2022 Great Group Reads
We are excited to share the 2022 Great Group Reads!
Twenty different books written by twenty-two different authors and published by twenty different imprints combine to make this year’s list one filled with depth and variety. No two books are similar, yet they are all ones worth reading and, if you like, discussing.
This year’s list should offer booklovers of all sorts wonderful reading experiences that will take them out of their own spaces and into the lives and experiences of other people, down the street, across the country, and across oceans, and across time. The 2022 Great Group Reads list provides an outstanding selection of well-written works that will broaden understanding, foster empathy, and engender thoughtful consideration.
We encourage you talk about the books and their authors on social media. If you do, please use tag us and use #GreatGroupReads and/or #WNBAbooks.
And if you are looking for a book club to join, the Bookwoman Book Club exclusively reads books from the GGR lists.
Whether you use this list to plan for National Reading Group Month in October or to read with a book club or classroom, we hope you will celebrate the joy of shared reading!
2022 Great Group Reads
The Barrens
by Kurt Johnson and Ellie Johnson
HC 978-1950994489
Publication Date: May 3, 2022
Fiction
Categories: thriller, LGBTQ+, coming-of-age, nature, environment
This riveting debut is at once a white-water adventure, coming-of-age novel, and tale of tragic love—and an extraordinary father-daughter collaboration.
Two young women attending college decide to have a summer adventure canoeing the rapids-strewn Thelon River that runs 450 miles through the uninhabited Barren Lands of subarctic Canada. Holly made the trip once before with a group of skilled paddlers she trained with at camp, and she wants to share that experience with her friend and lover, Lee, believing it will draw them closer. But a week in, Holly, the risk-taker, falls while taking a selfie near the edge of a cliff. She is left injured and comatose, and soon dies. Their locator beacon for summoning rescue was smashed in Holly’s fall. It remains to Lee, the inexperienced paddler, to continue the grueling and dangerous trip alone, to save herself and return her lover’s body to civilization and Holly’s family.
In their relationship, Holly and Lee had always told each other stories; Lee had called Holly a “storyist.” Storytelling helps Lee endure the rigors of her journey and engage her grief as she explores her relationship with Holly while chronicling her own coming-of-age off the grid in Nebraska with her estranged eco-anarchist father, who is now serving time in prison.
Reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly
Fiction
Categories: historical, Asian American, political, sagas, family, cultural heritage
December 2021 Indie Next List
An epic story of love, war, and redemption set against the backdrop of the Korean independence movement.
In 1917, deep in the snowy mountains of occupied Korea, an impoverished hunter on the brink of starvation saves a young Japanese officer from an attacking tiger. In an instant, their fates are connected — and from this encounter unfolds a saga that spans half a century.
In the aftermath, a young girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school, an act of desperation that will cement her in the lowest social status. When she befriends a local orphan boy named JungHo, who scrapes together a living begging on the streets of Seoul, they form a deep friendship. As they come of age, JungHo is swept up in the revolutionary fight for independence, and Jade becomes a sought-after performer with a new romantic prospect of noble birth. Soon Jade must decide whether she will risk everything for the one who would do the same for her.
From the perfumed chambers of a courtesan school in PyongYang to the glamorous cafes of a modernizing Seoul and the boreal forests of Manchuria, where battles rage, Juhea Kim’s unforgettable characters forge their own destinies as they wager their nation’s. Immersive and elegant, Beasts of a Little Land unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shapes.
Reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly
Fiction
Categories: literary, faith, coming-of-age, LGBTQ+, family
November 2021 Indie Next List, Shortlisted for the 2022 Lammy Award in Bisexual Fiction, An Autostraddle Best Queer Book of the Year
From the award-winning author of Marriage of a Thousand Lies comes a brilliantly written, globe-spanning novel about identity, faith, family, and sexuality.
In Tamil Nadu, India, a boy is born with blue skin. His father sets up an ashram, and the family makes a living off of the pilgrims who seek the child’s blessings and miracles, believing young Kalki to be the tenth human incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu. In Kalki’s tenth year, he is confronted with three trials that will test his power and prove his divine status and, his father tells him, spread his fame worldwide. While he seems to pass them, Kalki begins to question his divinity.
Over the next decade, his family unravels, and every relationship he relied on — father, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin — starts falling apart. Traveling from India to the underground rock scene of New York City, Blue-Skinned Gods explores ethnic, gender, and sexual identities, and spans continents and faiths, in an expansive and heartfelt look at the need for belief in our globally interconnected world.
Guides: Reading Group Choices Book Guide
Reviews: Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly
Drowned Town
by Jayne Moore Waldrup
HC 978-1950564156
Publication Date: October 26, 2021
Fiction
Categories: literary, short stories, Southern, environment
“They had been told their sacrifice was for the public good. They were never told how much they would miss it, or for how long.”
Drowned Town explores the multigenerational impact caused by the loss of home and illuminates the joys and sorrows of a group of people bound together by western Kentucky’s Land Between the Lakes and the lakes that lie on either side of it. The linked stories are rooted in a landscape forever altered by the mid-twentieth-century impoundment of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and the seizing of property under the power of eminent domain to create a national recreation area on the narrow strip of land between the lakes. The massive federal land and water projects completed in quick succession were designed to serve the public interest by providing hydroelectric power, flood control, and economic progress for the region — at great sacrifice for those who gave up their homes, livelihoods, towns, and history.
The narrative follows two women whose lives are shaped by their friendship and connection to the place, and their stories go back and forth in time to show how the creation of the lakes both healed and hurt the people connected to them. In the process, the stories emphasize the importance of sisterhood and family, both blood and created, and how we cannot separate ourselves from our places in the world.
Reviews: Southern Review of Books
Fighting Time
by Amy Banks and Isaac Knapper
TP 978-1646031672
Publication Date: November 5, 2021
Nonfiction
Categories: memoir, family, grief, incareration, loss, civil rights, social justice
Unaware of the danger lurking on the periphery of the French Quarter, Drs. Ronald Banks and John Hakola made a tragic decision on the evening of April 29, 1979, to walk several blocks from the historic district to the Hyatt Regency. Inches from the safety of their hotel, they were accosted by two young men—a scuffle ensued, a shot was fired, and Dr. Banks lay dead on the sidewalk. Fighting Time is a tale of two families whose lives became entangled in that moment of trauma.
Isaac Knapper, a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby housing project, was wrongfully convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. In Maine, the Banks family believed justice had been served by Isaac’s conviction, and his exoneration in 1992 unleashed a sea of confusion and grief. In 2015, Dr. Banks’ daughter, Amy, a psychiatrist and trauma specialist, realized it was time to unpack her own family trauma. After learning details of the prosecutorial misconduct, Amy and her sister, Nancy, traveled to New Orleans to meet the man wrongfully convicted of killing their father.
In Fighting Time, Isaac Knapper and Amy Banks narrate the story of their thirty-six-year journey from murder to meeting with clarity, humility, and vulnerability.
The Foundling
by Ann Leary
HC 978-1982120382
Publication Date: May 31, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, women, mental health, psychological, friendship
June 2022 Indie Next List
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Good House, the story of two friends, raised in the same orphanage, whose loyalty is put to the ultimate test when they meet years later at a controversial institution — one as an employee; the other, an inmate.
It’s 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She’s immediately in awe of her employer — brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel.
Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women’s suffrage. Now, at age forty, Dr. Vogel runs one of the largest and most self-sufficient public asylums for women in the country. Mary deeply admires how dedicated the doctor is to the poor and vulnerable women under her care.
Soon after she’s hired, Mary learns that a girl from her childhood orphanage is one of the inmates. Mary remembers Lillian as a beautiful free spirit with a sometimes-tempestuous side. Could she be mentally disabled? When Lillian begs Mary to help her escape, alleging the asylum is not what it seems, Mary is faced with a terrible choice. Should she trust her troubled friend with whom she shares a dark childhood secret? Mary’s decision triggers a hair-raising sequence of events with life-altering consequences for all.
Inspired by a true story about the author’s grandmother, The Foundling offers a rare look at a shocking chapter of American history. This gripping page-turner will have readers on the edge of their seats right up to the stunning last page . . . asking themselves, “Did this really happen here?”
Reviews: Kirkus; New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly
A Girlhood: Letter to My Transgender Daughter
by Carolyn Hays
HC 978-1949467901
Publication Date: September 13 , 2022
Nonfiction
Categories: memoir, LGBTQ+, family, parenting, social
A parent’s love letter to a daughter who has always known exactly who she is.
One ordinary day, a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families knocked on the Hays family’s door to investigate an anonymous complaint about the upbringing of their transgender child. It was this knock, this threat, that began the family’s journey out of the Bible Belt but never far from the hate and fear resting at the nation’s core.
Self-aware and intimate, A Girlhood asks us all to love better, not just for the sake of Hays’s child but for children everywhere enduring injustice and prejudice just as they begin to understand themselves. A Girlhood is a call to action, an ode to community, a plea for empathy, a hope for a better future. A Girlhood is a love letter to a child who has always known exactly who she is — and who is waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.
Resources: “Why I Wrote My Memoir, A Letter to My Transgender Daughter, Under a Pen Name”
Reviews: Booklist; Southern Review of Books
Here Lies
by Olivia Clare Friedman
HC 978-0802129390
Publication Date: March 22, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, science fiction, environment, friendship, Southern
Longlisted for The Crook’s Corner Book Prize
Louisiana, 2042. Spurred by the effects of climate change, states have closed graveyards and banned burials, making cremation mandatory and the ashes of loved ones state-owned unless otherwise claimed. In the small town of St. Genevieve, Alma lives alone and struggles to grieve in the wake of her young mother Naomi’s death, during which Alma failed to honor Naomi’s final wishes.
Now, Alma decides to fight to reclaim Naomi’s ashes, a journey of unburial that will bring into her life a mysterious and fiercely loyal stranger, Bordelon, who appears in St. Genevieve after a storm, as well as a group of strong, rebellious local women who, together, teach Alma anew the meaning of family and strength.
With poignance, poeticism, and deep insight in Here Lies, Olivia Clare Friedman gives us a stunning portrait of motherhood, friendship, and humanity in an alternate American South torn asunder by global warming. This is a stunning first novel from a unique and inventive writer.
Reviews: Booklist; New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly
I Will Die in a Foreign Land
by Kalani Pickhart
TP 978-1953387301
Publication Date: May 10, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, cultural heritage
2022 Young Lions Fiction Award, Winner; VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, Longlist; Indie Next List November 2021
In 1913, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring premiered at the new Théâtre de Champs-Elysées in Paris. The work so perplexed audiences that a riot broke out. “Only a Russian could do that,” says Aleksandr Ivanovich. “Only a Russian could make the whole world go mad.”
A century later, in November 2013, thousands of Ukrainian citizens gathered at Independence Square in Kyiv to protest then-President Yanukovych’s failure to sign a referendum with the European Union, opting instead to forge a closer alliance with President Vladimir Putin and Russia. The peaceful protests turned violent when military police shot live ammunition into the crowd, killing over a hundred civilians.
I Will Die in a Foreign Land follows four individuals over the course of a volatile Ukrainian winter, as their lives are forever changed by the Euromaidan protests. Katya is a Ukrainian-American doctor stationed at a makeshift medical clinic in St. Michael’s Monastery; Misha is an engineer originally from Pripyat, who has lived in Kyiv since his wife’s death; Slava is a fiery young activist whose past hardships steel her determination in the face of persecution; and Aleksandr Ivanovich, a former KGB agent, climbs atop a burned-out police bus at Independence Square and plays the piano.
As Katya, Misha, Slava, and Aleksandr’s lives become intertwined, they each seek their own solace during an especially tumultuous and violent period. The story is also told by a chorus of voices that incorporates folklore and narrates a turbulent Slavic history.
While unfolding an especially moving story of quiet beauty and love in a time of terror, I Will Die in a Foreign Land is an ambitious, intimate, and haunting portrait of human perseverance and empathy.
Reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly
Let the Wild Grasses Grow
by Kase Johnstun
TP 978-1948814515
Publication Date: October 19, 2021
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, WWII, cultural heritage, Hispanic American, family, love
Longlist, Reading the West 2022; Honorable Mention, League of Utah Writers, Fiction 2022; Finalist, High Plains Book Awards, 2022
Let the Wild Grasses Grow chronicles the lives of Della Chavez and John Cordova, childhood friends separated by a tragic accident, who find each other again during World War II after leading lives of struggle through the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and, for John, abuse at the hands of his grandfather. This sweeping American love story celebrates the power of home landscapes, family heritage, and first love.
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, African American, women
Coming of age in a free Black community in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie Sampson is all too aware that her mother, a physician, has a vision for their future together: Libertie is to go to medical school and practice alongside her. But Libertie is hungry for something else — is there really only one way to be independent? And she is constantly reminded that, unlike her light-skinned mother, she will not be able to pass for white. When a young man from Haiti proposes to Libertie and promises a better life on the island, she accepts, only to discover that she is still subordinate to him and all men. As she tries to parse what freedom actually means for a Black woman, Libertie struggles with where she might find it — for herself and for generations to come.
Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States, critically acclaimed and Whiting Award–winning author Kaitlyn Greenidge returns with an unforgettable and immersive novel that will resonate with readers eager to understand our present through a deep, moving, and lyrical dive into our past.
Reviews: Booklist, Kirkus, New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly
Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour
by Yelena Lembersky and Galina Lembersky
TP 978-1644696699
Publication Date: January 18, 2022
Nonfiction
Categories: memoir, women, family, Jewish, Russian history, Soviet Union, art, cultural heritage, coming-of-age
Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour traces Yelena Lembersky’s childhood in Leningrad (Saint Petersburg) in the 1970s and ‘80s. Her life is upended when her family decides to emigrate to America, but instead her mother is charged with a crime and unjustly incarcerated.
Told in the dual points of view, this memoir is a clear-eyed look at the reality of life in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, giving us an insider’s perspective on the roots of contemporary Russia. It is also a coming-of-age story, heartfelt and funny, a testament to the unbreakable bond between mothers and daughters, and the healing power of art.
Reviews: LA Review of Books, NPR
The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs
by Leslie Kirk Campbell
TP 978-1946448880
Publication Date: February 01, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, short stories, women
Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion and in passion, a must-read for our times.
Review: New York Times
A Map for the Missing
by Belinda Huijuan Tang
HC 978-0593300664
Publication Date: August 9, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, Asian American, China, cultural heritage, family
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2022 First Novel Prize; August 2022 Indie Next List
An epic, mesmerizing debut novel set against a rapidly changing post–Cultural Revolution China, A Map for the Missing reckons with the costs of pursuing one’s dreams and the lives we leave behind.
Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home.
When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery. So he seeks out a childhood friend who may be in a position to help: Tian Hanwen, the only other person who shared Yitian’s desire to pursue a life of knowledge. As a teenager, Hanwen was “sent down” from Shanghai to Yitian’s village as part of the country’s rustication campaign. Young and in love, they dreamed of attending university in the city together. But when their plans resulted in a terrible tragedy, their paths diverged, and while Yitian ended up a professor in America, Hanwen was left behind, resigned to life as a midlevel bureaucrat’s wealthy housewife.
Reuniting for the first time as adults, Yitian and Hanwen embark on the search for Yitian’s father, all the while grappling with the past — who Yitian’s father really was, and what might have been. Spanning the late 1970s to 1990s and moving effortlessly between rural provinces and big cities, A Map for the Missing is a deeply felt examination of family and forgiveness, and the meaning of home.
Reviews: Booklist, Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly
My Monticello
by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
HC 978-1250807151
Publication Date: October 5, 2021
Fiction
Categories: literary, short stories, African American, racism
Finalist for the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle John Leonard Prize; Finalist for the Kirkus Prize; October 2021 Indie Next List
A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.
Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.
In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”
United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.
Reviews: Kirkus, New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly,
Night of the Living Rez
by Morgan Talty
TP 978-1953534187
Publication Date: July 5, 2022
Fiction
Categories: literary, short stories, Native American, cultural heritage, family, addiction, mental illness, poverty, friendship
Winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction; July 2022 Indie Next List
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 dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs.
A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.
Reviews: Kirkus; New York Times; Publisher’s Weekly
Fiction
Categories: literary, historical, Western, family
In late fall of 1892 outlaw Eddie Mole gallops down the main street of Jericho Springs, Kansas, where he robs and shoots dead the freighter Barney Kreider. Some urge Barney’s son Ulysses (“Euly”) to take revenge, but Euly is a Mennonite and Mennonites don’t seek revenge. Instead, Euly plots how to make his fortune with the aid of his half-Osage sister, Kate, and his friend Johnny, an Osage farmhand.
The three make a plan to sell goods and livestock to the settlers converging on Caldwell, Kansas, for the land run going on in the Cherokee Outlet. When Johnny tracks Eddie into the Cherokee Outlet, he witnesses Buffalo Soldiers evicting Eddie from a ranch, leaving it public domain, and Johnny and Kate make the run for that beautiful land. Euly follows close behind, even as Eddie, riding from Arkansas City, tries to reclaim his old ranch.
John Mort’s narrative is an anti-revenge novel — always opting for nonviolence. But there’s violence nevertheless, as Eddie’s and Barney’s survivors converge in a rousing finish. Though this novel uses some of the architecture and motifs of traditional westerns, it is carefully researched and set in the unfolding of a pivotal, neglected historical event.
Review: Booklist
Fiction
Categories: literary, family, grief
Winner of Madville’s First Blue Moon Novel Competition
Still grieving his wife’s early death, DJ has spent the last three years — and the money from her insurance policy — collecting guitars, composing music, and continuing to shop the Brooklyn stoop sales and flea markets they’d always enjoyed. When his building is sold, he takes refuge in his younger sister’s half-finished basement, imagining a comfortable and solitary retreat in Hurley, the small Hudson Valley town where they grew up.
Instead, he finds himself caught up in her troubling divorce, drafted as caregiver for his 11-year-old niece, and unable to face or afford a storage unit crammed with hundreds of vinyl records and every other scrap of his former life. DJ gifts his niece a marbled glass egg, a porkpie hat, and one of his prized guitars. But what’s asked of him, on his return to Hurley is not to give the perfect object — it’s to give of himself.
Review: Chicago Review of Books
Fiction
Categories: general, family, politics, women
Winner of the 2022 National Indie Excellence Award
The Devil Wears Prada meets All the President’s Men.
Megan Barnes’ life is in free fall. After losing both her job as a reporter and her boyfriend in the same day, she retreats to Chicago and moves in with Helen, her over-protective mother. Before long, the two are clashing over everything from pro-choice to #MeToo, not to mention Helen’s run for US Congress which puts Megan’s career on hold until after the election.
Desperate to reboot her life, Megan gets her chance when an altercation at a campus rally brings her face to face with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jocelyn Jones, who offers her a job on her PR team. Before long, Megan is pulled into the heady world of fame and glamour her charismatic new mentor represents.
Until an anonymous tweet brings it all crashing down. To salvage Jocelyn’s reputation, Megan must locate the online troll and expose the lies. But when the trail leads to blackmail, and circles back to her own mother, Megan realizes if she pulls any harder on this thread, what should have been the scoop of her career could unravel into a tabloid nightmare.
Readers who love Jodi Picoult’s topical plot twists and Liane Moriarty’s character-driven novels will devour this fast-paced tale of three women whose lives converge as one fights a devastating accusation, another campaigns for a contested seat in Congress, and one, the young reporter with ties to both, navigates the tricky line between secrets and lies.
Reviews: Booklist; Book Reporter; Kirkus
The Two Lives of Sara
by Catherine Adel West
HC 978-0778333227
Publication Date: September 6, 2022
Fiction
Categories: historical, African American, Southern, family, women, civil rights
September 2022 Indie Next List
In 1960s Memphis, a young mother finds refuge in a boardinghouse where family encompasses more than just blood and hidden truths can bury you or set you free.
Sara King has nothing, save for her secrets and the baby in her belly, as she boards the bus to Memphis, hoping to outrun her past in Chicago. She is welcomed with open arms by Mama Sugar, a kindly matriarch and owner of the popular boardinghouse The Scarlet Poplar.
Like many cities in early 1960s America, Memphis is still segregated, but change is in the air. News spreads of the Freedom Riders. Across the country, people like Martin Luther King, Jr. are leading the fight for equal rights. Black literature and music provide the stories and soundtrack for these turbulent and hopeful times, and Sara finds herself drawn in by conversations of education, politics and a brighter tomorrow with Jonas, a local schoolteacher. Romance blooms between them, but secrets from Mama Sugar’s past threaten their newfound happiness and lead Sara to make decisions that will reshape the rest of their lives.
With a charismatic cast of characters, The Two Lives of Sara is an emotional and unforgettable story of hope, the limitations of resilience, and unexpected love.
Reviews: Booklist; Kirkus; Publisher’s Weekly
What is Great Group Reads?
Started as an initiative in 2009 for the Women’s National Book Association’s National Reading Group Month program, Great Group Reads is an annual list of recommended books perfect for shared reading. The list is released in time to celebrate National Reading Group Month in October.
Each year, publishers send their fiction and memoir books to be considered for the list. These books are recommended for use by book clubs, librarians, and educators to facilitate meaningful discussions. A committee of readers reads through all of the selections and chooses around 20 books that become that year’s Great Group Reads list.
While some of the books on the Great Group Reads lists go on to be bestsellers, many books are mid-list titles or come from small publishing houses. These books may be ones you’ve never heard of, but they are incredible books that deserve to be read.
Books on the lists tackle a myriad of social issues, and our hope is that reading these books will expose readers to people and worlds unlike their own, cultivate understanding, help develop empathy, and spark conversations that can lead to change one person — one community — at a time.
