July 31, 2026
Well, this month flew by. January always feels like a year, and July feels like a long weekend. We know that many book groups skip a month or two over the summer, but that just means you have plenty of time to read books to suggest at your next book group meeting. I have been on a total reading tear, which has been fun.
Somehow, I allow myself more pleasure reading time during the summer than at any other time of the year. I can stand in the pool and read for hours. I have read so many books that I have enjoyed. It has been one really wonderful summer for reading! Read on to see what I mean.
Editorial Content for Beginning Middle End
Book
Teaser
From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
Promo
From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
About the Book
From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics LOST CHILDREN ARCHIVE and TELL ME HOW IT ENDS comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles and sudden tempests. They’ve landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother’s grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong?
While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo --- cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up --- her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.
BEGINNING MIDDLE END evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time and confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made, and what happens when they disappear?
Warm, funny and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
Editorial Content for City of Widows
Book
Teaser
An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.
Promo
An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.
About the Book
From bestselling novelist Nadia Hashimi comes a gripping, occasionally terrifying, yet ultimately hopeful novel focusing on the women of Afghanistan in the years since the Taliban regained power.
In February 2020, the US began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years of occupation. A whole generation of Afghan women had been born during that time --- women who had grown up in relative peace, gone to school, entered the professions, even served in the army and Parliament. The women of Afghanistan watched as the Taliban filled the streets again. They knew everything was about to change.
In the bustling, cosmopolitan city of Kabul, women are TV newscasters, shop owners, doctors, teachers, lawyers, even soldiers. They include Marjan, who fought with the Afghan army and will risk everything to keep her daughter, Hawa, safe. In her earlier days Marjan was called Rahima and had lived the life of a bacha posh --- a girl raised as a boy until she came of age. Forced into an early marriage, Rahima took the name Marjan when she fled her warlord husband. She’s created a whole new life for herself, one she will not give up easily.
So has Soraya, who defiantly wore red lipstick as she led the army’s all-female combat force over the objections of her upper-class family. Soraya is now a wanted woman whose brother may choose not to shelter her from the Taliban. What will become of her? Or Mina, a journalist and broadcaster whose beautiful face is known to everyone in Kabul --- including the new regime?
Fight or flight? Or find a third way? One thing is for certain: none of these women will meekly accept her fate.
An epic saga of fear, resistance, change and reinvention, CITY OF WIDOWS gives voices to the unforgettable Afghan women at a crossroads of history.
Editorial Content for Country People
Book
Teaser
Joyous, absurd and life-affirming, COUNTRY PEOPLE is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Promo
Joyous, absurd and life-affirming, COUNTRY PEOPLE is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
About the Book
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont) --- a “witty and gorgeous” (The Guardian) novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of NORTH WOODS.
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, 12 years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales --- from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre --- perhaps ridiculous --- local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd and life-affirming, COUNTRY PEOPLE is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
Editorial Content for Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
Teaser
For fans of Fredrik Backman and Virginia Evans, this unforgettable and exquisitely moving novel is about finding beauty, hope and meaning in the brevity of life, as narrated by the one who knows it best: Death.
Promo
For fans of Fredrik Backman and Virginia Evans, this unforgettable and exquisitely moving novel is about finding beauty, hope and meaning in the brevity of life, as narrated by the one who knows it best: Death.
About the Book
For fans of Fredrik Backman and Virginia Evans, an unforgettable and exquisitely moving novel about finding beauty, hope and meaning in the brevity of life, as narrated by the one who knows it best: Death.
Travis is Death in the modern world. He wears jeans and a T-shirt and lives in a small, gray town. His job is to offer people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle and a little naive, despite everything he knows. He’s young and handsome, despite who he is. Each death he witnesses is meaningful to him. He listens, never judges and, most importantly, never tries to change anyone’s fate. He knows that every life must eventually end to maintain the balance of the universe, and he respects the cycle.
Then he meets Dalia, a midwife, and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter, Layla, who live across the hall. Despite his best attempts to keep his distance, he finds himself wholeheartedly embraced by other people for the first time. So it is with this seemingly unremarkable family that Travis begins to understand what it means to be truly alive --- and what might be irrevocably lost in death.
Written with radiant warmth, wisdom and compassion, EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT is a timeless story about appreciating life, accepting its end, and finding our place in the universe --- especially when it feels most impossible --- that will resonate with anyone who has ever loved and lost or worried at time’s passing.











