Mass. Center for the Book Reading Challenge: June 2025

"A Secret History of Witches follows five generations of women -- all of whom happen to be witches -- from nineteenth-century Brittany to London during World War II. Brittany, 1821. After Grand-mère Ursule gives her life to save her family, their magic seems to die with her. Even so, they fight to keep the old ways alive, practicing half-remembered spells and arcane rites in hopes of a revival. And when their youngest daughter comes of age, magic...

"Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children -- four daughters...

Ruby Lennox is conceived to the twelve strokes of her great-grandmother's clock. Born in her father's absense (he's courting a stranger at the Dog and Hare), she is delivered under the new reign of Queen Elizabeth II by an angry doctor late for dinner. Beginning as a cluster of cells in her mother's womb, Ruby narrates the epic tale of her life and all the lives that led to it. Many end in death, as lives tend to - her family has a knack for getting...

"The acclaimed, bestselling author--winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize--tells the enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families' lives. One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining...

On a visit to San Francisco, Kiku finds herself transported in time back to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II.

"It's 2034 and Jake Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world's last remaining forests. It's 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, fallen from a ladder and sprawled on his broken back, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It's 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests:...

"These Ghosts are Family centers on Abel and Vera Paisley are a working-class Jamaican couple, striving to build a better life for their children. Abel travels to London in the early 1960s in search of fortune. Instead, he sees an opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life by faking his death and assuming a new identity. Vera, now a widow, is racked with guilt over her husband's "death" and takes out her grief on her children, Irene and Vincent....

"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...

"After the death of her beloved grandmother, a Cuban-American woman travels to Havana, where she discovers the roots of her identity--and unearths a family secret hidden since the revolution... Havana, 1958. The daughter of a sugar baron, nineteen-year-old Elisa Perez is part of Cuba's high society, where she is largely sheltered from the country's growing political unrest--until she embarks on a clandestine affair with a passionate revolutionary......

Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.