Read Alikes
A Thread of Grace
by Mary Doria Russell
Magic for Beginners
by Kelly Link
Icebergs
by Rebecca Johns
Manhattan Nocturne
by Colin Harrison
You’re Not You
by Michelle Wildgen
No Good Deeds
by Laura Lippman
My Latest Grievance
by Elinor Lipman
Pandora’s Star
by Peter Hamilton
Traction Man is Here
by Mini Grey
Our Kind
by Kate Walbert
Whales on Stilts
by M. T. Anderson
The Eyre Affair
by Jasper Fforde
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
by Kate diCamillo
The Emperor’s Children
by Claire Messud
Morningside Heights
by Cheryl Mendelson
Little Big Man
by Thomas Berger
The Year of Secret Assignments
by Jaclyn Moriarty
Happiness Sold Separately
by Lolly Winston
So Sleepy
by Uri Shulevitz
Adèle & Simon
by Barbara McClintock
The Brambles
by Eliza Minot
Book! book! book!
by Deborah Bruss
The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets
by Eva Rice
Blow the House Down
by Robert Baer
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories
by Susanna Clarke
The Inhabited World
by David Long
Minaret
by Leila Aboulela
Piece of My Heart
by Peter Robinson
The Night Journal
by Elizabeth Crook
Dealing with Dragons
by Patricia C. Wrede
Love Walked In
by Marisa de los Santos
Interface
by Neal Stephenson (Stephen Bury)
Uniform Justice
by Donna Leon
Guess How Much I Love You
by Sam McBratney
American Born Chinese
by Gene Luen Yang
The Man of My Dreams
by Curtis Sittenfeld
A Safe Place for Dying
by Jack Fredrickson
The Abortionist's Daughter
by Elisabeth Hyde
The True Account
by Howard Frank Mosher
Birds without Wings
by Louis De Bernieres
Racketty Packetty House
by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Dirt Music
by Tim Winton
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks
Anahita’s Woven Riddle
by Meghan Nuttall Sayres
A Place of Greater Safety
by Hilary Mantel
Napoleon’s Pyramids
by William Dietrich
The Reconstructionist
by Josephine Hart
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
by Jose Saramago
The Shakespeare Stealer
by Gary L. Blackwood
Gloriana’s Torch
by Patricia Finney
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
by Diana Wynne Jones
In this Rain
by S. J. Rozan
Ilium
by Dan Simmons
Un Lun Dun
by China Miéville
The Intuitionist
by Colson Whitehead
As She Climbed Across the Table
by Jonathan Lethem
Book Description
In What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers has written what’s best described as a fictionalized memoir. Based on what must have been hours and days and months of conversations with Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan, and written in Deng’s own voice, he describes how, as a youngster of seven in the 1980s, he was swept up in the horrors of the Sudanese Civil War. When an Arab militia destroyed his Dinka village, he joined up with a group of other orphaned children, mostly boys, who attempted to walk to Ethiopia where they believed they would find peace and safety. (Unfortunately, that turned out to be just another unmet hope.) The tragic circumstances these children endured have been told in several works of nonfiction before, but having Deng relate, in an almost matter-of-fact tone, those nightmare-like experiences (where death - by starvation, via murderous adults masquerading as friends, from exhaustion, or being captured and killed by the wild animals who stalk them - is a constant companion) gives it an immediacy and potency that is unique among other accounts. Sadly, even when Deng and his compatriots are finally settled in towns and cities all over the United States, their troubles are not over. Readers of Eggers’s own memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, will find that here he’s subsumed his own strong personality and enormous talent for verbal fireworks into this truly heartbreaking and powerful story. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be divided among various foundations supporting the victims of the Sudanese Civil War.
|
