Life-Changing Books

Under the Whispering Door

“If Wallace Price was still alive, I would want to meet him. Well, no, I would like to meet the dead Wallace because he’s much nicer that way; a true curmudgeon turned marshmallow as he accepts he’s done in this plane of existence. I wasn’t sure a book about death and grieving was what I needed this year, but upon finishing I can assure you this book is exactly what we all need right now. Klune’s signature quirky characters have that tendency to sneakily sink their hooks into your chest. Before I knew it, I had fallen in love with everyone, especially the ghost dog Apollo. There will likely be a lot of emotions in this reading experience, but it is all beautifully cathartic. Laughter, yes, and some tears. Many quietly profound passages had me pause to reflect and think about my own life and my family. I recommend reading it with a cup of tea and having someone you can hug within reach.”

Leah, Bright Side Bookshop

When The Unbearable Lightness of Being was first published in English, it was hailed as "a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness" by critic Elizabeth Hardwick and named one of the best books of 1984 by the New York Times Book Review. It went on to win the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction and quickly became an...

The #1 New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon

Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick | Independent (London) Ten Best Books of the Year

"A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits."—The Washington Post

The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well... Read more »

A Stunning Novel of Hope and Redemption

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan grow up in different worlds: Amir... Read more »

Nicole Krauss' first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and her short fiction has been collected in Best American Short Stories. Now The History of Love proves Krauss is among our finest and freshest literary voices. It has been decades since Leo Gursky first surrendered his heart, then wrote a... Read more »

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell. For the first fifty years of her life, nothing out of the ordinary ever happened to her. She was an old-maid watchmaker living contentedly with her sister and their elderly father in the tiny Dutch house over their shop. Their uneventful days, as regulated...

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho continues to change the lives of its readers forever. With more than two million copies sold around the world, The Alchemist has established itself as a modern classic, universally admired.

Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece tells the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a...

One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career.

The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant,...

Widely recognized as Willa Cather’s finest book and one of the outstanding novels of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in Nebraska.

Through Jim Burden’s endearing, smitten voice, we revisit the remarkable vicissitudes of immigrant life in the Nebraska heartland with all its insistent bonds. Guiding the...

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters.

Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings captures the longing of lonely children, the brute... Read more »

“Both a masterpiece about the universal human condition and a masterpiece of Native American literature. . . . A book everyone should read for the joy and emotion of the language it contains.” — The Paris Review

A special 50th anniversary edition of the magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from renowned Kiowa writer and poet N. Scott Momaday,...

With Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argued that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that... Read more »

Educated

“How a young woman, raised without modern medicine, any schooling, or even a birth certificate, in a remote Mormon, survivalist household in Idaho, made it to college and ended up receiving a PhD from Cambridge is the incredible story of this memoir. Outstanding! This true story is a beautifully written and narrated, soulful, hilarious, heartbreaking, even suspenseful page-turner (that you'll want to listen on 1x speed to), and not to be missed!”

Josh, Underground Books

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
 
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize,... Read more »