A group of intelligent, eccentric misfits at a prestigious New England college invent a way of thinking and living that is very different from the mundane existence of their colleagues due to the influence of their captivating classics professor. However, when they cross the line into immoral behavior, they progressively progress from obsession to deceit and betrayal until finally—and inexorably—turning evil.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
“Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.”
“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”
“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
In Kimberly McCreight’s breathtaking debut book, Reconstructing Amelia, Kate is in the middle of the most important meeting of her professional life when she receives a call from Grace Hall, the elite private school her daughter attends in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Amelia has been fired with immediate effect, and Kate needs to come to fetch her daughter. When Kate finally arrives at the school and discovers it surrounded by police cars, fire vehicles, and an ambulance, her anxiety at leaving the office quickly turns to terror. Amelia will already be too late by that point. As well as Kate.
An academic achiever who felt defeated after being discovered cheating leaped to her death. At least that is the tale Kate is told by Grace Hall. It is the one that she makes herself believe, despite her guilt and anguish. She didn’t jump until she received an anonymous text:
Secret first loves, enduring friendships, and a tradition-rich all-girls club are all part of Reconstructing Amelia. But above all, it tells the tale of the lengths to which a mother will go in order to honor the memory of a daughter whose life she was powerless to preserve. Reconstructing Amelia will be just as suspenseful and engrossing for Gone Girl fans.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes it’s hard to tell how fast the current’s moving until you’re headed over a waterfall”
“It wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been counting the minutes until I could forgive her. But it’s a lot harder to forgive someone who’s not looking to apologize.”
“Everyone has beacons. Lights that guide them home.”
“But some things you can’t outrun, no matter how fast you move your legs.”
“But it’s a lot harder to forgive someone who’s not looking to apologize.”
Carmen Maria Machado carelessly destroys the artificial barriers between psychological realism and science fiction, humour and horror, and fantasy and fabulism in Her Body and Other Parties. She has been compared to Kelly Link and Karen Russell in the past, but she has a voice all her own. Machado bends genres to create astonishing narratives that depict the realities of women’s life and the brutality perpetrated against their bodies in her electrifying and controversial debut.
The husband begs his wife to take off the green ribbon around her neck, but she refuses. In a world where a plague is slowly consuming civilization, a lady recalls her sexual adventures. The seams of the prom gowns in the store are where a shocking discovery is made by a mall salesperson.
Due to weight loss surgery, one woman ends up with an unpleasant house guest. In addition, Machado creates a fantastical police procedural filled with doppelgängers, ghosts, and ladies with bells for eyes by reimagining each episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a program we mistakenly imagined had covered it all. This is done in the bravura novella Especially Heinous. Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrifying violence to the most delicate sentiment. It is both earthy and ethereal, acrobatic and seductive, queer and corrosive, humorous and deadly serious. These stories broaden the horizons of modern literature with their exploding originality.
Best Quotes from this Book:
afraid to make more of them.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body, and Other Parties
“I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled off to a sanatorium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly they take you away from the known world for wanting it?”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body, and Other Parties
“He is not a bad man, and that, I realize suddenly, is the root of my hurt.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
“Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
The Voss family is not at all typical. They reside in the recently baptized Dollar Voss, a converted church. The eldest children are annoyingly flawless, the father is married to the mother’s former nurse, the mother once battled cancer, and the mother lives in the basement with her half-brother. Merit comes next.
Merit Voss amasses awards she has not merited and secrets she is compelled to conceal by her family. She discovers Sagan while looking around the neighborhood antique store for her next trophy. She is disarmed and given new life by his humor and unabashed idealism, but she soon learns that he is entirely unavailable. When Merit discovers a secret that no award in the world can cover up, she withdraws even further into herself, watching her family from the sidelines.
Merit intends to dispel the false impression of a happy family—which she has never been a part of—before permanently leaving them behind since she is tired of the lies. Merit is required to comply with the horrific implications of admitting the truth and losing the one male she loves when her escape plan fails.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Not every mistake deserves a consequence. Sometimes the only thing it deserves is forgiveness.”
― Colleen Hoover, Without Merit
“Don’t make your presence known. Make your absence felt.”
― Colleen Hoover, Without Merit
“It annoys me when people try to convince other people that their anger or stress isn’t warranted if someone else in the world is worse off than them. It’s bullshit. Your emotions and reactions are valid, Merit. Don’t let anyone tell you any different. You’re the only one who feels them.”
― Colleen Hoover, Without Merit
“Tuqburni is used to describe the all-encompassing feeling of not being able to live without someone. Which is why the literal translation is, ‘You bury me.”
― Colleen Hoover, Without Merit
“You don’t get to decide what your life means to anyone else.”
― Colleen Hoover, Without Meri
A book that explores the surprising links in our lives and the notion that heaven is more than a place but rather a response comes from the author of the astonishing #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie.
Eddie is an injured war veteran and an elderly man who, in his opinion, has had a life devoid of inspiration. In a theme park beside the shore, he fixes rides. He tragically perishes while attempting to save a young girl from a falling wagon on the day of his 83rd birthday. He discovers that paradise is not a place when he awakens in the afterlife. There, five individuals—some of whom you knew and others who may have been strangers—explain your life to you. Eddie’s five companions each reflect on their relationships with him during a different stage of his life, from youth to soldier to senior citizen, unraveling the riddles of his “meaningless” existence and revealing the chilling truth behind the age-old question, “Why was I here?”
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
“All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.”
“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
“Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.”
“The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
Sarah Goldfarb is a lonely widow in Coney Island, Brooklyn, who only wants to slim down and be on a game show. In her obsessive search, she develops a dependency on diet pills, while her addict son Harry has come up with a sneaky way to gain wealth and leisure by obtaining a pound of uncut heroin with the help of his lover Marion and best buddy Tyrone. These four persuade themselves that unforeseen setbacks are only fleeting because they are mesmerized by the sparkling images of their futures. They cling to their illusions and get completely enmeshed in the cycle of drug use and addiction, unwilling to recognize that they have rather produced their own worst nightmares as their lives slowly fall apart around them.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done. ”
“I suspect there will never be a requiem for a dream, simply because it will destroy us before we have the opportunity to mourn it’s passing.”
“There’s a sorrow and pain in everyone’s life, but every now and then there’s a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.”
“For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasnt going to die.”
“Life was not longer something to endure, but to live. ”
A novel about a young woman’s attempts to avoid the problems of the world by going on a prolonged hibernation with the assistance of one of the worst doctors in literary history and the array of medications she prescribes comes from one of our bravest, most lauded new literary voices.
Our narrator ought to be content, right? She recently graduated from Columbia University, is young, attractive, and works an easy job at a cool art gallery. She also lives in an Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan that she pays for with her inheritance, much like the rest of her needs.
However, there is a hollow, dark spot in her heart that is not caused by the death of her parents, the way her Wall Street boyfriend abuses her, or even the sadomasochistic bond she has with her best friend, Reva. What could be so horribly wrong in a city that sparkles with wealth and opportunity in the year 2000?
A strong response to that query is provided by My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Moshfegh demonstrates how rational, even essential, alienation may be through the narrative of a year spent under the influence of a rather bizarre combination of pharmaceuticals intended to rehabilitate our heroine from her alienation from this world.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion”
“I did crave attention, but I refused to humiliate myself by asking for it.”
“Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.”
“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn’t exist yet.”
“For a moment I felt joyful, and then I felt completely exhausted.”
In a destitute Missouri farming family at the close of the nineteenth century, William Stoner is born. He was sent to the state university to study agronomy, but instead, he falls in love with English literature and begins to enjoy a life of learning that is very different from the hardscrabble living he has been used to. But as the years go by, Stoner experiences a string of disappointments: getting married into a “normal” household causes him to lose contact with his parents; his profession is stymied; his wife and daughter distance themselves from him; and a life-changing encounter with new love ends in controversy. Stoner, who is being pushed more and deeper inside of himself, rediscovers the stoic stillness of his ancestors and faces necessary loneliness.
The brilliant and moving novel by John Williams is a quiet masterpiece. William Stoner emerges through it not only as the prototypical American but also as an unusual existential hero, standing out against an uncaring world like a character in an Edward Hopper painting.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
“In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.”
“You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.”
“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?”
She is an absolute stranger. But she is aware of your identity. Suzi made a poor choice. She is currently paying for it by being afraid, pregnant, and sharing a cottage with her envious husband, Nick. Suzi is thrilled to have a friend when Nora moves into the lone house close. To the point where she is almost inclined to reveal her dreadful secret to Nora. But Nora is more complex than first appears. Does she already knows what Suzi did? It’s not feasible.
Elle, meantime, spends her days in her ideal house, obsessed with maintaining her good looks. However, her husband’s betrayal reveals a long-buried secret that dates all the way back to her early years. Whether it involves murder, she will do what it takes to keep him.
She’s done it before, after all. These strangers will quickly discover they have more in mind than they could have ever anticipated after being entangled in their own secrets and lies. Their lives are never the same again when a startling incident pulls them together.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Hope blinds you.”
“Funny how when the words run out, in lust or in shock or in grief, we call to a God we don’t believe in any more.”
“It’s a strange experience, hearing your spouse talk to a complete stranger. You want to shout out, That isn’t true! You never told me that! Like a test you don’t understand why you’re failing.”
“But those moments, when I managed not to think about the truth . . . it was that I missed more than anything.”
“always wanting something different than what was there. Never wanting to be where I was. It got to be an everyday pain, like walking around on a broken leg you don’t even notice”
A book that explores the surprising links in our lives and the notion that heaven is more than a place but rather a response comes from the author of the astonishing #1 New York Times bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie.
Eddie is a disabled war veteran and an elderly man who, in his opinion, has had a life devoid of inspiration. In a theme park beside the shore, he fixes rides. He tragically perishes while attempting to save a young girl from a falling wagon on the day of his 83rd birthday. He discovers that paradise is not a place when he awakens in the afterlife. There, five individuals—some of whom you knew and others who might have been strangers—explain your life to you. Eddie’s five companions each reflect on their relationships with him during a different stage of his life, from youth to soldier to senior citizen, unraveling the riddles of his “meaningless” existence and revealing the chilling truth behind the age-old question, “Why was I here?”
Best Quotes from this Book:
“All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.”
“Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you’re not really losing it. You’re just passing it on to someone else.”
“Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.”
“The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone.”
“You have peace,” the old woman said, “when you make it with yourself.”
The 1937 book, “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by American author Zora Neale Hurston. It is regarded as Hurston’s most well-known work and a masterpiece of the Harlem Renaissance. Janie Crawford, who is fair and long-legged, intelligent, and independent, strikes out to be her own person, which was no small accomplishment for a black woman in the 1930s. Janie travels back to her roots as part of her identity-searching odyssey, which includes three marriages.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
“Love is like the sea. It’s a moving thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from the shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”
“If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.”
“Some people could look at a mud puddle and see an ocean with ships.”
“She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.”
Finn Miller, 16, and ten other people are thrown over the side of the mountain in a terrible vehicle accident, and their lives are ended in an instant. She observes blankly as those she loves battle to survive while she is suspended between worlds.
The survivors are forced to make impossible decisions that will haunt them with pain and regret. As they attempt to take back their damaged lives, Finn remains vigilant because he can’t let go. Her mother, Ann, who ended up saving them all but is cursed by her choices, her father, Jack, who seeks retribution against the only person he can blame besides himself, and her best friend Mo, who bravely investigates the truth as the account of their survival is rewritten, her sister Chloe, who understands Finn lingers and longs to join her, and her. If Finn’s family is still in shambles, how can she ever go on? In an Instant is a narrative about the importance of family, the significance of love, and continuing even when it seems impossible. It is heartbreaking but ultimately redeeming.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“regret is the most difficult emotion to live with, but in order to have regret, you need to have a conscience: an interesting paradox that allows the worst of us to suffer the least in the aftermath of wrongdoing.”
“I realize how awful people are to each other, how a pervasive cynicism exists in most of us that stops us from seeing the best parts of one another.”
“Regret is a tough emotion to live with, impossible to move on from, because what’s done is done.”
“It’s strange and wonderful, the things we do that we don’t realize we’ve done.”
“I realize how awful people are to each other, how a pervasive cynicism exists in most of us that stops us from seeing the best parts of one another”
1996 saw the publication of American author A. M. Homes’ book The End of Alice. Both Scribner and Anchor Books in the UK and the United States published it. The story is narrated largely by a middle-aged pedophile and child serial killer who is sentenced to life in prison.
Such a broad spectrum of visceral reactions could only be elicited by a work of such piercing, painstakingly controlled brilliance. Here is the fantastic tale of a pedophile in prison who becomes involved in sexual contact with a nineteen-year-old suburban coed. The End of Alice by Homes is a romance-horror hybrid that is both unsettling and tempting as the two reveal—and indulge in—their obsessive wants.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I’m nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.”
“Silly bug, fly on the wall, our first fight and how quickly we are over it. Of course I don’t hate you, dearest, beloved, most cherished, I owe you everything.”
“Even though I thought I wouldn’t – could never – I do enjoy looking at him. It is like seeing one’s self, like seeing one’s self with a certain sense of remove.”
“when we fuck-and we do fuck,frequently-there is some-thing about her skin,about the way we fit into each other, that it is as if I’m inside out, touching myself.there is something between us not made on Earth.”
“There is a sky and trees, a high wire fence, a long road, and at the end of it you are there, waiting for me. So glad to see you, I say, misses you so much, thought about you ever day.”
Jack, age five, views Room as the entire world. Room is a celebration of resiliency and a moving tale of a mother and son whose love allows them to endure the unthinkable. It is told in the original, humorous, and tragic voice of Jack.
Jack, who is five years old, sees Room as the entire universe. It is where he was born and raised; it is where he still resides with his mother when they study, read, eat, sleep, and play. His mother locks him safely inside the wardrobe at night, where he is supposed to be sleeping until Old Nick comes to call.
Jack calls Room home, while Ma sees it as Old Nick’s jail, where she has been imprisoned for seven years. Ma has built a life for Jack through tenacity, creativity, and intense maternal love. But she is aware that neither for her nor for him, is sufficient. She comes up with a daring escape strategy that depends on her young son’s courage and a lot of good fortune. She is completely unprepared for the plot to succeed, which she is unaware of.
The entire book Room is written in the enthusiastic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack’s voice. It is a masterfully crafted novel about what it means to travel from one world to another, and it is a celebration of resiliency and the unbreakable relationship between parent and kid.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.”
“Everybody’s damaged by something.”
“People don’t always want to be with people. It gets tiring.”
“If I was made of cake I’d eat myself before somebody else could.”
“Stories are a different kind of true.”
Eleanor Oliphant is a socially awkward person who frequently expresses her thoughts without hesitation. Nothing is missing from her meticulously planned life of avoiding pointless human contact, which is punctuated on weekends by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone calls to her mother. But when Eleanor encounters Raymond, the clumsy and incredibly unsanitary IT guy from her company, everything changes. The three of them are rescued from their isolated lifestyles when she and Raymond work together to save Sammy, an old man who has fallen.
Eleanor will ultimately benefit from Raymond’s generous heart as she seeks to mend her own severely harmed one. If she does, she will discover that, after all, she is also capable of discovering companionship and even love. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is a smart, cozy, and uplifting story about an unconventional heroine whose deadpan quirkiness and unconscious wit make for a compelling journey as she realizes.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“In principle and reality, libraries are life-enhancing palaces of wonder.”
“Sometimes you simply needed someone kind to sit with you while you dealt with things.”
“Although it’s good to try new things and to keep an open mind, it’s also extremely important to stay true to who you really are.”
“I simply didn’t know how to make things better. I could not solve the puzzle of me.”
“Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary.”
The twin sisters of Vignes will forever be identical. However, everything about them as adults is changed after coming of age together in a small, southern black hamlet and fleeing at the age of sixteen: their families, their communities, and their racial identities. Years later, one sister still resides in the same southern community she once attempted to flee with her black kid. The other looks white and her white husband doesn’t know anything about her history. The twins’ lives are still entwined even though they are separated by such a great distance and an equal number of lies. What will occur to the next generations when the narratives of their own daughters collide?
Brit Bennett weaves together several lines and generations of one family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, to create a tale that is both an engrossing, touching family tale and an insightful investigation into the American history of death. The Vanishing Half discusses the enduring impact of a person’s past as it impacts their choices, wants, and expectations. It also examines some of the many contexts and reasons why people occasionally feel compelled to live as someone other than their beginnings.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
“She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.”
“This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”
“There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.”
“You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”