March Lucky Stars: Perfect for Your Book Club

LuckyStars-white-logoIs it your turn to pick your book club’s the next book? Don’t fret. We’ve got seven fantastic options for you. This month’s Lucky Stars run the gamut of topics, but they all have one thing in common: life-changing personal journeys that will give you plenty to talk about. Plus these Lucky Stars e-books are all priced at just $1.99 each throughout March.

Pictures of YouPictures of You by Caroline Leavitt:

Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, the book asks, How well do we really know those we love—and how do we forgive the unforgivable?

 

You can purchase the Pictures of You e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

is-this-tom-siteIs This Tomorrow by Caroline Leavitt:

In 1956, Ava Lark rents a house with her twelve-year-old son, Lewis, in a desirable Boston suburb. Ava is beautiful, divorced, Jewish, and a working mom. She finds her neighbors less than welcoming. Lewis yearns for his absent father, befriending the only other fatherless kids: Jimmy and Rose. One afternoon, Jimmy goes missing. The neighborhood—in the throes of Cold War paranoia—seizes the opportunity to further ostracize Ava and her son.

Years later, when Lewis and Rose reunite to untangle the final pieces of the tragic puzzle, they must decide: Should you tell the truth even if it hurts those you love, or should some secrets remain buried?

You can purchase the Is This Tomorrow e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

my-fathers-paradise tMy Father’s Paradise by Ariel Sabar:

“I am the keeper of my family’s stories. I am the guardian of its honor. I am the defender of its traditions. As the first-born son of a Kurdish father, these, they tell me, are my duties. And yet even before my birth I resisted.”

So begins Ariel Sabar’s true tale of a father and a son, and the two worlds that kept them apart and finally brought them together: ancient Iraq and modern America.

In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers, humble peddlers and rugged loggers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.

Caught unawares by growing ethnic tensions in the Middle East after World War II, the Jews of Zakho were airlifted to the new state of Israel in the 1950s with the mass exodus of 120,000 Jews from Iraq—one of the world’s largest and least-known diasporas. Almost overnight, the Kurdish Jews’ exotic culture and language were doomed to extinction.

Yona’s son Ariel knew little of his father’s history. Growing up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor at UCLA and had dedicated his career to preserving his people’s traditions, Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father’s strange immigrant heritage. Until he had a son of his own.

My Father’s Paradise is Ariel Sabar’s quest to reconcile present and past. As Ariel and his father travel together into today’s postwar Iraq to find what’s left of Yona’s birthplace, Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, telling his family’s story and discovering their place in the sweeping saga of the Sephardic Jews’ millennia-long survival in Islamic lands.

You can purchase the My Father’s Paradise e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

Rowland_Transcrptionist_pbk_jkt_rgb_HRThe Transcriptionist by Amy Rowland:

Once, there were many transcriptionists at the Record, a behemoth New York City newspaper, but new technology and the ease of communication has put most of them out of work. So now Lena, the last transcriptionist, sits alone in a room—a human conduit, silently turning reporters’ recorded stories into print—until the day she encounters a story so shocking that it shatters the reverie that has become her life.

This exquisite novel, written by a woman who spent more than a decade as a transcriptionist at the New York Times, asks probing questions about journalism and ethics, about the decline of the newspaper and the failure of language. It is also the story of a woman’s effort to establish her place in an increasingly alien and alienating world.

You can purchase the The Transcriptionist e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

Cohen_YearMyMother_new2-adThe Year My Mother Came Back by Alice Eve Cohen:

Thirty years after her death, Alice Eve Cohen’s mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice herself receives a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it’s entirely possible for the people we’ve lost to come back to us when we need them the most.

Although letting her mother back into her life is not an easy thing, Alice approaches it with humor, intelligence, and honesty. What she learns is that she must revisit her childhood and allow herself to be a daughter once more in order to take care of her own girls. Understanding and forgiving her mother’s parenting transgressions leads her to accept her own and to realize that she doesn’t have to be perfect to be a good mother.

You can purchase the The Year My Mother Came Back e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

Bremer cvr_11_22.indd

A Tender Struggle by Krista Bremer:

Fifteen years ago, Krista Bremer, a California-bred feminist, surfer, and aspiring journalist, met Ismail Suayah, sincere, passionate, kind, yet from a very different world. One of eight siblings born in an impoverished fishing village in Libya, Ismail was raised a Muslim—and his faith informed his life. When Krista and Ismail made the decision to become a family, she embarked on a journey she never could have imagined, an accidental jihad: a quest for spiritual and intellectual growth that would open her mind and, more important, her heart.

 

You can purchase the A Tender Struggle e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

Breakfast with BuddhaBreakfast with Buddha by Roland Merullo:

When his sister tricks him into taking her guru on a trip to their childhood home, Otto Ringling, a confirmed skeptic, is not amused.

Six days on the road with an enigmatic holy man who answers every question with a riddle is not what he’d planned. But in an effort to westernize his passenger—and amuse himself—he decides to show the monk some “American fun” along the way. From a chocolate factory in Hershey to a bowling alley in South Bend, from a Cubs game at Wrigley field to his family farm near Bismarck, Otto is given the remarkable opportunity to see his world—and more important, his life—through someone else’s eyes. Gradually, skepticism yields to amazement as he realizes that his companion might just be the real thing.

In Roland Merullo’s masterful hands, Otto tells his story with all the wonder, bemusement, and wry humor of a man who unwittingly finds what he’s missing in the most unexpected place.

You can purchase the Breakfast With Buddha e-book for $1.99 throughout March.

 

 

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One comment

  1. It is now May. Will you have this feature for May, or was that a one time event?

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