The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir

by Michele Harper

The author of this eloquent memoir is an ER doctor and a practitioner of yoga and meditation. Here she recounts how she overcame racist colleagues, a background of domestic violence, and the trauma of seeing suffering people every day at ...

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

Reviewed by Linda:Outstanding writing is the hallmark of this bestseller about the lives of people before, during, and after a plague wipes out much of human life on earth, and the remaining humans live in tight communities without...

Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

by Timothy Snyder

Reviewed by Linda:Finally, a book that explains how Americans got to the predicament we are in now, a nation without any of the tools we need to confront a life-threatening pandemic: adequate health care for all, a medical system that pri...

The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

Reviewed by Linda:The author of the bestseller Room has written a powerful and gripping work of historical fiction set in Ireland during the deadly 1918 flu pandemic. Julia, a nurse midwife at a Dublin hospital, is working under extremely ...

How to Be an Antiracist

by Ibram X. Kendi

Reviewed by Linda:This important book is receiving much well-deserved attention. The author is one of the country’s foremost historians and a leading voice on combatting racism. Here he combines an analysis of racism in America and the po...

Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

Reviewed by Linda:It's not often that an author's first book is a National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Best Book of the Year. This novel revolves around the lives that are upended when two young sisters are ...

Brother Robert: Growing Up with Robert Johnson

by Annye C. Anderson with Preston Lauterbach; foreword by Elijah Wald

We are excited to offer this new weekly feature and to share a wide array of books about Black lives in America. It seems appropriate to begin with a new book by a well-known Amherst res...

The Thursday Murder Club

by Richard Osman

Reviewed by Linda:If you like your murder mysteries charming and your sleuths immensely likable, then this British treasure is for you. The Thursday Murder Club meets weekly in the Jigsaw Room of Coopers Chase, a retirement community. Eliz...

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

Reviewed by Linda:What an astonishing true story! The Galvin Family of Colorado was always exceptional owing to its size (10 sons and 2 daughters). Six of the sons were tragically hit with schizophrenia as each reached adulthood. Little wa...

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague

by Maggie O’Farrell

Reviewed by Linda:This highly acclaimed novel concerns the lives of a penniless Latin tutor; his wife, Agnes, an eccentric but gifted healer, and their three children in Stratford-upon-Avon in sixteenth-century England. Few in...

These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

by Martha Ackmann

Reviewed by Cyndi:Even if you’re not a fan of Emily Dickinson, Martha Ackmann’s beautiful prose and vivid descriptions are certain to delight you. For Dickinson fans, These Fevered Days provides new insights into the l...

Washington Black

by Esi Edugyan

Reviewed by Janet:When the new master arrived after the old master’s death, the slaves on Faith Plantation didn’t know what to expect. For 11-year-old Washington Black, becoming the protégé of the ma...

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants

by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Reviewed by Linda:Robin Wall Kimmerer has written a very personal book about plants and our relationship to them and the natural world. She is both a biologist and a Native American who is steeped in traditional knowledge. Her book h...

The Vanishing Half

by Brit Bennett

Reviewed by Linda:This literary bestseller tells a fictional tale that has occurred unknown numbers of times throughout American history. Start with an African-American family and a member of that family who discovers he or she can pass as ...

Sea Wife

by Amity Gaige

Reviewed by Linda:I tumbled into this amazing novel of a family on a year-long voyage through the Caribbean on a newly acquired sailboat, and never wanted to leave. The characters were so real and so sympathetic: Juliet, the mother of two yo...

Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

Reviewed by Linda:I picked up this beloved sci fi classic because I thought 2020 might provide a unique opportunity for comprehending the experience of the Black Death that spread across Europe, Asia, and North Africa in the fourteenth cen...

News of the World

by Paulette Jiles

Reviewed by Janet:Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd spends his days traveling post-Civil War northern Texas, performing readings from newspapers to citizens hungry for news of the world. He finds himself agreeing to return 10 year old Johanna, ...

Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

Two-year-old Greta Greene was sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when a brick crumbled from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious. She is immediately rushed to the hospital. Once More...

The Limits of the World

by Jennifer Acker

Reviewed by Linda:Jennifer Acker of Amherst College is editor of the school's literary magazine The Common and organizer of LitFest, which brings distinguished writers to campus each spring. This elegantly written and thought-provoking no...

A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

A family caught between two cultures yields a resonant story of faith, tradition, identity, and belonging.

Circe

by Madeline Miller

Reviewed by Linda:Circe, the sorceress of ancient Greek mythology, appeared in tales about the Minotaur, Daedalus and Icarus, and Odysseus, but at last she is at the center of her own tale. This spellbinding novel will keep readers rapt ...

The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers

by Bridgett M. Davis

Reviewed by Linda:As some of you know, I love to read accounts of inspiring mothers. This book was an outstanding example of this genre. Fannie Davis ran a Numbers racket in the city of Detroit for decades. The granddaughter of slaves,...

How Hard Can It Be?

by Allison Pearson 

Reviewed by Linda:Sisters, if you are in the "Sandwich Generation" and need a hearty laugh, check out this hilarious and very smart novel about a London woman with two beloved children who have become teenage monsters...

Educated: A Memoir

by Tara Westover

Reviewed by Linda:

The author of this remarkable book was raised by survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, where she and her six siblings prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling food. Born at home, Tara had no birth certificate; n...

Vanessa and Her Sister

by Priya Parmar

Reviewed by Linda:

I was mesmerized by this novel about the Bloomsbury Group, which is told from the perspective of the artist Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia Woolf. In 1905 in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, Vanessa and her three si...

Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders

by Julianna Baggott

Reviewed by Linda:

Congratulations to Julianna Baggott of Amherst on her latest bestselling novel. Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and widely praised by reviewers, the novel introduces us to three generations of women, fr...

Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

Reviewed by Linda:

In Amherst author Judith Hooper’s fascinating work of historical fiction it wasn’t hysteria that kept the brilliant Alice James trapped in bed. Sister to the famous writer Henry and psychologist William, she suffered as m...

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reviewed by Linda:

The latest winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Between the World and Me takes the form of a father's passionate letter to his son about racism in America. Although a short book, the devastating knowledge ...

One Plus One

by Jojo Moyes

Reviewed by Janet:

Jess is a single mother, working two jobs to try to keep her family together. Nicky is a Goth 15 year old, being bullied by neighborhood toughs. Tanzie is a 10 year old math prodigy who's been offered a spot in a swanky scho...

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

by Michelle Alexander

Reviewed by Linda:

A devastating analysis of how we have come to have the majority of young black men in our major American cities locked behind bars or labeled felons for life for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by...

The Invention of Wings

by Sue Monk Kidd

Reviewed by Janet:

Sarah Grimké is not like other girls her age in 1803 Charleston, South Carolina. So when she is given her own personal slave girl, Hetty, for her 11th birthday, the institution of slavery becomes even more personal. Here ...

All I Know and Love

by Judith Frank

For years, Matthew Greene and Daniel Rosen have enjoyed a quiet domestic life together in Northampton, Massachusetts. Opposites in many ways, they have grown together and made their relationship work. But when they learn that Daniel's twin ...

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Reviewed by Linda:

A New Yorker staff writer, Elizabeth Kolbert knows how to grab and hold our attention in this account of evolution as it is being altered by humankind. Throughout earth's history there have been five major mass extinc...

The Fault in Our Stars

by John Green

Reviewed by Linda:

OK, I admit it. This book was a triple-hanky read for me. A young-adult novel that was just made into a film, the book introduces us to three teens living their fullest lives despite cancer diagnoses. Heart-breaking but not ...

Dear Committee Members

by Julie Schumacher

Reviewed by Janet:

A fun look at academia – told entirely through letters – from a member of the English Department at a small Midwestern college. His own writing career on the rocks, his personal life in tatters, and the campus building...

All the Light We Cannot See

by Anthony Doerr

Reviewed by Janet:

Marie-Laure is a blind girl in Paris, whose father is the master locksmith at the Museum of Natural History. As the German invasion and occupation approaches, they flee to a great-uncle in St. Malo. Werner Pfennig lives i...