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Madeleine Thien
Against the backdrop of twentieth-century China, the novel follows musicians and families through the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Memory, inheritance, and loss are woven together in an ensemble story shaped by music.
Svetlana Alexievich, Bela Shayevich
A work of oral history that traces post-Soviet Russia through dozens of voices. Hope, disillusionment, freedom, and loss accumulate into a vivid portrait of an era.
Philippe Sands
Winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize “A monumental achievement…a profoundly personal account of the origins of crimes against humanity and genocide, told with love, anger and precision .” –John le Carré “A narrative, to my knowledge unprecedented. [It] should not be ignored by anyone in the United States or elsewhere.” —Bernard-Henri Levy on the front cover of The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional…has the intrigue, verve and material density of a first-rate thriller.” — The Guardian “Astonishing…An outstanding book…A story of heroes and loss.” — The New Statesma n A profound and profoundly important book—a moving personal detective story, an uncovering of secret pasts, and a book that explores the creation and development of world-changing legal concepts that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich. East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in a city little known today that was a major cultural center of Europe, “the little Paris of Ukraine,” a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv. The book opens with the author being invited to give a lecture on genocide and crimes against humanity at Lviv University. Sands accepted the invitation with the intent of learning about the extraordinary city with its rich cultural and intellectual life, home to his maternal grandfather, a Galician Jew who had been born there a century before and who’d moved to Vienna at the outbreak of the First World War, married, had a child (the author’s mother), and who then had moved to Paris after the German annexation of Austria in 1938. It was a life that had been shrouded in secrecy, with many questions not to be asked and fewer answers offered if they were. As the author uncovered, clue by clue, the deliberately obscured story of his grandfather’s mysterious life, and of his mother’s journey as a child surviving Nazi occupation, Sands searched further into the history of the city of Lemberg and realized that his own field of humanitarian law had been forged by two men—Rafael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht—each of whom had studied law at Lviv University in the city of his grandfather’s birth, each considered to be the father of the modern human rights movement, and each, at parallel times, forging diametrically opposite, revolutionary concepts of humanitarian law that had changed the world. In this extraordinary and resonant book, Sands looks at who these two very private men were, and at how and why, coming from similar Jewish backgrounds and the same city, studying at the same university, each developed the theory he did, showing how each man dedicated this period of his life to having his legal concept—“genocide” and “crimes against humanity”—as a centerpiece for the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. And the author writes of a third man, Hans Frank, Hitler’s personal lawyer, a Nazi from the earliest days who had destroyed so many lives, friend of Richard Strauss, collector of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Frank oversaw the ghetto in Lemberg in Poland in August 1942, in which the entire large Jewish population of the area had been confined on penalty of death. Frank, who was instrumental in the construction of concentration camps nearby and, weeks after becoming governor general of Nazi-occupied Poland, ordered the transfer of 133,000 men, women, and children to the death camps. Sands brilliantly writes of how all three men came together, in October 1945 in Nuremberg—Rafael Lemkin; Hersch Lauterpacht; and in the dock at the Palace of Justice, with the twenty other defendants of the Nazi high command, prisoner number 7, Hans Frank, who had overseen the extermination of more than a million Jews of Galicia and Lemberg, among them, the families of the author’s grandfather as well as those of Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A book that changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder. Powerful; moving; tender; a revelation.
Alejandra Pizarnik, Yvette Siegert
A poetry collection by Alejandra Pizarnik that uses Extracting the stone of madness to explore poetry and relationships, with history in view.
Karan Mahajan
A novel by Karan Mahajan that uses The association of small bombs to explore terrorism and bombings, with victims of terrorism in view.
Claudia Casper
A literary science-fiction novel presented as a soldier's journals after climate collapse, focused on trauma and renewal.
Mike McCormack
Marcus Conway, an engineer in the west of Ireland, returns in thought to family, work, community, and death while sitting at his kitchen table, all carried in the flow of a single sentence. Ordinary details widen into economic crisis, public failure, love, and loss.
Bernice L. McFadden
A novel by Bernice L Mcfadden that uses The book of Harlan to explore african american families and african americans, with music in view.
Lauren Wolk
Set in postwar Pennsylvania, the novel follows Annabelle as she confronts bullying, prejudice, and the courage to speak up.
Anne Enright
A novel that follows a mother and her four children to explore family bonds, failure, and reconciliation. Its multigenerational perspective examines how individual choices shape a family over time.
Adam Haslett
Adam Haslett's Imagine Me Gone is a novel about the intergenerational impact of depression and anxiety within one family. It follows the same household from multiple perspectives as love and breakdown unfold at once.