Recommendations based on "The Unsinkable Greta James: A Novel"

From the author of "The Enchantment of Lily Dahl" comes a powerful and heartbreaking novel that chronicles the epic story of two families, two sons, and two marriages.

A beautiful new edition of the stunning debut novel by Nina LaCour, award-winning author of We Are Okay“Hold Still may be the truest depiction of the aching, gaping hole left in the wake of a suicide that I’ve ever read. A haunting and hopeful book about loss, love, and redemption.” – Gayle Forman, #1 bestselling author of If I Stay and I Have Lost My WayThat night Ingrid told Caitlin, I’ll go wherever you go. But by dawn Ingrid, and her promise, were gone.Ingrid’s suicide immobilizes Caitlin, leaving her unsure of her place in a new life she hardly recognizes. A life without the art, the laughter, the music, and the joy that she shared with her best friend.... But Ingrid left something behind. In words and drawings, Ingrid documented a painful farewell in her journal. Journeying through Ingrid’s final days, Caitlin fights back through unspeakable loss to find renewed hope.Hold Still is the indelible debut that launched Nina LaCour, the award-winning author of We Are Okay. LaCour’s breakthrough novel brings the changing seasons of Caitlin’s first year without Ingrid to the page with indelible emotion and honesty.Includes an all-new essay from the author to commemorate 10 years in print!

'One of those rarest of books: so beautiful I almost couldn't bear it, and so moving I was reading through tears' STACEY HALLS 'Uniquely witty, beautifully observed, intricately woven' MIRANDA HART 'A truly glorious life-affirming book, in which love, hope and friendship trump sorrow' DINAH JEFFERIES 'Had me absolutely sobbing - a beautiful, beautiful book' JO BROWNING WROE, bestselling author of A TERRIBLE KINDNESS 'Worth every tear' WOMAN & HOME 'Exquisitely tender, powerfully compelling' SARAH HAYWOOD 'One of my new all-time favourite books - an absolute joy' JULIETTA HENDERSON 'Thoughtful, warm and engaging' CHRISTINA SWEENEY-BAIRD 'Honest, heartfelt and hopeful' MARIANNE CRONIN 'A joy to read' ANNE YOUNGSON 'A love song to women everywhere' ERICKA WALLER MEET EVA MARTÍNEZ-GREEN, AN ONLY CHILD FULL OF QUESTIONS ABOUT HER BEGINNINGS. Between her emotionally absent mother and her physically absent father, there is nobody to answer them. Eva is convinced that all is not as it seems. Why are there no baby pictures of her? Why do her parents avoid all questions about her early years? When her parents' relationship crumbles, Eva begins a journey to find these answers for herself. Her desire to discover where she belongs leads Eva on a journey spanning decades and continents - and, along the way, she meets women who challenge her idea of what a mother should be, and who will change her life forever... 'A glorious journey into loving & longing' ANSTEY HARRIS 'Heartrending and heartwarming' CELIA ANDERSON 'Exquisite' JESSICA RYN 'A deep delight of a book that vibrates with love and longing' HELEN PARIS ________________________________________________________ Praise for Joanna Glen's debut novel, The Other Half of Augusta Hope: 'A therapeutic dose of high-strength emotion' GUARDIAN 'Entertains and moves in equal measure' DAILY MAIL 'Keep the tissues close' GOOD HOUSEKEEPING 'An irresistible message of redemption and belonging' RED magazine 'Heartening and hopeful' JESS KIDD 'Mesmerizingly beautiful' SARAH HAYWOOD 'An extraordinary masterpiece' ANSTEY HARRIS

“A beautifully crafted novel that sits at the intersection of race and class, that flags the frank truth of the life of migrant workers for whom a flight to freedom can become the most finely woven trap.”—JODI PICOULT, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Two WaysFrom the prize-winning author of The Beekeeper of Aleppo comes Songbirds, a stunning novel about the disappearance of a Sri Lankan domestic worker and how the most vulnerable people find their voices.Living on the island of Cyprus, Nisha is far from her native Sri Lanka. Though she longs to return home, she knows that working as a “maid” for a wealthy widow is the only way to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind to be raised by relatives.Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the illegal market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha.But one night, Nisha makes dinner, an aromatic dahl curry, for the family who pays her: Petra and her daughter Aliki. Then, after she cleans the kitchen and tucks Aliki into bed, Nisha goes out on a mysterious errand, and vanishes.When the police refuse to pursue the case, Petra takes on the investigation herself, a path that leads her to Nisha’s friends—other workers in the neighborhood—and to the darker side of a migrant’s life, where impossible choices leave them vulnerable, captive, and worse.Inspired by the real-life disappearance of domestic workers in Cyprus, Christy Lefteri has crafted a poignant, deeply empathetic narrative of the human stories behind the headlines. With infinite tenderness and skill, Songbirds offers a triumphant story of the fight for truth and justice, and of women reclaiming their lost voices.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY• A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy.“A rhapsodic hymn to Black women.”—The New York Times Book Review“I fell in love with this family, from Joan’s fierce heart to her grandmother Hazel’s determined resilience. Tara Stringfellow will be an author to watch for years to come.”—Jacqueline Woodson, New York Times bestselling author of Red at the BoneLONGLISTED FOR THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Boston Globe, NPR, BuzzFeed, Glamour, PopSugarSummer 1995: Ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father’s explosive temper and seek refuge at her mother’s ancestral home in Memphis. This is not the first time violence has altered the course of the family’s trajectory. Half a century earlier, Joan’s grandfather built this majestic house in the historic Black neighborhood of Douglass—only to be lynched days after becoming the first Black detective in the city. Joan tries to settle into her new life, but family secrets cast a longer shadow than any of them expected.As she grows up, Joan finds relief in her artwork, painting portraits of the community in Memphis. One of her subjects is their enigmatic neighbor Miss Dawn, who claims to know something about curses, and whose stories about the past help Joan see how her passion, imagination, and relentless hope are, in fact, the continuation of a long matrilineal tradition. Joan begins to understand that her mother, her mother’s mother, and the mothers before them persevered, made impossible choices, and put their dreams on hold so that her life would not have to be defined by loss and anger—that the sole instrument she needs for healing is her paintbrush.Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.

A Best Historical Fiction of Spring Pick by Amazon, PopSugar, AARP, and BookBub!A heartrending story about a young mother’s fight to keep her daughter, and the terrible injustice that tears them apart, by the USA Today bestselling author of The Nature of Fragile Things and The Last Year of the War.California, 1938—When she loses her parents in an accident, sixteen-year-old Rosanne is taken in by the owners of the vineyard where she has lived her whole life as the vinedresser’s daughter. She moves into Celine and Truman Calvert’s spacious house with a secret, however—Rosie sees colors when she hears sound. She promised her mother she’d never reveal her little-understood ability to anyone, but the weight of her isolation and grief prove too much for her. Driven by her loneliness she not only breaks the vow to her mother, but in a desperate moment lets down her guard and ends up pregnant. Banished by the Calverts, Rosanne believes she is bound for a home for unwed mothers. But she soon finds out she is not going to a home of any kind, but to a place that seeks to forcibly take her baby – and the chance for any future babies – from her.Austria, 1947—After witnessing firsthand Adolf Hitler’s brutal pursuit of hereditary purity—especially with regard to “different children”—Helen Calvert, Truman’s sister, is ready to return to America for good. But when she arrives at her brother’s peaceful vineyard after decades working abroad, she is shocked to learn what really happened nine years earlier to the vinedresser’s daughter, a girl whom Helen had long ago befriended. In her determination to find Rosanne, Helen discovers a shocking American eugenics program—and learns that that while the war had been won in Europe, there are still terrifying battles to be fought at home.

"The perfect pick to really light a fire under my book club, and yours....A reminder that goodness, and books, can still win in this world." —New York Times Book Review"A beautiful, big-hearted treasure of a novel." —Lily KingNational Bestseller * From the award-winning author of The One-in-a-Million Boy comes a heartfelt, uplifting novel about a chance encounter at a bookstore, exploring redemption, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living."A deeply humane and touching novel; highly recommended for book clubs and fans of Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures." — Booklist

From the author of Girl One comes a spellbinding adventure about a strange power lurking in the Arkansas Ozarks, and the group of friends obsessed with finding it.Five friends arrive back in Eternal Springs, Arkansas, the small town they all fled after high school graduation. Each is drawn home by a cryptic, scrawled two-word letter that reads, You promised.It has been fifteen years since the summer that changed their lives, and they’re anxious to find out why Brandi called them back, especially when they vowed never to return.But Brandi is missing. She’d been acting erratically for months, railing at whoever might listen about magic all around them. About a power they can’t see. And about strange houses that appear only when you need them . . .Told in two enthralling timelines, The Wonder State is a gorgeous, immersive, speculative Gothic tale about searching for home. Sara Flannery Murphy has created another brilliant, genre-blurring novel―an adventure story laced with nostalgia, exploring belonging and the lasting power of community.

A New York Times Editors' Choice “Anything can happen in The Bone Fire—and everything does. Dragomán puts us in the middle of our most wondrous and terrifying childhood fairytales, somehow unhazing their dreaminess and replicating their electrifying uncertainty all at once.” —Téa Obreht, bestselling author of Inland and The Tiger's Wife "[Dragomán's] telling is not just magic, but enchantment." —Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review  From an award-winning and internationally acclaimed European writer: A chilling and suspenseful novel set in the wake of a violent revolution about a young girl rescued from an orphanage by an otherworldly grandmother she’s never met Thirteen-year-old Emma grows up under an Eastern European dictatorship where oppression seems eternal. When her dissident parents die in a car accident, she’s taken to an orphanage, only to be adopted soon after by a grandmother she has never met. While her homeland is shattered by a violent revolution, Emma—like a witch's apprentice—comes to learn the ways of her new grandmother, who can tell fortunes from coffee dregs, cause and heal pain at will, and shares her home with the ghost of her husband. But this is not the main reason her grandmother is treated with suspicion and contempt by most people in town. They suspect her or her husband of having been involved in the disappearance of top secret government files. As Emma learns her family history, she begins to see that, for her grandparents, the alternate reality shaped by magic was their only form of freedom. The Bone Fire is a political Gothic, carried along by the menace and promise of a fairy tale.

'Astonishing' Marian KeyesA heart-wrenching, life-affirming novel about a 12-year-old boy who is the sole survivor of a deadly plane crashOne summer morning, a flight takes off from New York to Los Angeles. There are 192 passengers aboard: among them a Wall Street millionaire; a young woman taking a pregnancy test in the airplane toilet; a soldier returning from Afghanistan; and two beleaguered parents moving across the country with their adolescent sons. When the plane suddenly crashes in a field in Colorado, the younger of these boys, 12-year-old Edward Adler, is the sole survivor.Dear Edward recounts the stories of the passengers aboard that flight as it hurtles toward its fateful end, and depicts Edward's life in the crash's aftermath as he tries to make sense of the loss of his family, the strangeness of his sudden fame, and the meaning of his survival. As Edward comes of age against the backdrop of sudden tragedy, he must confront one of life's most profound questions: how do we make the most of the time we are given?'A rich, big-hearted tapestry. Fans of Room and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close will be spellbound by Dear Edward' Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists'A profoundly beautiful, page-turning story of mystery, loss, and wonder' Hannah Tinti, author of The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley and The Good Thief'Dear Edward is a masterpiece that should be at the top of everyone's reading list.' J. Courtney Sullivan, bestselling author of Saints for All Occasions'I loved Dear Edward so, so much. It made me laugh and weep. Magnificent!' Lily King, author of Euphoria