'...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five men in her life, to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write about the experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth--and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her community, to write their stories and her own. Jesmyn grew up in poverty in rural Mississippi. She writes powerfully about the pressures this brings, on the men who can do no right and the women who stand in for family in a society where the men are often absent. She bravely tells her story, revisiting the agonizing losses of her only brother and her friends. As the sole member of her family to leave home and pursue high education, she writes about this parallel American universe with the objectivity distance provides and the intimacy of utter familiarity.

Men We Reaped: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

JESMYN WARD

Community & Culture

Bloomsbury Publishing (UK)

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond [ The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond by Sims, Michael ( Author ) Hardcover Feb- 2014 ] Hardcover Feb- 18- 2014

The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond

Michael Sims

Professionals & Academics

This Is Where I Am

Literature & Fiction

Karen Campbell

Literary

Saul Bellow's Heart: A Son's Memoir

Greg Bellow

Arts & Literature

The Sound of Things Falling

Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Of all the family gatherings in her childhood, one stands out in Amina's memory. It is 1979, in Salem India, when a visit to her grandmother's house escalates into an explosive encounter, pitching brother against brother, mother against son. In its aftermath, Amina's father Thomas rushes his family back to their new home in America. And while at first it seems that the intercontinental flight has taken them out of harm's way, his decision sets off a chain of events that will forever haunt Thomas and his wife Kamala; their intellectually furious son, Akhil and the watchful young Amina. Now, twenty years later, Amina receives a phone call from her mother. Thomas has been acting strangely and Kamala needs her daughter back. Amina returns to the New Mexico of her childhood, where her mother has always filled silences with food, only to discover that getting to the truth is not as easy as going home. Confronted with Thomas's unwillingness to talk, Kamala's Born Again convictions, and the suspicion that not everything is what it seems, Amina finds herself at the centre of a mystery so tangled that to make any headway, she has to excavate her family's painful past. And in doing so she must lay her own ghosts to rest.

The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing

Mira Jacob

Jamaica, 1938. Gloria Campbell is sixteen years old when a single violent act changes her life forever. She and her younger sister flee their hometown to forge a new life in Kingston. As all around them the city convulses with political change, Gloria's desperation and striking beauty lead her to Sybil and Beryl, and a house of ill-repute where she meets Yang Pao, a Kingston racketeer whose destiny becomes irresistibly bound with her own. Sybil kindles in Gloria a fire of social justice which will propel her to Cuba and a personal and political awakening that she must reconcile with the realities of her life, her love of Jamaica and a past that is never far behind her. Set against the turbulent backdrop of a country on the cusp of a new era, Gloria is an enthralling and illuminating story of love and redemption.

Gloria

Kerry Young

Contemporary

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt [hardcover] Kwasi Kwarteng [Jan 01, 2012]

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt

Kwasi Kwarteng

Four disparate characters find themselves linked together in Paradise City. Howard Pink is a wildly successful businessman still struggling to cope fifteen years after his nineteen-year-old daughter disappeared. Beatrice Kizza fled persecution from Uganda where homosexuality is illegal. She now works as a maid at a hotel Howard frequents. Esme Reade, an ambitious staff reporter on a Sunday tabloid, is desperate to get the Howard Pink interview for which all London reporters froth at the mouths. Carol Hetherington, a widow who has time to keep an eye on her neighbors' actions, makes an astonishing discovery.  Paradise City explores what a city means to those who come seeking their fortune or a better life. It is also a story of absence and loss, of how we shape ourselves around the spaces that people leave behind.

Paradise City

Elizabeth Day

She Will Build Him a City

Jha, Raj Kamal

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