It’s a new quarter and that means new fiction and nonfiction picks have been selected for you courtesy of Bestsellers Club! Four fiction picks are available for you to choose from: diverse debuts, graphic novel, historical fiction, and international fiction. Four nonfiction picks are available for you to choose from: biographies, cookbooks, social justice, and true crime. Our fiction and nonfiction picks are chosen quarterly and are available in regular print only. If you would like to update your selections or are a new patron who wants to receive picks from any of those four categories, sign up for Bestsellers Club through our website!

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Below you will find information provided by the publishers and authors on the titles we have selected from the following categories in fiction: diverse debuts, graphic novel, historical fiction, and international fiction and the following categories in nonfiction: biographies, cookbooks, social justice, and true crime.

Acronym definitions

• BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
• LGBTQ+: Lesbian, gay, transgender, queer, and more.

FICTION PICKS

Diverse Debuts: Debut fiction novel by a BIPOC author, LGBTQ+ author or an author from another marginalized community.

Sisters of Fortune by Esther Levy Chehebar

The Cohen sisters are at a crossroads. And not just because the obedient middle sister, Fortune, has secretly started to question her engagement and impending wedding, even as her family scrambles to prepare for the big day. Nina, the rebellious eldest sister, is single at twenty-six (and growing cobwebs by her community’s standards) when she runs into an old friend who offers her a chance to choose a different path. Meanwhile, Lucy, the youngest and a senior in high school, has started sneaking around with a charming older bachelor.

As Fortune inches ever closer to the chuppah, the sisters find themselves in a tug-of-war between tradition and modernity, reckoning with what their tight-knit community wants for them—and what they want for themselves.

Sisters of Fortune is a story about dating, ambition, and coming-of-age within an immigrant community whose affection is endearing, maddening, and never boring. This novel explores the roots that entwine our lives with the ones who love us best, the dreams we hold for our daughters, and the winding paths we take to our own happy endings. – Random House

Graphic Novel: Fiction novel for adults of any subgenre with diverse characters depicted by color illustrations, sketches, and photographs.

Children of the Night written by Victoria Setian and illustrated by Savanna Ganucheau

Mina Murray is followed by death—at least, that’s the rumor in her small town of New Whitby. An aspiring photojournalist, she has a knack for finding herself in unsettling situations to find interesting shots, like on the deck of the recently crashed boat the Demeter.

While exploring the wreckage, Mina comes across large cases of dirt and debris—and the decaying body of the ship’s captain.

Intrigued by the ghastly scene, Mina tries to unearth more information about the abandoned ship, the captain, and the missing crew. Instead, she finds herself roped into her high school’s newspaper club covering the big school dance her BFF, Lucy, is coordinating. It’s a major bummer, but all might not be too bad if it gets her closer to Jon, her crush and guitarist for the local punk band the Romeros.

But instead of catching Jon’s eye, Mina enters the orbit of Raf, the brooding (and frankly, hot) transfer student who has everyone under his thrall. As Raf’s popularity grows and the dance draws near, sinister events begin to shake the core of the school: The head of the newspaper club gains an unseemly appetite for flies. Jon is getting close to Raf.

And Lucy falls ill . . . with strange puncture wounds on her neck. Mina starts to suspect that new student is hiding a dark and terrible secret . . . but will she be able to figure it out before it’s too late? – Fanfare

Historical Fiction: Historical fiction novel written by a BIPOC author, LGBTQ+ author or an author from another marginalized community, with main character(s) from a marginalized community.

Songs for darkness by Īmān Ḥumaydān; translated by Michelle Hartman.

Only songs are able to comfort the soul in its darkness—but can anyone hear them?

Iman Humaydan’s saga recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment.

Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away from her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion.

These women’s legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honoring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently preserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice—and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times. – Interlink Publishing

International Fiction: Fiction novel originally written in another language with main character(s) from marginalized communities.

The year of the wind : a novel / Karina Pacheco Medrano ; translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem.

Nina, a Peruvian writer in Spain on the eve of the pandemic, is pulled back into her nation’s fraught history after a fleeting encounter with a woman who is a doppelgänger of Bárbara, a cousin lost to time. The games, the candor, and the secrets of her youth come alive again, but these memories are tinged with disquiet, and what unfolds takes Nina back to a village nestled in the Andes where she must confront the terrors that stalked Peru in the early 1980s. As she travels from Cusco to Apurimac to uncover Bárbara’s fate, Nina begins to weave a new cloth of memory. She learns more about Bárbara’s political radicalization and involvement with the Shining Path, the Maoist terrorist group that instigated a bloody period of political violence in which tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Peruvians disappeared or were killed.

In her first novel to be translated into English, Karina Pacheco Medrano explores how war transforms family stories and complicates the distinction between prey and hunter. Part bildungsroman, part detective novel, The Year of the Wind records a significant chapter in Peruvian history rarely considered in the literature of political violence, exploring the anonymous stories marked by horror, loss, bewilderment, and, in some cases, redemption. – Graywolf Press

NONFICTION PICKS

Biography pick

Behind the Desk at the Main: a librarian’s memoir by Dorothy Lazard

When Dorothy Lazard became a public librarian, she returned to the building that had shaped her life from childhood. At the flagship branch (“the Main”) of the Oakland Public Library, she connected with her hometown to a degree that few people experience. Helping her fellow community members and ultimately becoming the keeper of Oakland’s public history archives, she witnessed the joys and dilemmas that shape one of the most diverse cities in the US. In Behind the Desk at the Main, Lazard takes readers through the day-to-day life of library work with love, wit, and candor. As the cracks in American society grow and our public institutions are strained to the breaking point, libraries remain the cherished containers of our ideals: They are places of curiosity, imagination, memory, and togetherness. Lazard reveals the pressures that library workers face—from economic crises to book bans and political upheaval—as they uphold these ideals in a fractured world. Filled with humor and urgency, Behind the Desk at the Main is a testament to the power of books and community in a time of division. – Heyday

Cookbook pick

Eating at home : the nourishing practice of everyday cooking by Trinity Mouzon Wofford with Rebecca Firkser ; photography by Dane Tashima ; illustrations by Issey Kobori.

Eating at Home provides a welcome shift from hurried meals and hectic evenings. Golde founder Trinity Mouzon Wofford shares 85 inviting, healthful recipes to bring more calm, connection, and nourishment into your household routine. Inspired by the meals Trinity makes with her own family, Eating at Home pairs affordable ingredients with gentle guidance to turn everyday cooking into a moment worth savoring.

Good-quality, simple food is health food, and the ingredients you cook with are as important as the gentleness you bring to the process. In Eating at Home, Trinity Mouzon Wofford’s 85 simple, healthful recipes embrace affordable, local produce, lean on approachable techniques without fuss or formality, and celebrate her family’s multicultural culinary heritage, including:

• $0 Scrap Stock
• Soft Dashi Scrambled Eggs over Rice
• Bitter Greens with Black Vinegar
• Sweet Rosemary Cornbread
• Olive Oil and Matcha Day Cake
• Salted Butter Sesame Shortbread

We’ve never been so collectively starved for moments of pause, and Eating at Home is a manifesto for taking pleasure in the act of cooking, and more than that, pleasure in the act of taking time to enjoy your food. With gentle, unhurried recipes, techniques that are easy and forgiving, and sidebars with advice for bringing wellness practices into quotidian moments, Eating at Home is an invitation and a reclamation: of our time, our nourishment, and our sense of connection to the people with whom we break bread. – Ten Speed Press

Social Justice pick

The body liberation project : how understanding racism and diet culture helps cultivate joy and build collective freedom by Chrissy King

From author and wellness personality Chrissy King, an exciting, genre-redefining narrative mix of memoir, inspiration, and activities and prompts, with timely messages about social and racial justice and how the world needs to move beyond body positivity to something even more exciting and revolutionary: body liberation.

When Chrissy King first joined a gym, she had one goal in mind: to “get skinny.” In pursuit of this goal, she fell into the all-too-common cycle of “not enough-ness”; no matter what she achieved, there was always something she felt she needed to change about her body, her appearance, herself. This made her realize the most liberating truth of all: She was not the problem. Diet and fitness industries rooted in white supremacy were the problem; Eurocentric and carefully manufactured beauty standards were the problem; discourses telling her that her happiness was directly tied to her physical appearance were the problem. So she created an actionable method to redefine the relationship we have with our bodies, thereby achieving a sense of self-worth that is completely separate from how we look.

The Body Liberation Project is about finding actual freedom in our bodies by discovering strength and aspects of fitness, movement, and eating that work for YOU. It’s about realizing that the goal is not to look at our bodies and love everything we see; it’s to understand that at our essence we are so much more than our bodies. But it’s also about recognizing the harsh realities that prohibit people in marginalized bodies from being able to do so. Society constantly bombards those who fall outside Eurocentric standards of beauty (think Black, fat, trans, etc.) with the message that they are less attractive, and part of the journey toward body liberation is examining your own privilege, acknowledging the harm you may be causing others, and mourning your old ideas about what a body “should” look like.

Recognizing that none of us are free until all of us are, Chrissy King shares the wisdom, the tools, and the inspiration to motivate readers to find body liberation and, even more important, to pass it on. – Tiny Reparations Books

True Crime pick

Injustice town : a corrupt city, a wrongly convicted man, and a struggle for freedom by Rick Tulsky

When the bodies of two Black men were found sitting with a crackpipe in a parked car in a rundown section of town in 1994, it seemed just another day in Kansas City, Kansas. The swift arrest and conviction of a seventeen-year-old Black kid from a broken home raised no eyebrows either.

And yet, thirty years later, Lamonte McIntyre would prove to be the David that took down the Goliath of corruption that had long controlled the city’s power structure and enveloped the city’s justice system

But the effort to prove Lamonte’s innocence opened a Pandora’s box. Before it was over, the fight to win Lamonte’s exoneration exposed corrupt police and prosecutors, incompetent court-appointed defense lawyers, and a judge who violated ethical standards by his secret past relationship with the prosecutor, whom he favored in his rulings.

Injustice Town follows Lamonte’s case from its harrowing beginning to its triumphant end and beyond, including the legal tsunami that came in its wake, that engulfed prosecutors, attorneys, and judges. Most shockingly, the lead cop on the case was indicted by the Department of Justice for the widespread abuses he had committed years earlier on women in the Black community of Kansas City Kansas. Abuses documented by Lamonte’s team. The criminal case ended, literally, with a bang, denying Lamonte and those whom the detective hurt, the chance for them to seek their own justice.

Rick Tulsky, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, goes beyond the courthouse, exposing the ways in which corruption flourished for decades in an erstwhile quiet Midwest town, a town once dedicated to justice and equality.

A lawyer by training as well as a reporter, Tulsky’s narrative not only brings Lamonte’s story to vivid life, it will empower cities, counties, states, and everyday citizens with a blueprint for equal justice. At a time when the federal government is abdicating its responsibility for demanding fairness and justice, it is up to states, local governments, and we the people look to ways they can act. Vivid and unforgettable, Injustice Town tells the story of one man and shows us a vision of what a better future could be. – Pegasus Books

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