How to say Babylon
by Safiya Sinclair
How to Say Babylon is Safiya Sinclair's memoir of growing up as the eldest daughter of a volatile reggae musician and mi…
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Hello, I'm Joy ✨
Join me as I read my way across all 50 states and every country in the world.
I'm a Pacific Northwest bookworm on a mission to read a book set in every US state and every country in the world. I journal every single read — by hand, in the margins, in my bullet journal, everywhere.
This space is where I share the books that move me, the journaling supplies I can't live without, and the slow, cozy joy of reading your way through the world.
Three books I keep pressing into people's hands.
Jamaica by Safiya Sinclair
How to Say Babylon is Safiya Sinclair's memoir of growing up as the eldest daughter of a volatile reggae musician and mi…
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Syria by Zoulfa Katouh
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow follows Salama, an eighteen-year-old pharmacy student who finds herself volunteering at …
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Burundi by Gaël Faye
A prize-winning bestseller in its native France, a vivid and evocative coming-of-age tale, set against the backdrop of t…
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fresh from the pages
When chocolatier Lotte Bonnet's husband Emil dies by suicide on the Camino de Santiago, she is left not only devastated but full of questions. A year later, she retraces his exact route through central France, hoping the path will give her answers. What she finds instead is that the man she loved was hiding a dark secret rooted in the horrors of the Bosnian War, and that someone on the trail does not want her to find out the truth.
In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh and changed everything. Told through the eyes of five-year-old Loung Ung, this memoir traces her family's desperate flight from the city, their years hiding under the regime, and the losses that accumulated along the way. It is a child's account of survival, and one of the most necessary books written about the Cambodian genocide.
Spanning nearly a century of Vietnamese history, this book follows the Trần family across two alternating timelines: grandmother Trần Diệu Lan, whose life is shaped by French colonialism, Japanese occupation, famine, and land reform, and her granddaughter Hương, coming of age in wartime Hà Nội during the 1970s. Through their intertwined voices, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai traces how war, ideology, and survival fracture and sustain a family across generations, refusing to look away from brutality while never losing sight of love.
The Other Moctezuma Girls is set in Tenochtitlan in 1551, thirty years after the Spanish Conquest. When the last Aztec empress dies and her contested will threatens to tear her family apart, her daughter Isabel suspects a hidden account of her mother's life is scattered in clues across the Valley of Mexico. Joined by her siblings and a young cook named Juan, Isabel sets out on a perilous journey through viceroyal courts, mystical chinampas, and harsh terrain to piece together who her mother really was and what she sacrificed to survive.
Pleasantview is a novel-in-stories set in a fictional Trinidadian town, where the sun-soaked surface of Caribbean life gives way to corruption, patriarchy, and the messy, interconnected fates of a community. Written in a blend of English and Trinidad Creole, it won both the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award for Fiction and the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.