Books like Shadows on the Hudson by Isaac Bashevis Singer

During World War II, a foster girl in Nazi Germany steals books to share with neighbors and a hidden Jewish man, proving literature’s power to nourish the soul amid darkness.

Alice Walker's 1982 novel, The Color Purple, won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, exploring the lives of black women in the South and their experiences of abuse and struggle for independence.

Reflections by Lebanese‑American poet Kahlil Gibran on love, marriage, joy, sorrow, crime, punishment, pain, and self‑knowledge.

A collection of linked short stories that follows a platoon of American soldiers and their experiences, thoughts, and burdens during the Vietnam War.

Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay argues for women writers’ rightful place in a patriarchal literary tradition, using both fictional narrative and lecture recordings.

A Jewish American teen travels to Ukraine with a tattered photograph, seeking the woman who saved his grandfather during the Holocaust, guided by a quirky translator, a blind veteran, and an oddly named guide dog.

A Fine Balance is Rohinton Mistry's critically acclaimed second novel, set in India in the mid-1970s and focusing on four unlikely individuals who come together in a city apartment during a state of emergency.

Set during the French Indochina War, the novel follows British journalist Thomas Fowler, his mistress Phuong, and American idealist Pyle, whose ambitions and tragic fate reshape their lives amid political turmoil.

An experimental novel by William Faulkner that tells the same events from four distinct perspectives, each with a unique narrative style, charting the decline of a once‑wealthy Southern family.

Posthumously published, Hemingway’s *A Moveable Feast* is a memoir of his Paris years in the 1920s, detailing his early career, intimate relationships, and encounters with other literary figures of the Lost Generation.

Set in 1951 during the Korean War, "Indignation" follows Newark law student Marcus Messner as he attends Ohio’s Winesburg College, struggles with his father’s fears, and confronts the challenges of coming of age in postwar America.

Olive Kitteridge follows a retired teacher in a small Maine coastal town as she navigates love, loss and the quiet complexities of middle‑age life.

"In 1945, Jewish refugees by the thousands set out for Palestine. Those who made it relied on the underground to shelter them; taking false names, they blended with the population, joining the wildly different factions fighting for independence. "City of Secrets" follows one survivor, Brand, as he tries to regain himself after losing everyone he's ever loved. Now driving a taxi provided--like his new identity--by the underground, he navigates the twisting streets of Jerusalem as well as the overlapping, sometimes deadly loyalties of the resistance. Alone, haunted by memories, Brand tries to become again the man he was before the war--honest, strong, capable of moral choice. He falls in love with Eva, a fellow survivor and member of his cell, and commits himself to the revolution, accepting missions that grow more and more dangerous even as he suspects he's being used by his cell's dashing leader, Asher. By the time Brand understands the truth, it's too late." -- jacket.

A Russian Jewish man named Yakov is wrongfully accused of ritual murder during the Tsarist era.

When a woman loses her lifelong best friend, she is left with his Great Dane, a silent, traumatized companion. Balancing grief, the dog's needs, and rent restrictions, she faces obsession and peril—yet finds unexpected rewards amid the turmoil.

A quiet tale of immigrant identity and family choice set against the backdrop of World War II in New York.

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Anna Friedman's bold tale of Jewish immigrants' struggle in New York City.