Diversify your reading with our Monthly Diverse Reads. Choose your title(s) from this month's carefully handpicked selection of titles with rich cultural representation for a unique diverse reading experience.
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October 2024 Diverse Reads:
1. Monstress by Lysley Tenorio (Paperback)
A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique stories set amongst the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines, now with a new preface by the author
Monstress stands as a landmark of American multicultural short fiction. Lysley Tenorio’s tales are framed by tense, fascinating dichotomies: tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, pop culture and high culture, the American and the Filipino. Tenorio balances these opposites with rare skill, humor, and deep understanding, exploring universal themes—the sometimes-suffocating ties of family, the melancholy of isolation, the need to find connections—with uncommon empathy and breathtaking originality.
2. Midnight Rooms by Donyae Coles (Hardcover)
Set in a foreboding Gothic mansion and infused with the heightened paranoia and creeping horror of novels like Catherine House and Crimson Peak, a spine-chilling debut historical thriller from a fresh voice in the genre that will leave you questioning who, or what, you can trust . . . including your own sanity.
England, 1840. Orabella Mumthrope spies an unexpected visitor in her uncle’s parlor. Scruffy in appearance yet claiming to be the scion of a fabulously wealthy family, Elias Blakersby declares a deep desire to make Orabella his wife. The orphaned daughter of a white man and a Black woman—an outsider with no fortune or connections—Orabella never expected to marry. But her uncle has many debts, and Orabella, curious about the seeming devotion Elias bestows upon her, agrees.
The new bride is quickly whisked away to Korringhill Manor, the Blakersby family estate, and far from everything she knows. Expecting splendor, Orabella is shocked to find decay, skittish servants, and curt elders. But her kind new husband’s loving touch, promises of a happy life together, and his assurances she’ll never want for anything soothe her concerns.
Yet there is a darkness deep within this house. Rooms are locked or hidden away, and the walls seem to thrum with secrets. Orabella can never venture outside unattended; she spends her days having tea with a catatonic sister-in-law and evenings at Elias’s side, dutifully hosting lavish dinners. The darkness soon begins to engulf her, too. Becoming dizzy and drowsy after dinner, she falls into a fitful sleep filled with macabre dreams, and is awakened by blood-curdling screams in the night. In the morning she rises from her bed covered in mysterious bruises. Confused and terrified, she begins to question where her dreams end and reality begins. The longer Orabella stays in this place, the more she loses parts of herself . . . how long until she no longer exists?
Midnight Rooms is a sweeping saga with supernatural undertones set in Victorian England. Vibrating with tension, richly atmospheric—haunted by ghosts, guilt, and familial bonds—it is an electrifying story that will linger in your dreams.
3. Tell It To Me Singing by Tita Ramirez (Hardcover)
A Cuban American family is sent into a tailspin when the ailing matriarch confesses the first of several shocking secrets to her daughter before undergoing heart surgery in this tender and twisty debut novel.
Monica Campo is pregnant with her first child when, moments before being wheeled into emergency heart surgery, her mother confesses a long-held secret: Monica’s father is not the man who raised her. But when her mother wakes up and begins having delusional episodes, Monica doesn’t know what to believe—whether the confession was real or just a channeling of the telenovela her mother watches nightly.
In her despair, Monica wants to speak with only one person: her ex-boyfriend of five years, Manny. She can’t help but worry, though, what this says about her relationship with her fiancé and father of her unborn child.
Monica’s search for the truth leads her to a new understanding of the past: the early eighties when her parents arrived from Cuba on the famous Mariel boatlift, and the tumultuous seventies, a decade after Castro’s takeover, when some people were still secretly fighting his regime—people like her mother and the man she claims is Monica’s real father. Tell It to Me Singing is a story that takes readers from Miami to Cuba to the jungles of Costa Rica and, along the way, explores the question of how and to whom we belong, how a life is built, and how we know when we’re home.
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About Monthly Diverse Reads:
Discover a world of diverse literature with our Monthly Diverse Reads!
Elevate your reading experience by immersing yourself in our curated selection of the new releases & backlist titles written by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. If you're seeking an effortless way to explore a range of perspectives without the hassle of endless searches, Monthly Diverse Reads is your solution.
Each month, choose from a carefully curated collection of three captivating and culturally diverse books. Skip the research with it diverse book club, avoid navigating lengthy lists, and eliminate worries about problematic content – Tuma takes care of it all for you.
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