NEA Big Read Introduces New Theme “Where We Live.” Applications Now Open.

• The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears is a novel by Dinaw Mengestu about the struggles and loneliness of an Ethiopian shopkeeper in a Washington DC neighborhood undergoing gentrification. The story alternates between the present and a past in which he had to flee his country from the Red Terror of the late 1970s.

• Beloved is a novel by Toni Morrison set in Ohio in 1873 about the scars of slavery, the risk of loving, and the meaning of freedom. A formerly enslaved woman and her daughter are haunted by the past and visited by a mysterious young woman who is the same age as another daughter would have been had she not been killed.

Bless Me, Ultima is a coming-of-age novel by Rudolfo Anaya set in rural New Mexico in the 1940s. With the help of a spiritual healer, a boy faces a maze of cultural, religious,
and moral contradictions in his community of farmers, priests, cowboys, and soldiers.

Brother, I’m Dying is a memoir by Edwidge Danticat, who lived with an uncle in Haiti for over a decade before joining her parents as immigrants in the U.S. Now grown and living in Miami, she faces the death of her father and the birth of her first child while her uncle and his son are fleeing for their lives from the Haitian government and gang disputes.

The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories is a collection of prose by Jack London. Set during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98 in Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory, The Call of the Wild is told from the perspective of a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd dog in charge of a dogsled team.

Everything I Never Told You is a novel by Celeste Ng about a biracial, Chinese American family in 1970s small-town Ohio trying to understand and cope with the death of the oldest daughter. As the police try to uncover what caused her drowning in a nearby lake, the family must uncover the sister and daughter they realize they hardly knew.

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel by John Steinbeck written in 1939 about a poor family of tenant farmers devastated by the Dust Bowl who must leave their home in Oklahoma and set out for California along Route 66 with thousands of other migrants in search of a better life.

The Great Gatsby is a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald set in Long Island, New York, during the 1920s amidst the lavish parties of the nouveau riche. The narrator, a newly arrived Midwesterner, is drawn into the mysterious and tragic world of his wealthy neighbor and the woman his neighbor has always loved.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a novel by Carson McCullers set in a small Georgia mill town in the late 1930s about the isolation and hardships felt by five of the town’s misfits: a teenage girl, the town’s Black doctor, an alcoholic socialist, a café owner, and a deaf man who takes on the role as the others’ confidant.

Homegoing is a novel by African-born writer Yaa Gyasi about the legacy of chattel slavery spanning eight generations. The novel begins with the parallel lives of two half- sisters from Ghana in the 18th century and follows their descendants through periods of history that include the American Civil War and Jazz Age Harlem.

The House on Mango Street is a collection of coming-of-age vignettes by Sandra Cisneros about a year in the life of a 12-year-old Mexican American girl growing up in Chicago. She finds confidence and invents herself anew against a poor and patriarchal community.

In the Heart of the Sea is a book by Nathaniel Philbrick that tells the true story of the 19th-century whaleship Essex out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, that got rammed by a gigantic whale and inspired Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. The ship sank, sending crewmembers adrift for months as they faced storms, starvation, and disease.

Interior Chinatown is a novel by Charles Yu about a Taiwanese American man in Hollywood, California, who is doomed to play bit parts and generic Asian characters until he gets entangled in a murder case in a procedural cop show. He unravels buried legacies, pervasive stereotypes, and learns to become a new protagonist in his own story.

The Joy Luck Club is a novel by Amy Tan about four Chinese immigrant mothers in San Francisco and their four American-born daughters. Structured like a game of Mahjong, the novel lets us glimpse into their childhoods and the difficult choices each had to make as adults.

Lab Girl is a memoir by Hope Jahren, a geobiologist from rural Minnesota. A young woman finds friendship in odd places, battles bipolar disorder, perseveres through setbacks and relishes hard-earned triumphs, and becomes a respected scientist and passionate observer of the natural world.

My Ántonia is a novel by Willa Cather about an orphan boy and a young immigrant girl from Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), who move to the Nebraska prairies at the end of the 19th century. Their childhood friendship grows fragile as they are faced with bitter winters, family tragedies, and financial hardships.

Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel by Emily St. John Mandel set 20 years after a flu pandemic destroys civilization as we know it. A woman moves between the settlements of the altered world with a troupe of actors and musicians until they encounter a violent prophet who threatens the troupe’s existence.

There, There is a novel by Tommy Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. It follows the unexpectedly connected lives of 12 characters from Native American communities who travel to a big, and ultimately volatile, powwow in the city of Oakland, California.

To Live is a novel by Yu Hua, translated from Chinese into English by Michael Berry and considered one of China’s most influential books. A man transforms from a selfish wastrel to a devoted husband and father trying desperately to keep his family alive during the worst famine in Chinese history at a time of dramatic political and social change.

When the Emperor Was Divine is a novel by Julie Otsuka about a Japanese American family forced to move from their home in California to an incarceration camp in Utah following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor. They return home after two years to find that their old neighborhood is neither familiar nor hospitable.