Ryan Amor

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Reading list Dec 21 - Jan 2022

Jeffrey Euginides’ Middlesex: Primarily a coming-of-age story (Bildungsroman) and family saga, the 21st century gender novel chronicles the effect of a mutated gene on three generations of a Greek family, causing momentous changes in the protagonist's life. The novel won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction .

Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway: The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

Joanne Tompkins’ What Comes After: After the shocking death of two teenage boys tears apart a community in the Pacific Northwest, a mysterious pregnant girl emerges out of the woods and into the lives of those same boys’ families—a moving and hopeful novel about forgiveness and human connection.

Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary: Is a 2021 science fiction novel by Andy Weir. It is his third novel, after 2011's The Martian, and 2017's Artemis. Set in the near future, the novel centers on junior high (middle) school-teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace, who wakes up from a coma afflicted with amnesia. He gradually remembers that he was sent to the Tau Ceti solar system, 12 light-years from Earth, to find a means of reversing a solar dimming event that could cause the extinction of humanity.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Remote Control: An alien artifact turns a young girl into Death's adopted daughter in Remote Control, a thrilling sci-fi tale of community and female empowerment from Nebula and Hugo Award-winner Nnedi Okorafor. The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa­­—a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Keri Hulme’s The Bone People: The buzz when The Bone People won the Booker prize in 1986 was all about the struggle Keri Hulme had to bring it to publication. First there was the monumental effort of writing it over a 12-year period, then the fact that nearly every publisher rejected it out of hand. Those who were prepared to look at it wouldn't contemplate bringing it to print without severe re-edits, prompting the author to declare she would rather have the book "embalmed in Perspex" than re-shaped. When the book was finally taken on, it was by Spiral, a tiny feminist press in New Zealand led by three women – two of whom had links to the same Maori tribe as Hulme. The initial print run was 2,000 copies. When they sold out and so did the next 2,000, Spiral approached Hodder and Stoughton in New Zealand, who shifted another 20,000 and brought it to the attention of the Booker judges.