Recommendations based on "Outlaws A Novel"

One Hundred Years of Solitude

DBA Version 3.0 updates the highly successful De Bellis Antiquitatis wargame rules for recreating ancient and medieval battles with miniature figures. The brainchild of well-known wargame designer Phil Barker and his wife Sue Laflin-Barker, the simple DBA rule system combines fast play play with historical realism to produce a visually realistic and exciting contest.

From the bestselling author of the National Book Award Finalist The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School comes a revenge story told with nuance, heart, and the possibility of healing. An ideal next read for fans of Laurie Halse Anderson. Ariana Ruiz wants to be noticed. But as an autistic girl who never talks, she goes largely ignored by her peers--despite her bold fashion choices. So when cute, popular Luis starts to pay attention to her, Ari finally feels seen. Luis's attention soon turns to something more, and they have sex at a party--while Ari didn't say no, she definitely didn't say yes. Before she has a chance to process what happened and decide if she even has the right to be mad at Luis, the rumor mill begins churning--thanks, she's sure, to Luis's ex-girlfriend, Shawni. Boys at school now see Ari as an easy target, someone who won't say no. Then Ari finds a mysterious note in her locker that eventually leads her to a group of students determined to expose Luis for the predator he is. To her surprise, she finds genuine friendship among the group, including her growing feelings for the very last girl she expected to fall for. But in order to take Luis down, she'll have to come to terms with the truth of what he did to her that night--and risk everything to see justice done.

'The best kind of book: the one you didn't know you were craving until it appeared . . . self-interrogative, intricately perceptive. I absolutely inhaled it' JIA TOLENTINO 'A very richly interesting exploration of a complex subject. Begoña Gómez Urzaiz tells the stories with such intelligence and wit and generosity' TESSA HADLEY When it comes to children: a man leaves, a woman abandons Ingrid Bergman, Muriel Spark, Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell ... what do these vastly different women have in common? During the pandemic, trapped at home with young children and struggling to find creative space to write, journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz became fixated on artistic women who were able to overcome both society's judgement and their own maternal instincts in order to leave their children. More than anything, she was fascinated by her own prejudice towards these women, so clearly tied up in a much wider cultural bias. Using famous examples including Doris Lessing, fictional ones such as Anna Karenina, and interrogating modern trends like Momfluencers, Begoña reveals what our judgement of these women tells us about our judgement of all women. 'The best book I've read on the implications of motherhood and its opposites after Sheila Heti's Motherhood' CLAUDIA DURASTANTI

"Sentimental and ferocious, upsetting and tender, firmly magic-realist yet utterly modern. . . Sáenz is a writer with greatness in him." —San Diego Union TribuneWith Carry Me Like Water, Benjamin Alire Sáenz unfolds a beautiful story about hope and forgiveness, unexpected reunions, an expanded definition of family, and, ultimately, what happens when the disparate worlds of pain and privilege collide.Diego, a deaf-mute, is barely surviving on the border in El Paso, Texas. Diego's sister, Helen, who lives with her husband in the posh suburbs of San Francisco, long ago abandoned both her brother and her El Paso roots. Helen's best friend, Lizzie, a nurse in an AIDS ward, begins to uncover her own buried past after a mystical encounter with a patient.This immensely moving novel confronts divisions of race, gender, and class, fusing together the stories of people who come to recognize one another from former lives they didn't know existed— or that they tried to forget.

“Offers hope in the face of desperate odds” – ELLE Magazine, ELLE’s Most Anticipated Books of Summer 2020“[D]isturbing and unforgettable memoir…This wrenching story brings to vivid life the plight of the many families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.” – Publisher’s Weekly, STARRED REVIEW“[The] haunting and eloquent…narrative of a Guatemalan woman's desperate search for a better life." -Kirkus, STARRED ReviewPEOPLE Magazine Best Books of Summer 2020TIME Magazine Best Books of Summer 2020PARADE Best Books of Summer 2020Compelling and urgently important, The Book of Rosy is the unforgettable story of one brave mother and her fight to save her family.When Rosayra “Rosy” Pablo Cruz made the agonizing decision to seek asylum in the United States with two of her children, she knew the journey would be arduous, dangerous, and quite possibly deadly. But she had no choice: violence—from gangs, from crime, from spiraling chaos—was making daily life hell. Rosy knew her family’s one chance at survival was to flee Guatemala and go north.After a brutal journey that left them dehydrated, exhausted, and nearly starved, Rosy and her two little boys arrived at the Arizona border. Almost immediately they were seized and forcibly separated by government officials under the Department of Homeland Security’s new “zero tolerance” policy. To her horror Rosy discovered that her flight to safety had only just begun.In The Book of Rosy, with an unprecedented level of sharp detail and soulful intimacy, Rosy tells her story, aided by Julie Schwietert Collazo, founder of Immigrant Families Together, the grassroots organization that reunites mothers and children. She reveals the cruelty of the detention facilities, the excruciating pain of feeling her children ripped from her arms, the abiding faith that staved off despair—and the enduring friendship with Julie, which helped her navigate the darkness and the bottomless Orwellian bureaucracy.A gripping account of the human cost of inhumane policies, The Book of Rosy is also a paean to the unbreakable will of people united by true love, a sense of justice, and hope for a better future.

Combining the haunting power of Toni Morrison’s Beloved with the evocative atmosphere of Phillippa Gregory’s A Respectable Trade, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s groundbreaking novel illuminates a little discussed aspect of history—the Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade—witnessed through the experiences of Pola, an African captive used as a breeder to bear more slaves. A Woman of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply spiritual African woman who is captured and later sold for the purpose of breeding future slaves. The resulting babies are taken from her as soon as they are born. Pola loses the faith that has guided her and becomes embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat but rather one of survival, regeneration, and reclamation of common humanity.  Readers are invited to join Pola in her journey to healing. From the sadistic barbarity of her first experiences, she moves on to receive compassion and support from a revitalizing new community. Along the way, she learns to recognize and embrace the many faces of love—a mother’s love, a daughter’s love, a sister’s love, a love of community, and the self-love that she must recover before she can offer herself to another. It is ultimately, a novel of the triumph of the human spirit even under the most brutal of conditions. 

"...a passionate indictment of tyranny." -- The New YorkerTwice confiscated by Cuban authorities and rewritten from memory, this is Arenas' most celebrated novel In this brilliant, apocalyptic vision of Castro's Cuba, we meet a young couple who leave the dreariness of Havana and spend six days at a small seaside retreat, where they hope to recapture the desire and carefree spirit that once united them. In a stunning juxtaposition of narrative voices, the wife recounts the grim reality of her marriage, the demands of motherhood, and her loss of freedom, innocence, and hope; while her husband, a disillusioned poet and disenchanted revolutionary, recalls his political struggles and laments the artistic and homosexual freedom that has been denied him. Rich in hallucination, myth and fantasy, Farewell to the Sea is a fierce and unforgettable work that speaks for the entire human condition.

Critics worldwide have praised Reinaldo Arenas's writing. His extraordinary memoir, Before Night Falls, was named one of the fourteen "Best Books of 1993" by the editors of The New York Times Book Review and has now been made into a major motion picture.The Color of Summer, Arenas's finest comic achievement, is also the fulfillment of his life's work, the Pentagonía, a five-volume cycle of novels he began writing in his early twenties. Although it is the penultimate installment in his "secret history of Cuba," it was, in fact, the last book Arenas wrote before his death in 1990. A Rabelaisian tale of survival by wits and wit, The Color of Summer is ultimately a powerful and passionate story about the triumph of the human spirit over the forces of political and sexual repression.

A threatened mother and relentless detective collide in this mesmerizing novel from a rising voice in literary horror, perfect for fans of Gabino Iglesias, Carmen Maria Machado, Augustina Bazterrica, and Stephen Graham Jones. "House of Spirits meets The Wire in this marvelously strange story of murder and motherhood; a gloriously surreal novel in which magical realism meets police procedural. Jenn Givhan twists your brain and leaves you looking at the world differently for a long time afterward. I have no idea how to describe what I just read, but it was really, really cool." --T. Kingfisher, author of What Moves the Dead A mother's love is the oldest curse Fortuna Miércoles has finally moved her family to a better neighborhood across the Rio Grande, desperate to outrun the curse that's stalked her bloodline since her greatest grandmother crossed the desert with a cactus thorn splitting her throat. But burying a family's violent legacy isn't so easy. Twenty years ago, girls and women vanished into the Albuquerque night, their bones later unearthed on the mesa. The so-called Reaper was never caught. Now, beneath the dormant volcanoes called the Sleeping Sisters, the killings have begun again. Detective Jeanette Palacio has spent decades chasing the ghosts of her murdered cousins--alongside the memory of the other women she couldn't avenge. When a new body turns up in Fortuna's backyard, both women are pulled into a dangerous, ancient plot. Are the Sleeping Sisters awakening--or has someone in Fortuna's family set a trap? Inspired by true events and shot through with a Chicana-Indigenous reimagining of the legend of the headless woman, The Sleeping Sisters is a fevered, feral hymn to motherhood and the monstrous bargains we make to protect those we love.