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The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Literary icon Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies shares an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling and her homeland of the Dominican Republic.
“Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing . . . Lively, joyous.” – The New York Times
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Meet Author Maggie Mertens
Maggie Mertens is a writer, journalist, and editor located in Seattle. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, NPR, Sports Illustrated, ESPNw, Deadspin, VICE, The Cut, Glamour, Refinery29, andThe Year’s Best Sports Writing 2021 (Triumph Books), and has been nominated for the 2021 Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting.
After recently attending her class reunion at all-women’s Smith College, Maggie has been thinking about whose stories get told, just as her new book Better Faster Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know about Women is being published: “The stories of women deserve this space of our own, deserve to not be constantly pushed up against men’s accomplishments for comparison. This year, I got to consider how lucky I felt that a part of my career, one I dreamed of while at this college 15 years ago, is about shepherding stories of women that might otherwise have been forgotten.”
Book Club Picks
Nightbloom
Dust Child
All the Little Bird-Hearts
The Museum of Failures
Moonrise Over New Jessup
A captivating and intimate debut novel interwoven with folktale and myth, Wendy Chen’s Their Divine Fires tells the story of the love affairs of three generations of Chinese women across one hundred years of revolutions both political and personal.
In 1917, at the dawn of the Chinese revolution, Yunhong is growing up in the southern china countryside and falls deeply in love with the son of a wealthy landlord despite her brother’s objections. On the night of her wedding, her brother destroys the marriage, irrevocably changing the shape of Yunhong’s family to come: her daughter, Yuexin, will never know her father. Haunted by a history that she does not understand, Yuexin passes on those memories to her daughters Hongxing and Yonghong, who come of age in the years following Mao’s death, battling the push and pull of political forces as they forge their own paths. Each generation guards its secrets, leaving Emily, great-granddaughter of Yunhong and living in contemporary America, to piece together what actually happened between her mother and her aunt, and the weight of their shared ancestry.
Drawing on the lives of her great-grandmother and her great-uncles—both of whom fought on the side of the Communists—as well as her mother’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Wendy Chen infuses this gorgeous debut with a passion that will transport the reader back to powerful moments in history while bringing us close to the women who persisted despite the forces all around them. Both brilliant and haunting, it’s a story about what our ancestors will, and won’t, tell us.
On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls?
Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny—and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, they fall in love. But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: whom can he save, and at what cost ?
Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, and told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice.
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