GIRLY BOOK CLUB
APRIL
Book Vote 2020
Every month we're pleased to bring you a short list of contenders for our Monthly Girly Book Club pick. We work really hard to ensure the list includes only titles available in paperback in our main markets, making the book more accessible to our membership. We also try to include a variety of authors and genres. We spend hours and hours pouring over potential books, their release dates, costs and availability. We hope you enjoy our selection.
Take a look at the synopses below and vote for the one that appeals to you most as a Girly Book Club selection!
How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist?
Samra Habib has spent most of her life searching for the safety to be herself. As an Ahmadi Muslim growing up in Pakistan, she faced regular threats from Islamic extremists who believed the small, dynamic sect to be blasphemous. From her parents, she internalized the lesson that revealing her identity could put her in grave danger.
When her family came to Canada as refugees, Samra encountered a whole new host of challenges: bullies, racism, the threat of poverty, and an arranged marriage. Backed into a corner, her need for a safe space--in which to grow and nurture her creative, feminist spirit--became dire. The men in her life wanted to police her, the women in her life had only shown her the example of pious obedience, and her body was a problem to be solved.
So begins an exploration of faith, art, love, and queer sexuality, a journey that takes her to the far reaches of the globe to uncover a truth that was within her all along. A triumphant memoir of forgiveness and family, both chosen and not, We Have Always Been Here is a rallying cry for anyone who has ever felt out of place and a testament to the power of fearlessly inhabiting one's truest self.
Anthony Ray Hinton was poor and black when he was convicted of two murders he hadn't committed. For the next three decades he was trapped in solitary confinement in a tiny cell on death row.
Eventually his case was taken up by the award-winning lawyer, Bryan Stevenson, who managed to have him exonerated, though it took 15 years for this to happen. How did Hinton cope with the mental and emotional torture of his situation, and emerge full of compassion and forgiveness? This is a story of hope and the resilience of the human spirit.
The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women's names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this “living autobiography” infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us, and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?
Levy draws on her own experience of attempting to live with pleasure, value, and meaning--the making of a new kind of family home, the challenges of her mother's death--and those of women she meets in everyday life, from a young female traveler reading in a bar who suppresses her own words while she deflects an older man's advances, to a particularly brilliant student, to a kindly and ruthless octogenarian bookseller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential reading, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.
Want to know the truth about what life is like as a mum and step-mum with a chaotic patchwork family?
This book is everything I've been through that's made me who I am, plus the lessons I've learned from many mistakes. I hope that it will make you laugh as well as give you strength to keep going when times get tough. After all, we are all in this together...
Rachaele, aka Part-Time Working Mummy
Hundreds of thousands of fans flock to the PTWM page online and now, in this book, Rachaele shares her behind-the-scenes experiences with single parenthood, unexpected pregnancy, domestic violence, relationships, bullying and much more - spreading kindness amidst the craziness along the way!
13 Comments
Voted for Cost of Living. Second choice is Part Time Working Mummy. Hope one of these win????????
I’m struggling my way through Vox at the moment – a book that’s making me so angry I might self combust so please don’t let it be The Cost of Living.
The world has its problems, but can we take a break from man beating, believe our own self worth and advertise our greatness rather than complain all the time?
Me too!
We Have Always Been Here sounds so interesting 🙂
Voted for Cost of Living; the others I would only ever read them as a “had to for book club”. All a bit too on trend & the fact that all 3 mentioned violence of some form. I like to be challenged through literature however there is so much darkness & after a second reading of Vox, a lighter subject gets my vote
Voted for the Cost of Living!
Same here.
I voted for it too. Hope it wins.
Same here!! I hope it wins.
Voted for The Sun Does Shine –
Voted for Cost of Living! Really interested in The Sun Does Shine as a second option. May read it anyways outside of the club if it isn’t chosen!
Voted for the sun does shine… The others sound a bit… Blah.
The Sun Does Shine got my vote!