August 2024 MassBook List (2024)

For January, June, July:

Jazz
by Toni Morrison

In Harlem, 1926, Joe Trace, a door-to-door salemsan in his fifties, kills his teenage lover. At the funeral, his wife Violet slashes the dead girl’s face and then desperately searches to find why Joe was unfaithful. The profound love story is immersed in the sights and sounds of Black urban life during the Jazz Age.

Nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell resolved to reclaim her life by cooking, in a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s 1961 classic, Mastering the art of French cooking. Her unexpected reward, a new life lived with gusto.

For February:

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years.

In this spellbinding exploration of the varieties of love, the author of the bestseller “Call Me by Your Name” revisits its complex and beguiling characters decades after their first meeting. No novel in recent memory has spoken more movingly to contemporary readers about the nature of love.

For March, May:

All her life, 13-year old Anna has helped her sister fight leukemiea. Anna has provided platelets, bone marrow, and even stem cells to ensure Kate’s survival. But when their parents ask her to donate a kidney, Anna has had enough. She enlist the aid of a lawyer and announces her intention to sue for control of her own body.

Malas
by Marcela Fuentes

A novel with alternating timelines in which the consequences of one old woman’s questionable curse reverberate through the generations of a Tejano family

For April, August:

A modern classic about star-crossed lovers that explores questions of race and being Black in America–and the search for what it means to call a place home.

From the New York Times bestselling author of We Begin at the End comes an epic novel about a man fixated on finding a missing woman and the FBI agent on his tail, who might be even more obsessed than he is

For September:

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one–hom*o sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Two dancers with different approaches to their craft share a complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, in a story that transitions from northwest London to West Africa.

For October:

In her third book that continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened, ” she explains. But this simple statement belies a terror that she might forget something, that she might miss something important.

A deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear.

For November:

An intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand, Harriet Tubman.

A haunting debut that is simultaneously dreamlike and visceral, vulnerable and redemptive, and risks the painful rewards of emotional honesty.

For December:

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go-Go. What happens next will become the stuff of legend. The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies.

In Tris Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue — Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Tris, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is — she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.