Books that Open Our World is a curated list of this year’s books that are available from NOPL. In 2020, I read some eye-opening titles such as Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and Lisa See’s the Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane. The authors share perspectives that are full of escapism but are based on grave endurance. Many of the authors debuted with stellar success writing about extraordinary challenges facing women, partners, and families living on the margins of life. The books are not for the faint of heart but grow on current stories around the world.
River Spirit by Leila Aboulela
A girl grows up during the Mahdist War in nineteenth-century Sudan where tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized collide. Akuany and her brother are orphans after a village raid in South Sudan. A merchant and scholar of the Qur’an vows to care for her going through adulthood. Forces against the rule of the Ottoman Empire have splintered the country from Qur’an followers to Christians to factions of Islam. River Spirit is about the religious, political and emotional divisions of this revolutionary time.
The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abe Daré
Adunni is a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who wants to be educated. Her mother has told her that the only way to get a ‘louding voice’ is to speak for herself and decide her future. Adunni’s father sells her to be the third wife of a local man who is eager for her to bear him a son and heir. When Adunni runs away to the city, hoping to make a better life, she finds that the only other option before her is servitude to a wealthy family. She realizes that she must stand up not only for herself but for other girls and finds the resolve to speak.
Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig
When Shek Yeung sees a Portuguese sailor slay her husband, a feared pirate, she knows she must act swiftly or die. Instead of mourning, Shek Yeung immediately marries her husband’s second-in-command and agrees to bear him a son and heir, to retain power over her half of the fleet. But as Shek Yeung vies for control over the army she knows she was born to lead, the Chinese Emperor has charged a brutal, crafty nobleman with ridding the South China Seas of pirates and the Europeans break away. Shek Yeung must decide how long she is willing to fight, and at what price.
A Market of Dreams and Destiny by Trip Galey
As a child, Deri was sold to one of the Untermarkt’s most powerful merchants. Deri finally spots a chance to buy not only his freedom but also his place amongst the Market’s elite when he stumbles into the path of a runaway princess desperate to sell her royal destiny. With the news of her disappearance, Royal enforcers and Master Merchants are on to block the way. Outmaneuvering them all would all be hard enough had Deri not just also met the love of his life whose employers are using the Market for their own nefarious schemes.
Vanishing Maps: A Novel by Cristina Garcia
Celia del Pino, the matriarch of a Cuban family, has watched her descendants spread out across the globe, struggling to make sense of their transnational identities and strained relationships with one another. In Berlin, the charismatic yet troubled Ivanito performs on stage as his drag queen persona, while being haunted by the ghost of his mother. Pilar Puente is an L.A. sculptor and the single mother of a young son. In Moscow, Ivanito’s cousin Irina has become the wealthy owner of a lingerie company, but she remains deeply lonely. Ivanito brings his family a sense of home.
Between Two Moons by Aisha Abdel Gawad
Sisters Amira and Lina are graduating from high school to live it up in Brooklyn when their brother returns home from prison. A violent act in their neighborhood brings turmoil to their summer. Mistrust and denial within the Arab community brings a quiet but eerie unrest to the family. In the wake of Islamophobia, this story will “prompt readers to question their own beliefs and experiences of mistrust.
Time Undoing: A Novel by Cheryl A. Head
Detroit Free Press Reporter Meghan McKenzie looks back to investigate her great-grandfather’s murder in 1929. Robert Lee Harrington is a master carpenter who brings his family to Birmingham in the city’s heydey for a job opportunity. He and his pregnant wife and young daughter soon come to the attention of the Klan. In 2019, Meghan travels to Birmingham to uncover the secrets behind her family’s tragedy. An outlier of the Black Lives Matter movement targets Meghan with mistrust and threatens her investigation.
Evil Eye by Etaf Rum
The oldest of nine children of Palestinian parents, Yara is experiencing trouble with her job at a North Carolina college, and her mother Meriem thinks this stems from a family curse. This intricate drama weaves the mother-daughter relationship with a legacy of family trauma. The Arab-American experience is well rooted in the author’s own journaling and reflective therapy of living in denial of cultural biases while wanting a better life and the courage to stand up.
The Daughters of Madurai: A Novel by Rajasree Variyar
Madurai, 1992. A young mother in a poor family, Janani is told she is useless if she can’t produce a son–or worse, if she bears daughters. They let her keep her first baby girl, but the rest are taken away as soon as they are born and murdered. But Janani can’t forget the daughters she was never allowed to love. Sydney, 2019. Nila has a secret and when her grandfather in India falls ill, she agrees to join her parents on a trip to Madurai. Nila knows very little about where her family came from or whom they left behind. What she’s about to learn will change her forever.
Let us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
Retelling the history of slavery in the deep South, a young woman, Annis, is enslaved and forced to journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the markets of New Orleans where people are sold into the hellish Louisiana sugar plantations. Annis has comfort in stories and memories from her grandmother. Throughout the book she opens her world to spirits of earth and water, of myth and history that nurture and give, but also manipulate and take.
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony free of the world’s troubles. There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body. In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
