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Items in this hypelist
Non-fiction

Ways of Seeing
John Berger · 1973

Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection
John Green · 2025
Instant #1 New York Times bestseller! • #1 Washington Post bestseller! • #1 Indie Bestseller! • USA Today Bestseller!<br/><br/>John Green, award-winning author and passionate advocate for global healthcare reform, tells a deeply human story illuminating the fight against the world’s deadliest infectious disease.<br/><br/>“The real magic of Green’s writing is the deeply considerate, human touch that goes into every word.” –The Associated Press<br/><br/>“Told with the intelligence, wit, and tragedy that have become hallmarks of the author’s work.... This is the story of us.” –Slate<br/><br/>“Earnest and empathetic.” –The New York Times<br/><br/>Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it.<br/><br/>In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year.<br/><br/>In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Cat Bohannon · 2023

Awakenings
Oliver Sacks · 2013
Fiction

Our Evenings: A Novel
Alan Hollinghurst · 2024
From the internationally acclaimed winner of the Booker Prize, a piercing novel that envisions modern England through the lens of one man’s acutely observed and often unnerving experience as he struggles with class and race, art and sexuality, love and violence<br/><br/>Did I have a grievance? Most of us, without looking far, could find something that had harmed us, and oppressed us, and unfairly held us back. I tried not to dwell on it, thought it healthier not to, though I’d lived my short life so far in a chaos of privilege and prejudice.<br/><br/>Dave Win, the son of a British dressmaker and a Burmese man he’s never met, is thirteen years old when he gets a scholarship to a top boarding school. With the doors of elite English society cracked open for him, heady new possibilities emerge, even as Dave is exposed to the envy and viciousness of his wealthy classmates, above all that of Giles Hadlow, whose worldly parents sponsored the scholarship and who find in Dave someone they can more easily nurture than their own brutish son.<br/><br/>Our Evenings follows Dave from the 1960s on—through the possibilities that remained open for him, and others that proved to be illusory: as a working-class brown child in a decidedly white institution; a young man discovering queer culture and experiencing his first, formative love affairs; a talented but often overlooked actor, on the road with an experimental theater company; and an older Londoner whose late-in-life marriage fills his days with an unexpected sense of happiness and security.<br/><br/>Moving in and out of Dave’s orbit are the Hadlows. Estranged from his parents, who remain close to Dave, Giles directs his privilege into a career as a powerful right-wing politician, whose reactionary vision for England pokes perilous holes in Dave’s stability. As the story accelerates toward the present day, the two men’s lives and values will finally collide in a cruel shock of violence.<br/><br/>From “one of our most gifted writers” (The Boston Globe), Our Evenings sweeps readers from our past to our present through the beauty, pain, and joy of one deeply observed life.

11/22/63
Stephen King · 2011

Hot Milk
Deborah Levy · 2017

The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel
Ocean Vuong · 2025
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive<br/><br/>One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.<br/><br/>Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Mayflies
O'Hagan Andrew · 2021
Winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize<br/><br/>A Guardian, Spectator, Sunday Times, Financial Times and Evening Standard Book of the Year<br/><br/>'What a stunning novel.' Graham Norton<br/><br/>'Funny, passionate, heartbreaking.' Tracey Thorn<br/><br/>'Life-enhancing.' Scotsman<br/><br/>'Unforgettable.' Cólm Toibín<br/><br/>'Spectacular.' Books of the Year, Spectator<br/><br/>'An incredible book . . . about men and how important friendship can be to men.' Douglas Stuart<br/><br/>'My god this is gorgeous. Wild, wise, wonderful . . . Absolutely brilliant.' Russell T Davies<br/><br/>Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.<br/><br/>In the summer of 1986, James and Tully ignite a friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over, they rush towards a magical weekend of youthful excess in Manchester played out against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded. And there a vow is made: to go at life differently.<br/><br/>Thirty years on, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Open, Heaven: A Novel
Seán Hewitt · 2025

Play It as It Lays
Joan Didion · 2011

Kairos
Jenny Erpenbeck · 2023
Jenny Erpenbeck’s much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates WINNER OF THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE Jenny Erpenbeck (the author of Go, Went, Gone and Visitation) is an epic storyteller and arguably the most powerful voice in contemporary German literature. Erpenbeck’s new novel Kairos—an unforgettably compelling masterpiece—tells the story of the romance begun in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s when nineteen-year-old Katharina meets by chance a married writer in his fifties named Hans. Their passionate yet difficult long-running affair takes place against the background of the declining GDR, through the upheavals wrought by its dissolution in 1989 and then what comes after. In her unmistakable style and with enormous sweep, Erpenbeck describes the path of two lovers, as Katharina grows up and tries to come to terms with a not always ideal romance, even as a whole world with its own ideology disappears. As the Times Literary Supplement writes: “The weight of history, the particular experiences of East and West, and the ways in which cultural and subjective memory shape individual identity has always been present in Erpenbeck’s work. She knows that no one is all bad, no state all rotten, and she masterfully captures the existential bewilderment of this period between states and ideologies.” In the opinion of her superbly gifted translator Michael Hofmann, Kairos is the great post-Unification novel. And, as The New Republic has commented on his work as a translator: “Hofmann’s translation is invaluable—it achieves what translations are supposedly unable to do: it is at once ‘loyal’ and ‘beautiful.’”

Cleopatra and Frankenstein
Coco Mellors · 2024

The Damned (La-Bas) (Penguin Classics)
Joris-Karl Huysmans · 2002

Gifted
Suzumi Suzuki · 2024

Outline: A Novel (Outline Trilogy, 1)
Rachel Cusk · 2016

Talking at Night
Claire Daverley · 2024

House of Names
Toibin Colm · 2018
THE TOP 10 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER<br/>'Unforgettable' Mary Beard<br/>'They cut her hair before they dragged her to the place of sacrifice. Her mouth was gagged to stop her cursing her father, her cowardly, two-tongued father. Nonetheless, they heard her muffled screams.'<br/>On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice.<br/>His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glorious victory.<br/>Three years later, he returns home and his murderous action has set the entire family - mother, brother, sister - on a path of intimate violence, as they enter a world of hushed commands and soundless journeys through the palace's dungeons and bedchambers. As his wife seeks his death, his daughter, Electra, is the silent observer to the family's game of innocence while his son, Orestes, is sent into bewildering, frightening exile where survival is far from certain. Out of their desolating loss, Electra and Orestes must find a way to right these wrongs of the past even if it means committing themselves to a terrible, barbarous act.<br/>House of Names is a story of intense longing and shocking betrayal. It is a work of great beauty, and daring, from one of our finest living writers.<br/>'A masterpeice' Daily Telegraph<br/>'Devastatingly human ... hauntingly believable' Guardian<br/>'A celebration of what novels can do' Observer

Stoner
John Williams
Fantasy

The Shadow of the Gods
John Gwynne · 2021

The Rage of Dragons
Evan Winter · 2019
Game of Thrones meets Gladiator in this blockbuster debut epic fantasy about a world caught in an eternal war, and the young man who will become his people's only hope for survival. ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S TOP 100 FANTASY BOOKS OF ALL TIME Winner of the Reddit/Fantasy Award for Best Debut Fantasy Novel The Omehi people have been fighting an unwinnable war for almost two hundred years. The lucky ones are born gifted. One in every two thousand women has the power to call down dragons. One in every hundred men is able to magically transform himself into a bigger, stronger, faster killing machine. Everyone else is fodder, destined to fight and die in the endless war. Young, gift-less Tau knows all this, but he has a plan of escape. He's going to get himself injured, get out early, and settle down to marriage, children, and land. Only, he doesn't get the chance. Those closest to him are brutally murdered, and his grief swiftly turns to anger. Fixated on revenge, Tau dedicates himself to an unthinkable path. He'll become the greatest swordsman to ever live, a man willing to die a hundred thousand times for the chance to kill the three who betrayed him. The Rage of Dragons launches a stunning and powerful debut epic fantasy series that readers are already calling "the best fantasy book in years." The BurningThe Rage of Dragons
Poetry

Bright Dead Things: Poems
Ada Limón · 2015
