MUST READ BOOKS 2020 a Program of the Massachusetts Book Awards at Massachusetts Center for the Book

MASSACHUSETTS MUST READ BOOKS 2020 A Program of the Massachusetts Book Awards at Massachusetts Center for the Book MASSACHUSETTS MUST READS 2020 FICTION The Age of Light, by Whitney Scharer. “I’d rather take a photograph than be one,” Lee Miller declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Lee’s journey of self-discovery takes her from bohemian Paris where she invents radical new photography techniques to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII as one of the first female war correspondents. -- Courtesy of Little, Brown and Co Big Giant Floating Head, by Christopher Boucher. After his wife announces on Twitter that she’s leaving him, Christopher’s life in small-town Coolidge goes from one catastrophe to another. He contracts a strange illness that divides him in half, undergoes a failure competition, and is driven to join a cult called The Unloveables. Heartfelt and riotously imaginative, this is a dazzling account of a man’s struggle with love, loss and redemption. -- Courtesy of Melville House Publishing Blue Hours, by Daphne Kalotay. Linking Manhattan circa 1991 to Afghanistan in 2012, this is the story of a life-changing friendship between Mim, a college grad who disavows her working-class roots, and Kyra, a dancer and daughter of privilege, until calamity causes their estrange-ment. Twenty years later, Kyra is missing and Mim embarks on a journey to find her. With nuance and moral complexity, Blue Hours proves to be a page-turning mystery. -- Courtesy of TriQuarterly Books Bunny, by Mona Awad. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination, Samantha is repelled by the rest of her MFA fiction writing cohort—a clique of twee rich girls who call each other “Bunny.” But everything changes when she is inexplicably drawn to their front door. From a fearless chronicler of the female experience, Bunny is a tale of loneliness, friendship and desire, and the fantastic, terrible power of the imagination. -- Courtesy of Viking Press A Kind of Solitude, by Dariel Suarez. Set in Cuba largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, these stories explore themes of isolation and preservation in the face of poverty and sociopolitical oppression. From a chronically ill santero refusing medical care to a female- fronted heavy metal band risking it all to emerge from Havana's underground, this debut portrays the harsh reality, inherent humor, and resilient heart of a people whose stories should be known. -- Courtesy of Willow Springs Books Leading Men, by Christopher Castellani. In a heartbreaking story about the burdens of fame and the negotiations of life in the shadows of greatness, Castellani reveals the hidden machinery of one of the great literary love stories of the twentieth-century—-Tennessee Williams and his longtime partner Frank Merlo. Leading Men is a glittering novel of desire and ambition set against the glamorous literary circles of 1950s Italy. -- Courtesy of Viking Press MASSACHUSETTS MUST READS 2020 FICTION The Lesson, by Cadwell Turnbull. For five years the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands have lived with the Ynaa, a race of super-advanced aliens on a research mission they will not fully disclose. A year after the death of a young boy at the hands of an Ynaa, three families find themselves at the center of the inevitable conflict, witnesses and victims to events that will touch everyone and teach a terrible lesson. -- Courtesy of Black Stone Publishing The Limits of the World, by Jennifer Acker. The Chandaria family have flourished in America, but they each keep explosive secrets. Spanning four generations and three continents, this debut illuminates the cultural divisions and ethical considerations that shape the ways we judge another’s actions. Written with empathy and insight, the novel depicts how we prevent ourselves from understanding the people we are closest to. -- Courtesy of Delphinium Books On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong. A letter from a son to a mother who cannot read written by the speaker in his late twenties, Vuong’s debut novel is as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With urgency and grace, Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds and asks how we rescue one another without forsaking who we are. -- Courtesy of Penguin Press Repentance, by Andrew Lam. In 1944, a Japanese American war hero has a secret. Decades later his son, a world-famous surgeon, is perplexed when the U.S. government comes calling about his father’s service. Wanting answers of his own, the son upends his life to find out what his father did on a small, obscure hilltop half a world away, a quest for the truth that unravels his family’s catastrophic past and his present. -- Courtesy of Tiny Fox Press This is Not a Love Song, by Brendan Matthews. When marriages, friendships, and families threaten to come undone, to what lengths do we go to keep it all together? That question lies at the heart of Brendan Mathews’s buoyant and unforgettable debut story collection. From rock-star flameouts to church burnings to ordinary people trying not to fall out of love, these stories are packed with vivid detail, emotional precision, and redemptive humor. -- Courtesy of Little, Brown and Co. Wake Siren, by Nina MacLaughlin. Retelling their stories in their own voices, the women of Ovid’s Metamorphoses challenge the power of myth, laying bare the violence lurking in the heart of narratives that helped perpetuate a distorted portrayal of women across centuries. Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry, alt rock, everyday speech, folk song, and therapy MASSACHUSETTS MUST READS 2020 sessions, MacLaughlin breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths. -- Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux NONFICTION American Radicals, by Holly Jackson. A dynamic history of nineteenth-century activists—free- lovers, socialists, abolitionists, and vigilantes—and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era. Though they are largely forgotten today, Jackson writes them back into the story in all their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The result is a panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers important lessons for our time. -- Courtesy of Crown Publishing Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter, by Kerri K. Greenidge. With the stylistic verve of a newspaperman and the unwavering fearlessness of an emancipator, William Monroe Trotter galvanized black working-class citizens to wield their political power despite the violent racism of post-Reconstruction America. Greenidge renders the drama of turn-of-the-century America and reclaims Trotter as a seminal figure. -- Courtesy of Liveright Publishing Corporation The Body Papers, by Grace Talusan. Exploring the fraught contours of her life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse, this debut memoir is a testament to determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to an unspeakable experience and shines a light of hope into the darkness. -- Courtesy of Restless Books City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present, by Alex Krieger. City on a Hill is a sweeping history of American cities and towns and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by. -- Courtesy of The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Once More to the Rodeo, by Calvin Hennick. Five years into fatherhood, Calvin Hennick is plagued by questions. As a white man, what can he teach his biracial son when his own father abandoned him? What does it even mean to be a man when society’s expectations constantly change? In search of answers, Hennick takes his son on the road to the annual rodeo in his Iowa hometown, holding up a mirror to himself and his country in a story about fatherhood, family, and manhood in America. -- Courtesy of Pushcart Press The Optimist’s Telescope, by Bina Venkataraman. An adviser in the Obama administration, Venkataraman helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead—and what can be done to change that. With new research in biology, psychology, and economics, she dispels the myth that humans are impossibly reckless and highlights the surprising practices each of us can adopt in our own lives—and the ones we must fight for as a society. -- Courtesy of Riverhead Books MASSACHUSETTS MUST READS 2020 NONFICTION Some of My Friends Are…: The Daunting Challenges and Untapped Benefits of Cross-Racial Friendships, by Deborah L. Plummer. Inspiring and engaging, Psychologist Plummer draws from focus groups, statistics, surveys, personal narratives, and social analyses to provide insight into the discomforts associated with cross-racial friendships, giving insight into how they work and fail within American society. Plummer encourages all of us to examine our cross-racial friendship patterns in order to deepen them. -- Courtesy of Beacon Press The Soul of Care, by Dr. Arthur Kleinman. Caring for his wife after her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, Kleinman discovered how far the act of caregiving extends beyond the boundaries of medicine. Delivering a deeply humane and inspiring story of his life in medicine and marriage, he describes the practical, emotional and moral aspects of caretaking as well as the problems our society faces as medical technology advances and the cost of health care soars even when caring for patients no longer seems important.

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