Novels that feature kindness and connection and embrace those who are struggling, marginalized or overlooked by society. They often deal with darker issues, but ultimately they are uplifting feel good stories.
When Maggie Banks arrives in Bell River to run her best friend's struggling bookstore, she expects to sell bestsellers to her small-town clientele. But running a bookstore in a town with a famously bookish history isn't easy. Bell River's literary…
Thomas Major wasn't meant to be the first man on Mars—but when the astronaut who was supposed to go dropped dead of a heart attack, he jumped at the chance. Being completely alone in space sounds heavenly to Thomas, who dislikes just about everyone…
Quirky Eleanor Oliphant struggles to relate to other people and leads a very solitary and routine life. When she and the new work IT guy from work happen to be walking down the street together, they witness an elderly man collapse on the sidewalk…
Embarking on a more than 3,000-kilometer walking journey from rural Canada to the East coast so that she can see the ocean for the first time in her life, an octogenarian woman has experiences that blur her perspectives between illusion, memory and…
A man with a secret rare condition that has enabled him to survive for centuries moves to London to become a high-school history teacher and considers defying his protective guardians' rule against falling in love when he becomes entranced by a…
An uplifting, feminist coming-of-age love story about a young woman who dreams of becoming a tattoo artist, and living life on her own terms. But this is 1985, when tattooing is still a gritty, male-dominated fringe culture, and Gina’s funky flash…
Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his 50th birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself and making connections with…
In this Swedish bestseller, Ove is a lovably miserable neighborhood curmudgeon who spends his days inspecting his community and criticizing others, judging each by how closely he follows rules and his choice of automobile (Ove cannot reason with…
Working at the local library, Aleisha reads every book on a secret list she found, which transports her from the painful realities she's facing at home, and she decides to pass the list on to a lonely widower desperate to connect with his bookworm…
In this unique and luminous debut novel a widow develops an unlikely friendship with the wise giant Pacific octopus Marcellus who reluctantly resides at the local aquarium. He slowly helps his new friend uncover the truth about her son's…
Witch Mika Moon has never felt like she belonged; as an orphaned child, she was raised by a controlling older witch named Primrose and taught to never reveal her powers. But once she's an adult she takes a risk by posting videos online in which she…
After a traumatic loss, Marcie Malone finds herself adrift on a beach in Florida. She’s driven in a haze from Atlanta to Palmetto Key, and a chunk of her memory is gone. Flint, a misanthropic elderly man who lives on the beach, finds her facedown…
After his friend, Iris, dies from a terminal illness at age 33, PR genius Smith Simonyi teams up with Iris’ sister, Jade, to make Iris’ final request—to get her blog posts published as a book—a reality. Told entirely in email exchanges and blog…
Miriam Delaney hasn’t gone farther than her backyard in three years, and has yet to deal with multiple traumas inflicted by her now-dead, allegedly insane mother and her father’s supposed death. Meanwhile, Ralph Swoon feels adrift in his marriage…
Masha, whose son drowned 12 years ago, spends her time in an old Victorian cemetery, creating stories about the inhabitants, and at the lido, where she “drowns" her grief by swimming to the deep end every morning. She befriends a fellow visitor to…
