With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon is a bigamist,” Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the teenage girls caught in the middle.

Set in a middle-class neighborhood in Atlanta in the 1980s, the novel revolves around James Witherspoon’s families– the public one and the secret one. When the daughters from each family meet and form a friendship, only one of them knows they are sisters. It is a relationship destined to explode when secrets are revealed and illusions shattered. As Jones explores the backstories of her rich and flawed characters, she also reveals the joy, and the destruction, they brought to each other’s lives.

Summoned to Evelyn’s luxurious apartment, Monique listens in fascination as the actress tells her story. From making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the ‘80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way, Evelyn unspools a tale of ruthless ambition, unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love. Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the legendary star, but as Evelyn’s story near its conclusion, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

Homeland Elegies

By Ayad Akhtar 

A deeply personal work about hope and identity in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of belonging and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque adventure -- at its heart, it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and our ideals have been sacrificed to the gods of finance, where a TV personality is president and immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds of 9/11 wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one -- least of all himself -- in the process

Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson                          6.5/10

Lost Children Archive - Valerie Luiselli                               4.6/10

The Salt Path - Raynor Winn                                                  6.2/10

The Bookwoman of Troublesome Creek - K.M. Richardson 

                                                                                                         7.1/10

Things Fall Apart - Chiuha Achebe                                    8.07/10

Small Island - Andrea Levy                                                      7.9/10

Girl Woman Other - Bernardine Evaristo                            7.3/10

The Dry - Jane Harper                                                              7.3/10

Nothing to Envy - Barbara Demick                                       8.4/10

Agent Running in the Field - John LeCarré                     5.75/10

Thunderstruck - Erik Larson                                                  7.5/10

The Midgnight Library - Matt Haig               

Below you can find an overview of all the books we read for the year 2014-2015

The Devil in the White City              5.14

World War Z                                          7.06

Breakfast at Tiffany's                            8.11

The Lives of Girls and Women         7.14

The House on Mango Street             5.93

We Have Always Lived in the Castle                      8.00

I am Malala                                             6.33

Three Day Road                                   7.25

Lamb                                                        3.71

The Bellwether Revivals                     6.80