MORE READS MUST : FIVE

1.- SEA OF TRANQUILITY by Emily St. John Mandel

Sea of Tranquility introduces readers to Olive, the author of a best-selling pandemic novel - a rather meta plot point, given that Mandel herself is the author of the hugely popular pandemic novel Station Eleven.

We get to know Olive by jumping from a Vancouver forest in 1912 to the lunar colony she inhabits in 2203.

2.- TRUE BIZ : By Sara Novic.

Novic's second novel takes place at a school for the deaf, where the lives of a headmistress and two students intersect.

One of the teens, Charlie, is forced by her parents to get a cochlear implant, a controversial device that helps some deaf people perceive sounds.

Her hearing family never allowed her to learn American Sign Language - which is starkly opposite the experience her classmate Austin had growing up with deaf parents. When Charlie and Austin go missing, the community is tested.

3.- MEMPHIS By Tara M Stringfellow

Stringfellow's moving debut novel follows three generations of a Southern Black family from the 1930s through the early 2000s.

When Joan is 10, she, her mother, and her sister flee violent father and take refuge at a family home in Memphis. It's the same place where, 50 years earlier, Joan's grandfather was lynched after becoming the city's first Black detective.

Stringfellow jumps between years and voices to reveal how we pass down trauma and love.

4.- CONSTRUCTING A NERVOUS SYSTEM : By Margo Jefferson.

Pulitzer Prize - winning critic Jefferson reflects on some of her most intimate memories. She combines memoir and criticism by examining how Black artists such as Elia Fitzgerald, Ike Turner, Nat King Cole, and Bud Powell helped shape her, and how they impacted race and class more broadly.

5.- SISTERS OF MOKAMA : By Jyoti Thottam

Sisters of Mokama is the inspiring story of six Kentucky nuns who built a hospital in a destitute part of India in 1947, when diseases like cholera were running rampant. Soon, the nuns opened a nursing school - and the mother of Thottam [a journalist who once worked at TIME] was one of the women who studied there.