What Doesn’t Kill You: A Life with Chronic Illness – Lessons from a Body in Revolt by Tessa Miller

Tessa Miller was a writer in New York city and in her twenties. She suddenly began getting pain in her stomach. The pain would consume her life that she had to take sick days from work, was attached to her bathroom and her bed. When her family finally convinced her to go to the hospital it became a grueling struggle of procedures, misdiagnoses, and infections. When she was finally told that she had Crohn’s disease Miller faced the reality of accepting that she will never get better.

Today three in five adults in the U.S suffer form a chronic disease. Whether the illness be arthritis, Crohn’s, diabetes, endometriosis, multiple sclerosis, or any other disease, many people endure these illness emotionally as well as physically. Miller uses her personal experiences to look at the cultural reality of living with a lifetime diagnosis and offers wisdom and a positive outlook on how to accept and learn to cope with it.

Brood by Jackie Polzin

 A narrator who has no name, owns a chicken coop consisting of Gloria, Gam Gam, Darkness and Miss Hennepin County. In a year the narrator tries to keep the four chickens alive and safe despite the freezing nights of winter, melting summer, a tornado, predators and the fear of what the future may hold. This novel brings the reader a new perspective on motherhood, grief, hope and serenity.

Big Girl Small Town by Michelle Gallen

Majella is comfortable when the spotlight isn’t on her or when the neighbors in her small town in Northern Ireland don’t stare. She lives a good bland life with her alcoholic mother, working in the local chip shop and lets the days go by. Same clothes, same dinner and binge watches old DVDS of Dallas from bed. But the thoughts that linger in her mind are that she doesn’t know where her father is and that there is a divide between Protestants and Catholics in her town that is interfering. When the death of her granny comes to soon it makes her realize there is more to life than what she has in this small town and that there is more beyond it.

This Close to Okay by Leesa Cross-Smith

Tallie Clark is a divorced therapist who was on her way home from work one October rainy night and spots a man who was by the side of a bridge. Tallie pulls over jumps into the pouring rain and convinces the man to get a cup of coffee with her. He eventually agrees and they head back to her place. As the week goes by Tallie tries to make the guy who she learns his name is Emmett, comfortable. She gets a bit nervous telling Emmett this is her day job but she has her secrets and he has his, and both of them need healing. Swtichign from Tallie and Emmett’s perspective we soon get to find the reason for Emmett being by the bridge as well as Tallie’s truth about her own struggles in her life.

My Year Abroad by Chang- rae Lee

Tiller is an American college student with a good heart and little aspirations. Pong Lou is a wild creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees potential in Tiller beyond his average exterior and decides to mentor him. When Pong brings Tiller along to a trip across Asia, he becomes an average man to a talented prodigy which brings him a new outlook on the world, Pong, and of himself.  an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure – and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection. This novel explores mentorship, capitalism Western and Eastern culture, while getting the point of views from an American man in Asia and a Chinese man in America.