Favorite Books of 2005
Discover the best books of 2005 in this curated list of must-read fiction, featuring timeless classics like *The Kite Runner* and *Mama Day*, alongside powerful favorites by Bebe Moore Campbell and Gloria Naylor.
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Upstate
by Kalisha Buckhanon
A powerful coming-of-age novel, in the vein of "The Color Purple," is filled with tragedy, struggle, love, and triumph.
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Playing My Mother's Blues
by Valerie W. Wesley
An emotionally rich and flavorful novel of past and present, loss and fulfillment is penned by the renowned author of "Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do."
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Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense, this book "resonates with genuine excitement … a big, strong, admirable novel” (New York Times Book Review). On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
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72 Hour Hold
by Bebe Moore Campbell
Fed up with the mental health community and desperate to save her daughter, who is suffering from bipolar disorder, Keri enlists the assistance of the Program, an illegal group of radicals who have rejected the established psychiatric system.
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Freshwater Road
by Denise Nicholas
Celeste Tyree, a young black collegian, leaves Michigan for Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help found a Freedom School and a voter registration project. As Freedom Summer unfolds, Celeste confronts not only the political realities of race and poverty in this tiny town, but also truths about herself and her own family.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption, and it is also about the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies. The first Afghan novel to be written in English, The Kite Runner tells a sweeping story of family, love, and friendship against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before, bringing to mind the large canvases of the Russian writers of the nineteenth century. But just as it is old-fashioned in its narration, it is contemporary in its subject-the devastating history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years. As emotionally gripping as it is tender, The Kite Runner is an unusual and powerful debut.
