words & thoughts
Book reviews, journaling tips, stationery obsessions, and the occasional personal ramble.
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.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →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.
Read more →A place for journaling tips, book talk, stationery finds, and the occasional personal ramble from a reading-obsessed psychonaut.
Read more →The Story Keeper by Kelly Rimmer is a haunting, emotionally layered novel that blends family mystery with a book-within-a-book narrative. After a difficult year, Fiona Winslow returns to her family’s decaying estate, Wurimbirra, determined to restore it—but instead uncovers long-buried secrets. When she discovers a mysterious novel in her late uncle’s library that eerily mirrors her own life, the line between fiction and reality begins to blur. As past and present intertwine, Fiona must unravel the truth hidden within both the house and the story itself.
Read more →I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is part memoir, part self-help, structured around twelve weeks of recorded therapy sessions between the author and her psychiatrist, interspersed with reflective personal essays. Candid and quietly funny, it traces one young woman's attempt to untangle the cycles of self-doubt, anxiety, and persistent low-grade depression that kept her from fully inhabiting her own life.
Read more →Born a Crime is the memoir of Trevor Noah, born to a white Swiss father and a Black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison in apartheid South Africa. Kept mostly indoors as a child to hide him from authorities, Noah traces his journey from a mischievous boy navigating a world where he was never supposed to exist to a restless young man finding his footing in post-apartheid Johannesburg.
Read more →A prize-winning bestseller in its native France, a vivid and evocative coming-of-age tale, set against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide and the civil war in Burundi, of a young boy's childhood innocence shattered by the brutal tides of history. In 1992, Gabriel, ten years old, lives in Burundi in a comfortable expatriate neighborhood with his French father, his Rwandan mother and his little sister, Ana. In this joyful idyll, Gabriel spends the better part of his time with his mischievous band of friends, in a tiny cul-de-sac they have turned into their kingdom. But their peaceful existence will suddenly shatter when this small African country is brutally battered by history. In this magnificent coming-of-age story, Gael Faye describes an end of innocence and drives deep into the heart and mind of a young child caught in the maelstrom of history.
Read more →The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park follows five residents of the same Tokyo apartment building, each drawn to a worn old hippo ride in the nearby playground. Local legend holds that if you touch Kabahiko on the part of his body that corresponds to your own ailment, you will be healed. Quietly funny and gently moving, it is a story about the small, unexpected ways community and connection find us when we need them most.
Read more →The Ferryman and His Wife follows Nils Vik, who wakes on November the 18th knowing it will be the day he dies. He follows his morning routine one last time, steps onto his beloved boat, and sets off along the fjord. As he travels his familiar route, the dead begin to board, former passengers emerging from the woods and the ferry stops, accompanied by his dog who has been gone for years. Nils waits for one passenger above all others: his late wife, Marta.
Read more →It's Not Her follows Courtney Gray, whose peaceful family vacation at a remote Wisconsin lake resort becomes a nightmare when she discovers her brother and sister-in-law brutally murdered in their cottage. Her teenage niece Reese is missing, leaving investigators and Courtney herself asking the same unsettling question: is Reese a victim, or the killer?
Read more →Aicha is a fierce, myth-infused historical fantasy that follows a young woman born into rebellion as she fights against colonial rule in Morocco. Aicha, the daughter of a freedom fighter, is driven by grief and rage after witnessing the suffering of her people under Portuguese occupation. As war escalates, she must confront both the external forces oppressing her homeland and the dark, supernatural power growing within her—one that could either liberate her people or destroy her completely.
Read more →Slanting Towards the Sea spans twenty years in the life of Ivona, who divorced the love of her life, Vlaho, a decade ago and has returned to her childhood home to care for her ailing father. When she reconnects with Vlaho and is welcomed into his new family by his spirited wife Marina, a fragile and unlikely dynamic forms between the three. Then a new man enters Ivona's life, and everything shifts. Set against the Croatian coastline, it is a story of buried secrets, thwarted potential, and the enduring pull of first love.
Read more →An Italian-inspired gothic historical fantasy debut in which a young woman competing with her twin brother to inherit the family forge finds her power in the nocturnal world that lurks beneath her own.
Read more →When Sleeping Women Wake follows three women, a mother, her daughter, and their maid, each forced onto a journey of survival during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in World War II. Separated by the ravages of war, Mingzhu, Qiang, and Biyu must each navigate their own fate amid escalating danger, holding onto the hope that they will find their way back to one another.
Read more →A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl begins on an ordinary morning in an upscale Atlanta suburb, when Maya's husband drops a letter on the counter and asks a devastating question: who is Sunny? The letter, from a sister no one in Maya's life knows she has, sends her spiralling back to her childhood in 1980s Guyana and the traumatic journey to America that forced her to leave everything behind, including her name, her family, and every version of herself she had ever been. A dual-timeline story of identity, survival, and the secrets we bury to keep ourselves safe.
Read more →Ten Incarnations of Rebellion imagines an alternate 1960s India that was never liberated from British colonial rule. Kalki Divekar grows up in Kingston, a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay, driven by the memory of her executed father and determined to destroy the empire from the inside out. Told across ten moments in Kalki's life that mirror the Dashavatara, the ten avatars of Vishnu, it is a sweeping story of empowerment, friendship, sacrifice, and the true cost of freedom.
Read more →Guatemalan Rhapsody is a debut short story collection of twelve slice-of-life stories about men and boys living in Guatemala and its diaspora. Ranging from a custodian at an underfunded college to a medicine man living in a temple dedicated to San Simón, the patron saint of alcohol and cigarettes, the characters find themselves at defining moments in their lives, where sacrifices may be required of them, by them, or for them. Revealing the places where beauty, desperation, love, violence, and hope exist simultaneously, the collection illuminates the ties that both connect us and constrain us.
Read more →There Are Rivers in the Sky spans centuries and continents to tell the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives, all connected by a single drop of water. From a brilliant child born into poverty on the banks of Victorian London's Thames, to a young Yazidi girl fleeing war-torn lands by the River Tigris in 2014, to a heartbroken hydrologist living on a houseboat in 2018 London, the novel weaves together loss, memory, and the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh into something vast and quietly devastating.
Read more →No Heaven for Good Boys follows six-year-old Ibrahimah and his older cousin Étienne, who are sent by their families to study the Koran under a respected teacher in Dakar, Senegal. Instead of the education their parents imagined, the boys, known as Talibé, are forced to beg on the streets to line their Marabout's pockets, navigating rival gangs, black-market organ traders, and escalating danger as they fight to find their way home. Drawn from real incidents, it is a story of survival, love, and the bonds that hold us together when everything else falls apart.
Read more →All Boys Aren't Blue is a young adult memoir-manifesto in which George M. Johnson traces their childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia through a series of personal essays. Weaving together experiences of bullying, family, sexual abuse, Black joy, and the journey toward queer identity, it is both a reassuring testimony for young queer people of color and a primer for anyone seeking to understand their experiences.
Read more →The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo follows disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who is hired by aging industrialist Henrik Vanger to investigate the decades-old disappearance of his great-niece Harriet from the family's isolated island estate. Aided by the brilliant, unconventional hacker Lisbeth Salander, Blomkvist uncovers a trail of corruption and violence that reaches deep into one of Sweden's most powerful dynasties. The first book in the Millennium series, it combines murder mystery, financial thriller, and family saga into one compulsively readable whole.
Read more →Minor Detail begins in the summer of 1949, one year after the war Palestinians mourn as the Nakba. Israeli soldiers murder a Bedouin encampment in the Negev desert, capture a young Palestinian woman, rape and kill her, and bury her in the sand. Decades later, a young woman in Ramallah stumbles across a brief account of this crime and becomes obsessed with uncovering its details, not least because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born. Told in two parts, in two radically different voices, the novel is a meditation on violence, memory, and what it costs to go looking for a truth that has been deliberately buried.
Read more →A piercing, intimate hybrid of protest diary and poetry from Belarus. Cimafiejeva documents the 2020 election aftermath alongside poems about Chernobyl, exile, and the act of writing as resistance.
Read more →ABlack Butterflies tells the story of Zora Kočović, a 55-year-old landscape painter and teacher, during the first ten months of the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992. Separated from her husband and mother when violence breaks out, she must face brutal shelling and blockade alone, finding unexpected love, deep community, and a fierce determination to keep making art even as the city crumbles around her. The title comes from the charred fragments of books and paintings that floated over Sarajevo for days after the National Library was burned.
Read more →The Lion Women of Tehran follows Ellie and Homa, two girls from opposite sides of Tehran's class divide who meet on the first day of school in 1950s Iran and forge an unlikely, world-shaping friendship. As they come of age amid the political upheaval building toward the 1979 Iranian Revolution, one devastating betrayal will alter the course of both their lives forever.
Read more →Soviet Milk is narrated alternately by an unnamed mother and daughter, spanning the years 1969 to 1989 in Soviet-occupied Latvia. The mother, a gifted gynaecologist, has her promising career destroyed by a single act of resistance and is banished to a rural clinic, where she and her young daughter struggle to build a life together under the suffocating weight of a system designed to grind them down.
Read more →A Disappearance in Fiji is set in 1914, where 25-year-old Sergeant Akal Singh has been sent to colonial Fiji as punishment for a humiliating professional mistake in Hong Kong. Lonely and grumpy, he is reluctantly assigned to investigate the disappearance of an indentured Indian woman from a sugarcane plantation. What begins as a cursory case quickly pulls him into the brutal realities of indentured servitude, the racism of British colonisers, and the collision of cultures between white plantation owners, Indian workers, and native Fijians.
Read more →Between Shades of Gray begins with a knock at the door in the dead of night. Fifteen-year-old Lina Vilkas is hauled away by the Soviet secret police from her home in Lithuania and thrown into a cattle car with her mother and younger brother, bound for a labour camp in Siberia. Separated from her father, Lina secretly passes along clues in the form of drawings, hoping they will reach his prison camp. Spanning years and 6,500 miles, it is a story of survival, love, and the inextinguishable human will to endure.
Read more →How to Say Babylon is Safiya Sinclair's memoir of growing up as the eldest daughter of a volatile reggae musician and militant Rastafari adherent in Jamaica, who became obsessed with keeping the corrupting influences of the Western world, which Rastas call Babylon, away from his family. He forbade almost everything, demanded his daughters' silence and obedience, and believed a woman's highest virtue was her compliance.
Read more →Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly is a witty, heartfelt contemporary novel that follows queer siblings Greta and Valdin as they navigate love, identity, and the chaos of their large, multicultural family in Auckland. Told in alternating perspectives, the story captures the messy reality of young adulthood—unrequited crushes, lingering exes, career struggles, and complicated family dynamics. Both humorous and deeply emotional, the novel explores themes of queerness, belonging, and the many ways people care for one another, all wrapped in sharp, lively prose
Read more →A haunting yet heartwarming fable set in a remote Armenian mountain village. Abgaryan weaves together the lives of elderly villagers with warmth, grief, and wonder — part family saga, part fairy tale.
Read more →Set in 1974, The Great Alone tells the gripping story of the Allbright family as they leave behind the chaos of Seattle for a remote stretch of Alaska wilderness. Ernt Allbright, a Vietnam War POW, returns home a changed man—haunted by nightmares, flashbacks, and volatile anger. His wife Cora and their 13-year-old daughter Leni must navigate the harsh Alaskan environment while facing the darker storms brewing at home. It’s a tale of survival, resilience, and hope against both human and natural forces.
Read more →As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow follows Salama, an eighteen-year-old pharmacy student who finds herself volunteering at a hospital in the Syrian city of Homs, performing amputations and removing shrapnel as bombs fall around her. Desperate to get herself and her pregnant sister-in-law to safety before it is too late, she is also, impossibly, falling in love, while a figure only she can see embodies everything she fears most.
Read more →The Memory Keeper of Kyiv follows two timelines: in 1929, sixteen-year-old Katya watches Stalin's activists arrive in her Ukrainian village, the beginning of a systematic campaign of collectivisation and starvation that will steal millions of lives. Seventy years later, a young widow discovers her grandmother's journal, uncovering the long-buried secrets of her family's haunted past and finally understanding why her grandmother hoards food and is troubled by ghosts. Inspired by the Holodomor, the man-made famine the Russian government still denies.
Read more →River Sing Me Home follows Rachel, an enslaved woman on a Barbados plantation, who runs away after the 1834 Emancipation Act only to discover that freedom means little without knowing what has become of her five children, all sold to different plantations across the Caribbean. Driven by a mother's love that refuses to accept the unknown, she journeys across islands and through extraordinary danger to find each one. Inspired by the true stories of women who went searching for their stolen children after abolition.
Read more →Foster is set during a hot summer in rural Ireland. A young girl is left by her father with relatives on a farm in County Wexford, not knowing when or if she will be brought home again. In the Kinsellas' house she finds a warmth and tenderness she has not known before, and slowly begins to blossom. But there is something unspoken in this quiet household, and the summer must soon come to an end.
Read more →Homegoing begins in 18th-century Ghana with two half-sisters who never know each other. One marries a British colonial governor and lives in comfort in Cape Coast Castle; the other is imprisoned in the very same castle's dungeons and sold into slavery in America. From there, the novel follows their descendants across eight generations, from the Gold Coast to Mississippi plantations, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem, illuminating slavery's long and troubled legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.
Read more →The Hour of the Star is narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., whose story concerns Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet cannot avoid the realisation that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free.
Read more →Some People Need Killing is Patricia Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' drug war and Rodrigo Duterte's assault on the country's struggling democracy. For six years, Evangelista immersed herself in the world of killers and survivors, documenting the thousands of Filipinos killed by police and vigilantes in the name of a war on drugs that left somewhere between 8,000 and 30,000 dead. The book's title comes from the words of a vigilante who described his actions as making his neighborhood safer, words that captured the psychological accommodation an entire nation had been asked to make.
Read more →A beautiful debut collection of short stories with a dreamlike quality. Kincaid's lyrical, precise prose explores mother-daughter relationships and Caribbean identity with breathtaking economy.
Read more →Violeta tells the epic story of Violeta Del Valle, born on a stormy day in 1920 as the Spanish flu reaches the shores of her South American homeland, and dying a century later during the COVID-19 pandemic. Structured as a long letter to her beloved grandson, the novel follows Violeta through the Great Depression, the rise and fall of dictators, the fight for women's rights, passionate and destructive loves, and the upheavals of a continent in constant transformation. Inspired by the life of Allende's own mother.
Read more →Set in Montgomery in 1973, Take My Hand follows Civil Townsend, a young Black nurse determined to make a difference in her community. Fresh out of nursing school, Civil begins working at a family planning clinic, believing she’ll empower women with choices about their bodies and futures. But her expectations are quickly shattered when she is assigned to two young sisters—just 11 and 13 years old—who are being placed on birth control not because of medical need, but because they are poor, Black, and seen as burdens on the system. As Civil grows deeply attached to India and Erica, she becomes entangled in a devastating situation that will shape the course of her life for decades.
Read more →Bolla begins in April 1995 in Pristina, Kosovo, where Arsim, a closeted Albanian literature student in a loveless marriage, meets Miloš, a Serbian medical student, in a café. Before the day is out, everything has changed. Their unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of the Balkan wars, which sends Arsim into exile and Miloš to the front, where he is broken beyond repair. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison, Arsim attempts to find Miloš again. Woven through their alternating narratives is a recreated legend of the bolla, a demonic serpent from Albanian folklore, a creature that each year is given one day of freedom before being swallowed back into darkness.
Read more →In the Time of the Butterflies opens on November 25, 1960, when three sisters are found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official newspaper calls it an accident. It does not mention that a fourth sister survived, nor that all four were among the leading opponents of General Rafael Trujillo's dictatorship. In this novel, the voices of all four sisters, Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor Dedé, speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horror of life under Trujillo's rule.
Read more →I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography tracing the early years of Maya Angelou's life, from age three through sixteen. A coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of racial segregation in the American South, it follows young Maya as she navigates abandonment, trauma, racism, and an enduring love of literature that ultimately helps her find her voice.
Read more →How We Disappeared weaves together two timelines across sixty years. In 1942, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is taken from her village during the Japanese occupation of Singapore and forced into sexual slavery as a so-called 'comfort woman'. In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin overhears a mumbled confession from his ailing grandmother and sets out to uncover the truth, setting in motion a chain of events he never could have foreseen.
Read more →A completely haunting collection of stories by Afghan women — their hopes, dreams, regrets, resentments, loves, and defiances. Powerful, life-changing, and unforgettable.
Read more →Firekeeper's Daughter follows eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine, who has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. When family tragedy derails her college plans and she witnesses a shocking murder, she is pulled into an FBI investigation of a lethal new drug, going undercover and drawing on her knowledge of both chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to protect her community.
Read more →The Ex Hex is a witchy paranormal rom-com set in the small town of Graves Glen, Georgia. When witch Vivienne Jones drunkenly cursed her ex-boyfriend nine years ago, she assumed nothing would come of it. Then Rhys Penhallow strolls back into town and the chaos begins: a possessed ghost, a talking cat, and calamity at every turn, all while the two of them try very hard not to fall for each other again.
Read more →To Paradise is a sweeping novel spanning three centuries and three alternate versions of America, tracing stories of lovers, family, and the elusive promise of utopia across 1893, 1993, and 2093. Each section is set in the same Washington Square townhouse in New York, and each asks the same urgent questions about freedom, love, illness, and what it costs to protect the people we care for.
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