Nussaibah's bookshelf: all en-US Thu, 24 Oct 2024 04:06:50 -0700 60 Nussaibah's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg The Bandit Queens 61065982
But she soon discovers that being known as a "self-made" widow has some surprising perks. No one messes with her, no one threatens her, and no one tries to control (ahem, marry) her. It's even been good for her business; no one wants to risk getting on her bad side by not buying her jewelry.

Freedom must look good on Geeta, because other women in the village have started asking for her help to get rid of their own no-good husbands...but not all of them are asking nicely.

Now that Geeta's fearsome reputation has become a double-edged sword, she must decide how far to go to protect it, along with the life she's built. Because even the best-laid plans of would-be widows tend to go awry.]]>
342 Parini Shroff 059349895X Nussaibah 5 3.90 2023 The Bandit Queens
author: Parini Shroff
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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Quicksand 23492644
Liam is a struggling writer and a failing cop. Aldo, his best friend and muse, is a haplessly criminal entrepreneur with an uncanny knack for disaster. As Aldo's luck worsens, Liam is inspired to base his next book on his best friend's exponential misfortunes and hopeless quest to win back his one great love: his ex-wife, Stella. What begins as an attempt to make sense of Aldo's mishaps spirals into a profound story of faith and friendship.

With the same originality and buoyancy that catapulted his first novel, A Fraction of the Whole, onto prize lists around the world—including shortlists for the Man Booker Prize and the Guardian First Book Award—Steve Toltz has created a rousing, hysterically funny but unapologetically dark satire about fate, faith, friendship, and the artist's obligation to his muse. Sharp, witty, kinetic, and utterly engrossing, Quicksand is a subversive portrait of twenty-first-century society in all its hypocrisy and absurdity.]]>
368 Steve Toltz 147679782X Nussaibah 5 3.47 2015 Quicksand
author: Steve Toltz
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.47
book published: 2015
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/04/14
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The Song of Achilles 13623848 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780062060624.

Achilles, "the best of all the Greeks," son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods' wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.]]>
408 Madeline Miller Nussaibah 5 4.30 2011 The Song of Achilles
author: Madeline Miller
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 4.30
book published: 2011
rating: 5
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Circe 35959740
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.

But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from or with the mortals she has come to love.]]>
393 Madeline Miller 0316556343 Nussaibah 5 4.22 2018 Circe
author: Madeline Miller
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2018
rating: 5
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<![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]>
401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 Nussaibah 5 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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The Rachel Incident 63094957
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.]]>
304 Caroline O'Donoghue 0593535707 Nussaibah 5 4.06 2023 The Rachel Incident
author: Caroline O'Donoghue
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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Priestdaddy 31920820
When an unexpected crisis forces Lockwood and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, she must learn to live again with the family's simmering madness, and to reckon with the dark side of her religious upbringing. Pivoting from the raunchy to the sublime, from the comic to the serious, Priestdaddy is an unforgettable story of how we balance tradition against hard-won identity—and of how, having journeyed in the underworld, we can emerge with our levity and our sense of justice intact.]]>
336 Patricia Lockwood 1594633738 Nussaibah 5 3.84 2017 Priestdaddy
author: Patricia Lockwood
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2017
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/22
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Detransition, Baby 48890225 A whipsmart debut about three women—transgender and cisgender—whose lives collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires around gender, motherhood, and sex.

Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.

Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?

This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.]]>
337 Torrey Peters 0593133374 Nussaibah 5 3.94 2021 Detransition, Baby
author: Torrey Peters
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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We All Want Impossible Things 60410002 Who knows you better than your best friend? Who knows your secrets, your fears, your desires, your strange imperfect self? Edi and Ash have been best friends for over forty years. Since childhood they have seen each other through life's milestones: stealing vodka from their parents, the Madonna phase, REM concerts, unexpected wakes, marriages, infertility, children. As Ash notes, 'Edi's memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.'

So when Edi is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ash's world reshapes around the rhythms of Edi's care, from chipped ice and watermelon cubes to music therapy; from snack smuggling to impromptu excursions into the frozen winter night. Because life is about squeezing the joy out of every moment, about building a powerhouse of memories, about learning when to hold on, and when to let go.
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224 Catherine Newman 0063230895 Nussaibah 5 3.96 2022 We All Want Impossible Things
author: Catherine Newman
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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Milk Fed 54304105 The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.]]>
304 Melissa Broder 1982142499 Nussaibah 5 3.56 2021 Milk Fed
author: Melissa Broder
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.56
book published: 2021
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/21
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I'm a Fan 60151826 I'm A Fan, a single speaker uses the story of their experience in a seemingly unequal, unfaithful relationship as a prism through which to examine the complicated hold we each have on one another. With a clear and unforgiving eye, the narrator unpicks the behaviour of all involved, herself included, and makes startling connections between the power struggles at the heart of human relationships and those of the wider world, in turn offering a devastating critique of access, social media, patriarchal hetero-normative relationships, and our cultural obsession with status and how that status is conveyed.

In this incredible debut, Sheena Patel announces herself as a vital new voice in literature, capable of rendering a range of emotions and visceral experiences on the page. Sex, violence, politics, tenderness, humour—Patel handles them all with both originality and dexterity of voice.]]>
207 Sheena Patel Nussaibah 5 3.28 2022 I'm a Fan
author: Sheena Patel
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2022
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/20
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Big Swiss 60701439
One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship…]]>
336 Jen Beagin 1982153083 Nussaibah 5 3.69 2023 Big Swiss
author: Jen Beagin
name: Nussaibah
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2023
rating: 5
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