We are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World by Malala Yousafzai – In We Are Displaced, which is part memoir, part communal storytelling, Malala not only explores her own story, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her journeys – girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they’ve ever known. In a time of immigration crises, war, and border conflicts, We Are Displaced is an important reminder from one of the world’s most prominent young activists that every single one of the 68.5 million currently displaced is a person -often a young person- with hopes and dreams.
Velvet was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – In 1970s Mexico City, Maite, a secretary with a penchant for romance novels, searches for her missing neighbor, Leonora, a beautiful art student, which leads her to an eccentric gangster who longs to escape his own life, and together, they set out to discover the dangerous truth.
The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro – The Romans have long since departed and Britain is steadily declining into ruin. But, at least, the wars that once ravaged the country have ceased. Axl and Beatrice, a couple of elderly Britons, decide that now is the time, finally, for them to set off across this troubled land of mist and rain to find the son they have not seen for years, the son they can scarcely remember. They know they will face many hazards -some strange and otherworldly- but they cannot foresee how their journey will reveal to them the dark and forgotten corners of their love for each other. Nor can they foresee that they will be joined on their journey by a Saxon warrior, his orphan charge, and a knight — each of them, like Axl and Beatrice, lost in some way to his own past, but drawn inexorably toward the comfort, and the burden, of the fullness of a life’s memories.
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – An exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it.
Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon – Experiencing visions of other people’s heartbreak and trying to understand why this is happening, Evie signs up for lessons at a dance studio, where she falls for her dance partner, forcing her to question all she thought she knew about life and love. In the end, is love worth the risk?
This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz – The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents a lyrical collection of stories that explores the heartbreak and radiance of love as it is shaped by passion, betrayal and the echoes of intimacy
How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue – A young revolutionary risks everything to secure her people’s freedom when her small African village is decimated by an American oil company that reneges on promises of reparation and their needs are ignored by the country’s government. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
The Last Days of Café Leila by Donia Bijan – When Noor returns to her native Iran for the first time in thirty years, with her very American daughter, Lily, so much about her homeland is different. But Café Leila -the restaurant Noor’s family has run for three generations- hasn’t changed. This neighborhood café in Tehran is at the center of this powerful and transporting story of love, family, friendship, and homecoming told against the backdrop of Iran’s rich, yet tragic, history.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri – Born just fifteen months apart, Subhash and Udayan Mitra are inseparable brothers, one often mistaken for the other in the Calcutta neighborhood where they grow up. But they are also opposites, with gravely different futures ahead. It is the 1960s, and Udayan—charismatic and impulsive—finds himself drawn to the Naxalite movement, a rebellion waged to eradicate inequity and poverty; he will give everything, risk all, for what he believes. Subhash, the dutiful son, does not share his brother’s political passion; he leaves home to pursue a life of scientific research in a quiet, coastal corner of America. But when Subhash learns what happened to his brother in the lowland outside their family’s home, he goes back to India, hoping to pick up the pieces of a shattered family, and to heal the wounds Udayan left behind—including those seared in the heart of his brother’s wife.
Here Comes the Sun by Nicole Dennis-Benn – Working as a prostitute near the pristine beaches and turquoise seas of Jamaica to pay for a younger sister’s education, Margot hopes that a new hotel that is reshaping her home will grant her financial independence and allow her to pursue a forbidden affair with another woman.
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi – Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her. Even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family’s loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith, and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised.
The Soul of a Woman: On Impatient Love, Long Life, and Good Witches by Isabel Allende – The best-selling author of A Long Petal of the Sea describes her lifelong commitment to feminism, her fight to provide for her children, the gender and race obstacles that challenged her goals and her international successes as a writer.
My Year Abroad by Chang-Rae Lee – An everyday American college student finds his life transformed by a Chinese-American businessman who unexpectedly takes him under his wing on a series of whimsical, heartbreaking and darkly shocking adventures throughout Asia.
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat – Just as her father makes the wrenching decision to send her away for a chance at a better life, Claire Limyè Lanmè—Claire of the Sea Light—suddenly disappears. As the people of the Haitian seaside community of Ville Rose search for her, painful secrets, haunting memories, and startling truths are unearthed.
A Map is Only One Story: Twenty Writers on Immigration, Family, and the Meaning of Home, edited by Nicole Chung & Mensah Demary – From rediscovering an ancestral village in China to experiencing the realities of American life as a Nigerian, the search for belonging crosses borders and generations. Selected from the archives of Catapult magazine, these essays highlight the human side of immigration policies and polarized rhetoric, as twenty writers share provocative personal stories of existing between languages and cultures.