Out of Africa is a memoir by the Danish author Karen Blixen, who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Set in colonial Kenya from 1914 to 1931, the book chronicles the seventeen years Blixen spent managing a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills...

Oodgeroo Noonuccal is an Aboriginal Australian writer and political activist whose work centers the experience of indigenous people in Australia. "We Are Going," a poem originally published in her 1964 collection of the same name, examines the...

Geek Love is the third novel published by Katherine Dunn. The book was published in 1989, eighteen years after her second novel, Truck. Although published in 1989, Dunn actually finished writing it a decade earlier. It would take her nearly as...

Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice (called The Legacy in the United States) was published in 1950. It tells the story of a young woman named Jean Paget who becomes romantically involved with a fellow prisoner of war during WWII in modern-day...

Published in 1964, The Rector of Justin is a fiction novel written by American lawyer and writer Louis Auchincloss. It tells the story of Frank Prescott—the revered headmaster of the Justin Martyr School for Boys.

Set in an elite boarding school,...

The Things We Cannot Say (2019) by Kelly Rimmer is set in the backdrop of World War II. It weaves together two timelines and features two separate but nonetheless compelling protagonists. In 1942, Alina Dziak navigated a life interrupted by the...

Nick Lake's In Darkness was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury USA. It tells the story of a young boy nicknamed "Shorty," who is trapped in a hospital after the Haitian Earthquake of 2010. Initially, Shorty is hopeful that he will be rescued....

Magisterium is a sci-fi and Fantasy Fiction novel by American author Jeff Hirsch. It was published in 2012 by Scholastic Press. The novel explores a world split in half by a mysterious Rift. On one side exists a technologically advanced...

The Yearling (1938) was borne out of advice author Marjorie Rawlings received from her editor: write about her life. Rawlings did just that. Although The Yearling is a work of fiction, it was directly inspired by Rawlings' own life. It tells the...

Shadowmancer (2002) by G.P. Taylor is a fantasy novel and religious allegory in 18th-century Yorkshire, England. The plot centers on Obadiah Demurral, a vicar with malicious intentions of controlling the world by manipulating the powers of a...

The novel Wolf by Wolf, published in 2015, is a historical fiction work written by American author Ryan Graudin. She is an acclaimed author of young adult fiction who has authored eight novels, including The Walled City and the series The World...

The Serpent King (2016) by Jeff Zentner is set in a small town in rural Tennessee. The novel follows three friends: Dill, the son of a Pentecostal snake-handling minister who is grappling with his faith; Travis, a gentle giant obsessed with a...

Queen's Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle is a historical fiction novel that explores the life of Katherine Parr, the sixth wife of King Henry VIII. Initially pleased to find herself a wealthy widow after her second husband's death, Katherine soon...

Marcel Rouff's The Passionate Epicure (1920) is a novel, as its title and cover suggest, about food. The novel follows Dodin-Bouffant, a well-known bachelor with a tremendous passion for fine dining and love—namely, for women. Dodin-Bouffant is...

The Zone of Interest, Martin Amis' novel, which was published in 2014 by Vintage Books, is a novel about the Holocaust. Specifically, it is a novel about a love affair between Angelus Thomsen and the wife of the camp's commandant in the notorious...

Published in 2013, Dust is a science fiction novel written by American author Hugh Howey. It is the third and final book in the "Silo" series following Wool and Shift. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the remnants of humanity...

First published in 2013, Shift is a dystopian fiction novel written by Hugh Howey. It is both the prequel and sequel to the first book in the science fiction trilogy known as "Silo." This novel followed the success of Wool, which initially gained...

Sasha LaPointe's Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk (2022) does what few other books have done in history: tell the story of a Native American woman. LaPointe begins her memoir by discussing her long, intense longing for...

Indian writer Amitav Ghosh is primarily known for his novels, such as The Glass Palace (2000) and The Hungry Tide (2004), but in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2017) he tackles climate change through the lenses of...