Gravel Heart: By Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature
Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict–the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.
When glamorous Uncle Amir, now a senior diplomat, offers Salim an escape, the lonely teenager travels to London for college. But nothing has prepared him for the biting cold and seething crowds of this hostile city. Struggling to find a foothold, and to understand the darkness at the heart of his family, he must face devastating truths about those closest to him–and about love, sex and power. Evoking the immigrant experience with unsentimental precision and profound understanding, Gravel Heart is a powerfully affecting story of isolation, identity, belonging, and betrayal, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s most astonishing achievement.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester
Land—whether meadow or mountainside, desert or peat bog, parkland or pasture, suburb or city—is central to our existence. It quite literally underlies and underpins everything. Employing the keen intellect, insatiable curiosity, and narrative verve that are the foundations of his previous bestselling works, Simon Winchester examines what we human beings are doing—and have done—with the billions of acres that together make up the solid surface of our planet.
Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World examines in depth how we acquire land, how we steward it, how and why we fight over it, and finally, how we can, and on occasion do, come to share it. Ultimately, Winchester confronts the essential question: who actually owns the world’s land—and why does it matter?
Modern Freezer Meals: Simple Recipes to Cook Now and Freeze for Later by Ali Rosen
Modern freezer meals to turn the notion of frozen food on its head. Despite our food culture’s deification of preserving ingredients through classic methods like canning and fermenting, we have relegated the freezer to the category of TV dinners and overwrought casseroles. But the freezer can be your best meal-prepping friend, and the easiest way to always have a ready-made meal on hand. Modern Freezer Meals provides one hundred fresh recipes for frozen food—from healthy, vibrant grain bowls to proteins cooked straight from the freezer with tons of flavor still intact.
Frozen food guru Ali Rosen offers proper packing and labeling techniques to shatter some of the myths around freezer meals. The days of freezer burn or giant blocks of unwieldy meals are replaced by dozens of dishes that stand up to the cold.
Book descriptions from Amazon.com