Popular North American Cultural Books
Find cultural books written by authors from North America for the next part of the Read Around The World Challenge. (48)
21.
Learning to Breathe by Janice Lynn Mather EN
Country: North America / 
Bahamas
Bahamas
Description:
A 2019 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Selection Amelia Bloomer List’s 2019 Top Ten Recommended Feminist Books for Young Readers A Governor General’s Literary Award Finalist A Junior Library Guild Selection A Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize Semifinalist A BC Book Prize Finalist “A love letter to girls—bittersweet and full of hope.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of National Book Award Finalist American Street “This is a stellar debut.” —Brandy Colbert, award-winning author of Little & Lion and Pointe “A vibrant, essential story of healing, resilience, and finding one’s family.” —Stephanie ... continue
22.
Country: North America / 
United States of America
United States of America
Description:
An Instant New York Times Bestseller! Winner of the Coretta Scott King - John Steptoe for New Talent Author Award Filled with mystery and an intriguingly rich magic system, Tracy Deonn’s YA contemporary fantasy Legendborn offers the dark allure of City of Bones with a modern-day twist on a classic legend and a lot of Southern Black Girl Magic. After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses a m... continue
23.
Moccasin Square Gardens : Short Stories by Richard Van Camp EN
Country: North America / 
Canada
Canada
Description:
The characters of Moccasin Square Gardens inhabit Denendeh, the land of the people north of the sixtieth parallel. These stories are filled with in-laws, outlaws and common-laws. Get ready for illegal wrestling moves ("The Camel Clutch"), pinky promises, a doctored casino, extraterrestrials or "Sky People," love, lust and prayers for peace. While this is Van Camp's most hilarious short story collection, it's also haunted by the lurking presence of the Wheetago, human-devouring monsters of legend that have returned due to global warming and the greed of humanity. The stories in Moccasin Square ... continue
24.
My Monticello : Fiction by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson EN
Country: North America / United States of America
United States of America
Description:
A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlotte... continue
25.
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty EN
Country: North America / United States of America
United States of America
Description:
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty—with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight—breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a de... continue
26.
Of Women and Salt : A Novel by Gabriela Garcia EN
Country: North America / 
Cuba
Cuba
Description:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021 A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK WINNER of the Isabel Allende Most Inspirational Fiction Award, She Reads Best of 2021 Awards • FINALIST for the 2022 Southern Book Prize • LONGLISTED for Crook’s Corner Book Prize • NOMINEE for 2021 Goodreads Choice Award in Debut Novel and Historical Fiction A sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter's fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction.... continue
27.
Out of Havana : Memoirs of Ordinary Life in Cuba by Araceli Alonso EN
Country: North America / Cuba
Cuba
Description:
Out of Havana provides an uncommon ordinary woman's insight into the last half century of Cuba's tumultuous recent history. More powerfully than an academic study or historical account, it allows us intimately to grasp the enthusiasm, commitment and sense of promise that defined many average Cubans' experience of the 1959 Revolution and the first triumphant decades of the Castro regime. As the story shifts into the final decades of the last century (the 1980s Mariel Boatlift, the so-called "special period in time of peace" [from 1991 to the end of the decade], and the 1994 Balseros or Rafters ... continue
28.
Probably Ruby : A Novel by Lisa Bird-Wilson EN
Country: North America / Canada
Canada
Description:
An Indigenous woman adopted by white parents goes in search of her identity in this unforgettable debut novel about family, race, and history. “Engaging . . . Ruby never disappoints with her big heart and outrageous sense of humor—and her resilient search for her own history.”—The New York Times Book Review “A passionate exploration of identity and belonging and a celebration of our universal desire to love and be loved.”—Imbolo Mbue, author of Behold the Dreamers This is the story of a woman in search of herself, in every sense. When we first meet Ruby, a Métis woman in her thirties, her life... continue
29.
Selected Poems by Octavio Paz, G. Aroul EN
Country: North America / 
Mexico
Mexico
Description:
Octavio Paz, asserts Eliot Weinberger in his introduction to these Selected Poems, is among the last of the modernists "who drew their own maps of the world." For Latin America's foremost living poet, his native Mexico has been the center of a global mandala, a cultural configuration that, in his life and work, he has traced to its furthest reaches: to Spain, as a young Marxist during the Civil War; to San Francisco and New York in the early 1940s; to Paris, as a surrealist, in the postwar years; to India and Japan in 1952, and to the East again as his country's ambassador to India from 1962 t... continue
30.
The Birds of Opulence by Crystal Wilkinson EN
Country: North America / United States of America
United States of America
Description:
From the critically acclaimed, award-winning author of Blackberries, Blackberries and Water Street comes an astonishing new novel. A lyrical exploration of love and loss, The Birds of Opulence centers on several generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. The Goode-Brown family, led by matriarch and pillar of the community Minnie Mae, is plagued by old secrets and embarrassment over mental illness and illegitimacy. Meanwhile, single mother Francine Clark is haunted by her dead, lightning-struck husband and forced to fight agai... continue