Recommendations based on "Strays"

In her first book, the popular From the Front Porch podcast host and independent bookstore owner challenges the idea that loud lives are the ones that matter most, reminding us that we don't have to leave the lives we have in order to have the lives of which we've always dreamed.Can life be an adventure, even when it’s just . . . ordinary?Annie Jones always assumed adulthood would mean adventure: a high-powered career; life in a big, bustling city; and travels to far-flung places she’d longed to see. But her reality turned out differently. As the years passed, Annie was still in the same small town running an independent bookstore —the kind of life Nora Ephron dreamed.During that time, she hosted friends’ goodbye parties and mailed parting gifts; wrote recommendation letters and wished former shop staffers well. She stayed in her small town, despite her love of big cities; stayed in her marriage to the guy she met when she was 18; and she stayed at her bookstore while the world outside shifted steadily toward digital retailers. And she stayed loyal to a faith she sometimes didn’t recognize.After ten years, Annie realized she might never leave. But instead of regret, she had an epiphany. She awakened to the gifts of a quiet life spent staying put.In Ordinary Time, Annie challenges the idea that loud lives matter most. Rummaging through her small-town existence, she finds hidden gifts of humor and hope from a life lived quietly. Staying, can itself be a radical act. It takes courage to stay in the places we’ve always called home, Jones argues, as she paints a portrait of possibility far away from thriving metropolises and Monica Gellar-inspired apartments.We’ve long been encouraged to follow our dreams, to pack up and move to new places and leave old lives—and past selves—behind. While there is beauty in these kinds of adventures, Ordinary Time helps us see ourselves right where we are: in the middle of messy, mundane lives, maybe not too far from where we grew up. We don’t have to leave to find what we yearn—we can choose to stay, celebrating and honoring our ordinary lives, which might turn out to be bigger and better than we ever imagined.

De Vinck's true account of his severely handicapped brother's life is a powerful, inspirational statement on the value of life.

"Warm and wise, Frankie is a woman worth getting to know."— Bonnie Garmus, New York Times -bestselling author of Lessons in ChemistryFrom internationally bestselling author and host of The Graham Norton Show, adazzling and decades-sweeping story about love, bravery, and what it means to live a significant life.Always on the periphery, looking on, young Frankie Howe was never quite sure enough of herself to take center stage—after all, life had already judged her harshly. Now old, Frankie finds it easier to forget the life that came before.Then Damian, a young Irish caretaker, arrives at her London flat, there to keep an eye on her as she recovers from a fall. A memory is sparked, and the past crackles into life as Damian listens to the story Frankie has kept stored away all these years.Traveling from post-war Ireland to 1960s New York—a city full of art, larger-than-life characters and turmoil—Frankie shares a world in which friendship and chance encounters collide. A place where, for a while, life blazes with an intensity that can't last but will perhaps live on in other ways and in other people.

From Indonesia, an inspiring, record-breaking bestseller—and a modern-day fairy tale Published in Indonesia in 2005, The Rainbow Troops, Andrea Hirata's closely autobiographical debut novel, sold more than five million copies, shattering records. Now it promises to captivate audiences around the globe. Ikal is a student at the poorest village school on the Indonesian island of Belitong, where graduating from sixth grade is considered remarkable. His school is under constant threat of closure. Ikal and his friends—a group nicknamed the Rainbow Troops—face threats from every angle: skeptical government officials, greedy corporations, deepening poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and their own low self-confidence. But the students also have hope, which comes in the form of two extraordinary teachers, and Ikal's education in and out of the classroom is an uplifting one. We root for him as he defies the island's tin mine officials. We meet his first love, the unseen girl who sells chalk from behind a shop screen, whose pretty hands capture Ikal's heart. We cheer for Lintang, the class's barefoot math genius, as he bests the students of the mining corporation's school in an academic challenge. Above all, we gain an intimate acquaintance with the customs and people of the world's largest Muslim society. This is classic storytelling in the spirit of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner: an engrossing depiction of a milieu we have never encountered before, bursting with charm and verve.

An autobiographical story of childhood and family from the international sensation and bestseller, Karl Ove Knausgaard.Childhood is exhilarating and terrifying. For the young Karl Ove, new houses, classes and friends are met with manic excitement and creeping dread. Adults occupy godlike positions of power, benevolent in the case of his doting mother, tyrannical in the case of his cruel father.In the now infamously direct style of the My Struggle cycle, Knausgaard describes a time in which victories and defeats are felt keenly and every attempt at self-definition is frustrated. This is a book about family, memory and how we never become quite what we set out to be.

A poignant and witty graphic novel by a leading New Yorker cartoonist, following a millennial's journey from performing his life to truly connecting with peopleNick, a young illustrator, can’t shake the feeling that there is some hidden realm of human interaction beyond his reach. He haunts lookalike fussy, silly, coffee shops, listens to old Joni Mitchell albums too loudly, and stares at his navel in the hope that he will find it in there. But it isn’t until he learns to speak from the heart that he begins to find authentic human connections and is let in—to the worlds of the people he meets. Nick’s journey occurs alongside the beginnings of a relationship with Wren, a wry, spirited oncologist at a nearby hospital, whose work and life becomes painfully tangled with Nick’s.Illustrated in both color and black-and-white in McPhail’s instantly recognizable style, In elevates the graphic novel genre; it captures his trademark humor and compassion with a semi-autobiographical tale that is equal parts hilarious and heart-wrenching—uncannily appropriate for our isolated times.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A moving and powerful account by an acclaimed journalist that "informs the heart. [This] meticulous portrait of two boys in a Chicago housing project shows how much heroism is required to survive, let alone escape" (The New York Times)."Alex Kotlowitz joins the ranks of the important few writers on the subiect of urban poverty."—Chicago TribuneThe story of two remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago's Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex disfigured by crime and neglect.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Fish in a Tree comes a compelling story about perspective and learning to love the family you have.Delsie loves tracking the weather--lately, though, it seems the squalls are in her own life. She's always lived with her kindhearted Grammy, but now she's looking at their life with new eyes and wishing she could have a "regular family." Delsie observes other changes in the air, too--the most painful being a friend who's outgrown her. Luckily, she has neighbors with strong shoulders to support her, and Ronan, a new friend who is caring and courageous but also troubled by the losses he's endured. As Ronan and Delsie traipse around Cape Cod on their adventures, they both learn what it means to be angry versus sad, broken versus whole, and abandoned versus loved. And that, together, they can weather any storm.

The bestselling Vanderbeeker family finds love and hope in hard times as they face the challenge of a serious illness with the support of their Harlem community. The Vanderbeekers are looking forward to the wedding of two of their favorite people! But when one of the siblings receives a dire diagnosis, instead of preparing for a celebration, the family is suddenly spending their time at the hospital. And soon they are helping a newly-made and critically ill friend, even as they struggle with how their own lives have turned upside down. In the poignant conclusion to the bestselling Vanderbeekers series, the beloved family faces their biggest challenge yet, rising to meet it with the characteristic love, warmth, and hope that has won them a lasting home in the hearts of readers everywhere. The series includes: The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found The Vanderbeekers Make a Wish The Vanderbeekers on the Road The Vanderbeekers Ever After

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: “Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going. From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California, where he struggled with drug addiction, and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, we see how his engagement with patients comes to define his life.With unbridled honesty and humor, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions—weight lifting and swimming—also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual; his guilt over leaving his family to come to America; his bond with his schizophrenic brother; and the writers and scientists—Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick—who influenced him.On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer—and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.