road as it is a subject we need to understand if we are going to correct the past failures.

As The New York Times wrote,

Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow,” an indispensable guide to the making of our times, addresses 2017’s mystifications. The book sets the Obama era beside Reconstruction and the Trump era beside the white supremacist terrorism of Redemption, the period beginning in 1877 during which Reconstruction’s nascent, biracial democracy was largely dismantled. Gates juxtaposes the optimism of Reconstruction, the despair of Redemption, and the promise of the New Negro movement — the effort by black Americans, starting around the turn of the 20th century, to craft a counternarrative to white supremacy. In doing so, “Stony the Road” presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism.

Growing up in the Jim Crow south, I was well aware of white nationalism. This book is an essential read if we are going to make America a multi-racial democracy.

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Read: March 2025

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The Amen Effect

by Sharon Brous

Sharon Brous, a prominent American rabbi, argues in The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Heal Our Hearts and Mend Our Broken World that the essential spiritual work of our time—though instinctual and often countercultural—focuses on connecting through celebration, sorrow, and solidarity. We must support one another in times of joy and pain, embracing vulnerability and possibility, nurturing relationships with shared purposes, and creating communities centered on care.

From one of our country’s most prominent rabbis comes this inspiring book about the power of community, based on one of her most impactful sermons. What will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society in a time of loneliness, isolation, social rupture, and alienation?

Brous contends that honoring our most basic human instinct—the yearning for authentic connection—is the way to reawaken our shared humanity and begin the healing process. This kind of sacred presence is captured by the word amen, a powerful ancient idea that we affirm the fullness of one another’s experience by demonstrating, in body and word: “I see you. You are not alone.”

An acclaimed preacher and storyteller, Brous pairs heart-driven anecdotes from her experience building and pastoring to a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades with ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary science. The result is a clarion call: the sense of belonging engendered by our genuine presence is both a social and biological need, as well as a moral and spiritual necessity.

With original insights and practical tools, The Amen Effect translates foundational ideas into simple practices that connect us to our better angels, offering a blueprint for a more meaningful life and a more connected and caring world.

As she writes in the preface, after listing the joys and pains of life, weddings, births, and death,

It’s in these times that I feel the weight of the work, the privilege of being alive, the blessing of being so close to such raw beauty and pain. It’s there that I have learned the power of saying ‘Amen‘ to one another’s grief and joy, sorrow and celebration with our very presence. Of bearing witness to profound suffering and protesting injustice with our very presence. Of comforting and consoling, surviving and thriving with our very presence. What I’ve learned, during the years, is the meaning of sacred companionship. I have seen, in ways subtle and pronounced, a longing to connect with others who can help hold the pain, a need to share what we’ve learned in the trenches, and a desire to give, even when we ourselves have barely caught our breath. And I have seen how knowing that we’re not alone can both heighten our joy and help us endure unimaginable hardship.

Click here to read about my experience listening to Rabbi Brous at the Kol Tzedek Speakers Series at Temple Emanu-El in Westfield.

Sharon Brous is the senior and founding rabbi of IKAR, a leading-edge Jewish community based in Los Angeles, and the author of The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Heal Our Hearts and Mend Our Broken World, a national bestseller.

In 2013, Brous blessed President Obama and Vice President Biden at the Inaugural National Prayer Service, and in 2021, returned to bless President Biden and Vice President Harris and then led the White House Passover Seder 2021 and the Hanukkah candle lighting with the Vice President and Second Gentleman in 2023. She was ranked as the number one most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek/The Daily Beast. She has also been recognized by The Forward and the Jerusalem Post as one of the most influential Jews alive today. Her work has appeared in prominent publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Additionally, her TED talk, “Reclaiming Religion,” has been viewed by over 1.5 million people.

Brous is part of the inaugural cohort of Auburn Seminary’s Senior Fellows program, which brings together top faith leaders working on the frontlines for justice. She sits on the faculty of REBOOT and serves on the International Council of the New Israel Fund, as well as the national steering committee for the Poor People’s Campaign.

A Columbia University graduate (holding both undergraduate and M.A. degrees in Human Rights), she was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary and resides in Los Angeles with her husband and children.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Read: November 2025

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The Land in Winter: A Novel

by Andrew Miller

“The Land in Winter” by Andrew Miller is a captivating exploration of relationships and a masterclass in storytelling. It reaffirms Miller’s status as one of the most brilliant chroniclers of the human heart. The novel has been shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and has also won the 2025 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the 2025 Winston Graham Historical Prize for Fiction.

December 1962: In a village deep in the English countryside, two neighboring couples begin the day. Local doctor Eric Parry commences his rounds in the town while his pregnant wife, Irene, wanders the rooms of their old house, mulling over the space that has grown between the two of them.

On the farm nearby lives Irene’s mirror image: witty but troubled Rita Simmons is also expecting. She spends her days trying on the idea of being a farmer’s wife, but her head still swims with images of a raucous past that her husband, Bill, prefers to forget.

When Rita and Irene meet across the bare field between their houses, a clock starts. There is still affection in both their homes; neither marriage has yet been abandoned. But when the ordinary cold of December gives way–ushering in violent blizzards of the harshest winter in living memory–so do the secret resentments harbored in all four lives.

An exquisite, page-turning examination of relationships, The Land in Winter is a masterclass in storytelling–proof yet again that Andrew Miller is one of the most dazzling chroniclers of the human heart.

Andrew Miller‘s first novel, Ingenious Pain, was published by Sceptre in 1997. It won several prestigious awards, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Grinzane Cavour Prize for the best foreign novel published in Italy.

Following Ingenious Pain, he released several other novels: Casanova, Oxygen (which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award in 2001), The Optimists, One Morning Like a Bird, Pure (which won the Costa Book of the Year Award in 2011), The Crossing, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, The Slowworm’s Song, and The Land in Winter (which won the Winston Graham Historical Prize and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2025).

Andrew Miller’s novels have been translated into twenty languages. He was born in Bristol in 1960 and currently resides in Somerset.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books that I’ve personally vetted to ensure quality and enjoyment. Additionally, by supporting these selections, you’ll help me continue to provide you with more personalized recommendations. I earn a small commission from your purchase, which allows me to buy and share even more books with you. Your support truly makes a difference!

Read: June 2025

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So Far Gone: A Novel

by Jess Walter

For the week before Father’s Day, I read So Far Gone by Jess Walter, a hilarious, empathetic, and brilliantly provocative adventure through life in modern America about a reclusive journalist forced back into the world to rescue his kidnapped grandchildren. Is this gripping tale of a grandfather’s love and determination the perfect read for the upcoming Father’s Day?

Rhys Kinnick, a character who has truly gone off the grid, provides a humorous twist to the story. At Thanksgiving a few years back, a fed-up Rhys punched his conspiracy theorist son-in-law in the mouth, chucked his smartphone out a car window, and fled for a cabin in the woods with no one around except a pack of hungry raccoons.

Now, Kinnick’s old life is about to land right back on his crumbling doorstep. Can this failed husband and father, a man with no internet and a car that barely runs, reemerge into a broken world to track down his missing daughter and save his sweet, precocious grandchildren from the members of a dangerous militia?

With the help of his caustic ex-girlfriend, a bipolar retired detective, and his only friend (who happens to be furious with him), Kinnick, a man who is struggling with his past and his present, heads off on a wild journey through cultural lunacy and the rubble of a life he thought he’d left behind. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, So Far Gone is a rollicking, razor-sharp, and moving road trip through a fractured nation from a writer who has been called “a genius of the modern American moment.”

Jess Walter is the author of seven previous novels, including the bestsellers The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins, the National Book Award Finalist The Zero, and Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award for best novel. His short fiction, collected in The Angel of Rome and We Live in Water, has won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He lives in his hometown of Spokane, Washington.

When you purchase a book through one of my links, I earn a small commission that helps support my passion for reading. This contribution allows me to buy even more books to share with you, creating an incredible cycle of discovering great reads together! Your support truly makes a difference!

Enjoy a limited-time offer of 20% off your next book purchase at Bookshop.org!

Read: May 2026

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Look What You Made Me Do

by John Lanchester

“Look What You Made Me Do” by John Lanchester is a darkly comedic tale that delves deep into the intricate web of love, trust, resentment, and entitlement. The narrative weaves the lives of two women from contrasting generations, drawing them into a thrilling conflict where wits and wills are tested to the limit. As tension mounts and secrets unravel, only one will rise to claim victory in this captivating showdown.

“Every successful marriage has its own private language.” So it is for baby boomer Kate and her beloved architect husband Jack, thirty years into their seemingly idyllic life in metropolitan North London. And so it is for spiky millennial screenwriter Phoebe and her charming loafer of a partner, Tony.

But when Phoebe’s steamy television series, Cheating, becomes the year’s most talked-about show, Kate thinks she sees details and intimacies of her marriage in it that only she and her husband could have known. Who has betrayed whom? Who has stolen whose story―and why?

John Lanchester is the author of five novels, including the best-selling *The Debt to Pleasure* and *Capital*. His works have received several accolades, including the Hawthornden Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award, and the E. M. Forster Award. His books have also been longlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into more than twenty-five languages. Lanchester is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He resides in London.

Discover your next favorite book and dive into a world of curated, exciting reads by purchasing through my links. You’ll have access to a diverse selection of books I’ve personally vetted for quality and enjoyment. Supporting these selections not only helps me continue to provide you with personalized recommendations but also ensures you have access to meaningful stories that enrich your life. Your support truly makes a difference in helping me share more books and insights with you!