A noisy young family comes in next door, upending the lonely life of a gruff but lovable father. I’m Ove. He’s a curmudgeon, the kind of person who accuses those he doesn’t like of breaking in through his bedroom window. He has short temper, rigid routines, and strong morals. People refer to Ove as the bitter neighbor from hell, but must Ove be bitter simply because he doesn’t always have a smile on his face?
There is a story and grief hidden beneath the gruff appearance. So when a chatty young couple and their two chatty young girls move in next door one November morning and unintentionally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it serves as the prelude to a funny and endearing story of unkempt cats, a surprising friendship, and the age-old skill of backing a U-Haul. All of which will fundamentally alter one grumpy old man and a neighborhood residents’ group.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was color. All the color he had.”
“We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if’.”
“She just smiled, said that she loved books more than anything, and started telling him excitedly what each of the ones in her lap was about. And Ove realised that he wanted to hear her talking about the things she loved for the rest of his life.”
“Ove had never been asked how he lived before he met her. But if anyone had asked him, he would have answered that he didn’t.”
“Men are what they are because of what they do. Not what they say.”
Amor Towles made a name for himself as a master of intellectual fiction with Rules of Civility, his bestselling debut book, which brilliantly captured the ambiance and style of late 1930s Manhattan. In the words of NPR, “Towles writes with grace and energy about the social norms and manners of a civilization on the edge of tremendous change,” readers and critics were enthralled.
With the tale of Count Alexander Rostov, A Gentleman in Moscow transports us to a different gorgeously rendered era. The count is placed under house imprisonment in the Metropol, a luxurious hotel located across the street from the Kremlin, in 1922 after being found to be an unrepentant aristocracy by a Bolshevik tribunal.
Since Rostov has never employed a day in his life, he is forced to reside in an attic room as some of the most turbulent decades in Russian history take place outside the hotel. Rostov is an unflappable man of intelligence and wit. Unexpectedly, his more limited circumstances open a gateway to a vaster universe of emotional exploration for him.
This unique novel creates a spell as it describes the count’s attempt to comprehend what it means to be a man of purpose in greater detail. It is rife with humor, has a glittering cast of characters, and wonderfully described scenes after another.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“…what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
“Fate would not have the reputation it has if it simply did what it seemed it would do.”
“For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”
“If patience wasn’t so easily tested, then it would hardly be a virtue. . . ”
“Here, indeed, was a formidable sentence–one that was on intimate terms with a comma, and that held the period in healthy disregard.”
Marie-Laure, whose father works at the Museum of Natural History, resides in Paris close by. When Marie-Laure is twelve years old, the Nazis have taken over Paris, and her father and daughter leave for Saint-Malo, a walled city where Marie-great Laure’s uncle lives alone in a tall home by the sea. They may be transporting the most priceless and hazardous treasure in the museum.
Orphan Werner Pfennig grows up in a mining village in Germany with his younger sister, fascinated by a rudimentary radio they discover that transmits news and tales from locations they have never visited or imagined. Werner gains proficiency in creating and maintaining these essential new tools and is hired to use his skill to find the resistance. Doerr skillfully illustrates the ways people attempt to be kind to one another in spite of all circumstances by weaving together the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner.
The breathtakingly beautiful, immediately successful New York Times bestseller by Anthony Doerr tells the story of a blind French girl and a German boy who cross paths in occupied France as they both struggle to survive the destruction of World War II.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”
“Don’t you want to be alive before you die?”
“But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”
“So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?”
“All your life you wait, and then it finally comes, and are you ready?”
When all is lost, what endures are our tales. How will we survive the end of everything? In order to depict a vision of surviving against all odds, Cloud Cuckoo Land draws together an extraordinary ensemble of dreamers and outsiders from the past, present, and future.
Constantinople, 1453: On opposing sides of a city wall, a cursed child who loves animals and an orphaned seamstress risk all to defend the people they care about.
Idaho, 2020: An idealistic, poor child seeks vengeance on a world that is disintegrating around him. Can he carry it out when a kind old guy stands in the way of his plans?
Unknown, In the Future:
Konstance is the last hope for humanity as her small community is in danger. She must seek the oldest tales of all for direction in order to move forward. These stories, which are connected by a single ancient text, weave together to create a tapestry of comfort and resiliency as well as a celebration of storytelling. Anthony Doerr’s latest book, like its predecessor All the Light We Cannot See, is a story of profound human connection and optimism.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“But books, like people, die. They die in fires or floods or in the mouths of worms or at the whims of tyrants. If they are not safeguarded, they go out of the world. And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.”
“Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.”
“Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.”
“WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU SO DESPERATELY SEEK”
“we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human”
Teenage Sunja, the beloved daughter of a disabled fisherman, falls in love with a rich stranger at a beach close to her house in Korea in the early 1900s. He makes a lot of promises, but she rejects his advances when she learns she’s pregnant and that her lover is married. Instead, she accepts a marriage proposal from a kind, frail clergyman who is passing through town while traveling to Japan. But by leaving her house and rejecting her son’s wealthy father, she starts a dramatic story that will last for many generations.
Pachinko is a beautifully written and incredibly poignant tale of love, devotion, ambition, and sacrifice. Strong, unyielding women, devoted sisters, and sons, fathers shook by moral crisis, and others Lee’s complex and passionate characters survive and thrive against the uncaring arc of history in everything from bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
“Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge—it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.” Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.”
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
“We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.”
Two women—an unconventional American socialite looking for her cousin in 1947 and a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I—are brought together in a captivating new historical novel by national bestselling author Kate Quinn. The story is one of bravery and redemption.
1947. American college student Charlie St. Clair is unmarried, pregnant, and on the verge of being expelled from her extremely proper family in the turbulent years following World War II. She also has a fervent wish that her beloved cousin Rose, who vanished during the war in Nazi-occupied France, is still alive. Charlie, who is determined to learn what happened to the cousin she adores like a sister, escapes her parents’ control and travels to London after they send her to Europe to have her “small problem” resolved.
1915. Eve Gardiner is eager to fight against the Germans a year into the Great War and unanticipatedly gets her opportunity when she is hired to operate as a spy. She is sent into enemy-occupied France where she receives training from the captivating Lili, alias Alice, the “queen of spies,” who oversees a vast network of covert agents directly in front of the enemy’s eyes. Thirty years later, Eve spends her days alone and intoxicated in her dilapidated London home, plagued by the treachery that eventually tore the Alice Network apart. Up until a young American enters, speaking a name Eve hasn’t heard in years, setting them both on a quest to discover the truth—wherever it may lead.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“What did it matter if something scared you when it simply had to be done?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network
“Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network
“There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sits safely in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network
“Poetry is like passion–it should not be merely pretty; it should overwhelm and bruise.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network
“Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”
― Kate Quinn, The Alice Network
1940. Three very different women respond to the summons to the enigmatic country estate Bletchley Park, where the brightest minds in Britain learn to decipher German military codes, as England gets ready to fight the Nazis. Osla is a vivacious debutante who has it all—beauty, money, and the handsome Prince Philip of Greece sending her roses—but she is driven to prove that she is more than just a society girl. To that goal, she uses her fluent German to translate enemy secrets. Mab, a conceited self-made woman who was raised in poverty in East London, works the famed code-breaking machines while hiding her scars and looking for a husband who will benefit her social standing.
Meliara must learn a whole new method of fighting if she is to survive—with wit, words, and covert alliances. At least in war, she knew who she could rely on. She can no longer put her trust in anyone.
Both Osla and Mab see potential in local village spinster Beth, whose shyness hides a tremendous ability with puzzles, and Beth soon spread her wings as one of the Park’s few female cryptanalysts. However, conflict, loss, and the unbearable pressure of secret will separate the three.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“If he doesn’t love me in a boiler suit, he’s not worth dressing up for in the first place.”
“Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, Beth had read in Vanity Fair only that morning, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of history?”
“Every night, tell yourself what you told me. How you’re a patriot, not a traitor. How you’re the hero of this story, not the villain.” Beth smiled. “Then remember that you got an innocent woman locked in a madhouse to save your own skin, and ask yourself: how goddamned heroic is that?”
“These have knelled your fall and ruin, but your ears were far away,’” Beth quoted one of Dilly’s irreverent verses. “‘English lassies rustling papers through the sodden Bletchley day .”
“No one should tell their mother more than one-third of anything they get up to.”
Molly Gray is unique compared to other people. She has trouble interacting with others and frequently misinterprets their intentions. Molly’s grandmother used to translate the world for her, codifying everything into clear guidelines that she could follow.
Since Gran passed away a few months ago, Molly, age 25, has had to deal with the difficulties of life on her own. Whatever the case, she enthusiastically dives into her work as a hotel maid. She is the perfect candidate for the job because of her distinctive personality, obsession with cleanliness, and understanding of the right protocol. She enjoys putting on her polished uniform every morning, filling her cart with tiny soaps and bottles, and making sure the guest rooms at the Regency Grand Hotel are immaculate.
The day Molly visits the opulent and infamous Charles Black’s apartment, however, her tidy life is upended when she discovers it in a chaotic state and Mr. Black dead in his bed. Before Molly realizes what’s occurring, the police have her as their top suspect due to her peculiar behavior. She soon finds herself entangled in a web of lies that she is unable to escape from. Luckily for Molly, she teams up with pals she didn’t even know she had in order to look for information about what actually happened to Mr. Black. However, will they be able to identify the real culprit before it’s too late? The Maid examines what it means to be identical to everyone else and yet very different—and illustrates that all riddles may be solved through connecting to the human heart. It is a Clue-like locked-room mystery and a delightful voyage of the soul.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“That’s the trouble with pain. It’s as contagious as a disease. It spreads from the person who first endured it to those who love them most. Truth isn’t always the highest ideal’ sometimes it must be sacrificed to stop the spread of pain to those you love.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“I’ll never understand it—why people find the truth more shocking than lies.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“My truth is not the same as yours because we don’t experience life in the same way.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
“It’s easier than you’d ever think—existing in plain sight while remaining largely invisible. That’s what I’ve learned from being a maid.”
― Nita Prose, The Maid
Elizabeth Zott, a chemist, is not your typical woman. In actuality, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to acknowledge the lack of a typical woman. However, her all-male Hastings Research Institute staff has a very unscientific perspective on equality because it is the early 1960s. Except for Calvin Evans, the misanthropic, bright, and Nobel Prize nominee who falls in love with her mind of all things. Results of true chemistry.
But life is unpredictable, just like science. Because of this, Elizabeth Zott discovers herself to be a single mother and the unwilling star of Supper at Six, one of America’s most popular cookery programs, a few years later. Elizabeth’s novel method of cooking—combining a tablespoon of acetic acid with a dash of sodium chloride—proves to be ground-breaking. But not everyone is pleased as her fan base expands. Elizabeth Zott isn’t simply teaching women how to cook, it turns out. She is daring them to alter the current situation.
Lessons in Chemistry is as unique and lively as its main character and is laugh-out-loud humorous, astutely observant, and filled with a sparkling ensemble of supporting characters.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Because while musical prodigies are always celebrated, early readers aren’t. And that’s because early readers are only good at something others will eventually be good at, too. So being first isn’t special – it’s just annoying.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
“Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
“On the other hand, wasn’t that the very definitely of life? Constant adaptations brought about by a series of never-ending mistakes?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
“Imagine if all men took women seriously. Education would change. The workforce would revolutionize. Marriage counsellors would go out of business. Do you see my point?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry
Texas, 1934. The Great Plains are in a drought, and millions of people are jobless. As crops fail, water runs out, and dust threatens to bury everyone, farmers are fighting to maintain their land and their means of subsistence. The Dust Bowl era, one of the worst parts of the Great Depression, has descended with a vengeance.
Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, is forced to choose between fighting for the land she loves and moving to California in quest of a better life in this uncertain and frightening period. A generation will be defined by the heroism and sacrifice of one unbreakable woman, whose book The Four Winds is an unforgettable portrayal of America and the American Dream.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“A warrior believes in an end she can’t see and fights for it. A warrior never gives up. A warrior fights for those weaker than herself. It sounds like motherhood to me.”
“Courage is fear you ignore.”
“It wasn’t the fear that mattered in life. It was the choices made when you were afraid. You were brave because of your fear, not in spite of it.”
“Love is what remains when everything else is gone.”
“Books had always been her solace; novels gave her the space to be bold, brave, beautiful, if only in her own imagination.”
An emotional comedy about a crime that never happened, a would-be bank robber who vanishes into thin air, and eight incredibly anxious strangers who discover they have more in common than they ever imagined comes from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove and “writer of astonishing depth” (The Washington Times).
Viewing an apartment is often not a life-or-death experience, but this open house does turn into one when a failed bank robber storms in and kidnaps everyone inside. The eight strangers gradually start to open up to one another as the pressure builds and divulge long-kept secrets. The whimsical story of Anxious People serves up memorable insights into the human condition and is a friendly reminder to be kind to all the anxious people we come across every day. It is rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled humanistic approach” (Shelf Awareness).
Best Quotes from this Book:
“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”
“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”
“Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”
“We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”
“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”
At the conclusion of World War II, Cyril Conroy builds a massive real estate empire by a combination of good fortune and a single wise investment, lifting his family out of extreme poverty. The Dutch House, an opulent house outside of Philadelphia, is his first order of business. The house, which was intended to be a present for his wife, causes everyone he loves to fall apart.
Danny, Cyril’s kid, tells the tale as he and Maeve, their older sister, who is superbly sarcastic and confident, are banished from the home where they were raised by their stepmother. The two affluent brothers discover they can only rely on one another when they are thrust back into the misery their parents had managed to escape. Both their lives are saved and their futures are derailed by this unbreakable tie between them.
The Dutch House is a sad fairy tale about two intelligent people who are unable to get past their past, taking place over a period of five decades. Even though they appear to be successful, Danny and Maeve are only fully at ease when they are together. They continually resort back to the well-worn narrative of what they have lost with wit and passion throughout their lives. However, the bond between an indulgent brother and his ever-protective sister is eventually put to the test when they are finally forced to face the people who abandoned them.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“We had made a fetish out of our misfortune, fallen in love with it.”
“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”
“Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.”
“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”
“We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”
As a result, You ask for a story, therefore I’ll give it to you. 1952 in Afghanistan. In the little village of Shadbagh, Abdullah and his sister Pari reside with their father and stepmother. Together they endure hardship and harsh winters as their father, Saboor, is always looking for a job. Pari, who is as lovely and kind-hearted as the fairy after whom she was named, means the world to Abdullah. Abdullah is more like a dad to her than a brother and will do anything for her, even giving up his one and only pair of shoes for a priceless feather. Each night, they share a cot, their heads touching and their limbs intertwined. The siblings and their father travel to Kabul by way of the desert one day.
The events that will take place there will destroy Pari and Abdullah’s lives; sometimes a finger must be amputated in order to save a hand. Pari and Abdullah have no idea what doom awaits them there. Khaled Hosseini writes about the ties that describe us and shape our lives, the ways in which we assist our loved ones in need, how the decisions we make resonate through history, and how we are frequently surprised by the people closest to us, spanning generations and continents and moving from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I suspect the truth is that we are waiting, all of us, against insurmountable odds, for something extraordinary to happen to us.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“It’s a funny thing… but people mostly have it backward. They think they live by what they want. But really, what guides them is what they’re afraid of. What they don’t want.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“They say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. But, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“I now know that some people feel unhappiness the way others love: privately, intensely, and without recourse.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
“Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.”
― Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
The heartwarming love tale of a woman who has lost her sight and her husband, who fights for their existence as they travel through Syria as refugees to Europe. Beekeeper Nuri and artist Afra are married. In the lovely Syrian city of Aleppo, they have a straightforward existence full of family and friends—until the unthinkable occurs. They are compelled to flee after the war destroys all they care about. However, Afra’s experience was so horrific that it caused her to lose her vision. As a result, they must go across Turkey and Greece at great risk in order to reach an unknown future in Britain.
Nuri is kept going on the journey by the knowledge that Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has established an apiary and is instructing other refugees in Yorkshire in beekeeping, will be waiting for them. In addition to the sorrow of their own unfathomable loss, Nuri and Afra must face perils that would weaken even the most courageous individuals as they journey through a ruined world. They must travel in order to reconnect, above all. The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a moving, potent, sympathetic, and exquisitely written example of how the human spirit may prevail. It is the kind of book that serves as a reminder of the importance of narrative.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Where there are bees there are flowers, and wherever there are flowers there is new life and hope.”
“But in Syria there is a saying: inside the person you know, there is a person you do not know.”
“Sometimes we create such powerful illusions, so that we do not get lost in the darkness.”
“When you belong to someone and they are gone, who are you?”
“It’s amazing, the way we love people from the day we are born, the way we hold on, as if we are holding on to life itself.”
From her vantage point inside the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with exceptional observational skills, keeps a close eye on the actions of those coming in to browse and people walking by on the street outside. While Klara is still certain that a client will soon select her, she is cautioned not to place too much faith in human promises as it becomes possible that her circumstances could change for good.
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro examines the fast-evolving modern world through the perspective of a memorable narrator to delve into a central query: what is love?
Best Quotes from this Book:
“There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”
“Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”
“They fought as though the most important thing was to damage each other as much as possible.”
“At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.”
“So I know just how much it matters to you that people who love one another are brought together, even after many years.”
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established her as one of the most outstanding writers of her generation. Her stories are one of just a few debut works – and only a few collections – to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical acclaim for its grace, insight, and compassion in depicting lives transplanted from India to America were among the many other awards and distinctions it garnered.
Lahiri expands on the issues that made her compilation an international phenomenon, including the immigrant experience, cultural clashes, assimilation struggles, and, most poignantly, the braided relationships between generations. Lahiri’s fine touch for the exact detail — the fleeting instant, the turn of phrase — opens up huge worlds of feeling on display once more.
Lahiri portrays Gogol with amazing empathy as he struggles along the first-generation path, which is littered with conflicted loyalties, humorous detours, and wrenching love affairs. She illustrates, with razor-sharp clarity, not just the defining impact of the names and expectations put upon us by our parents, but also the process by which we gradually, and sometimes painfully, begin to define ourselves.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
“You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.”
“They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”
“Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.”
“She has the gift of accepting her life.”