The Pearl that Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

Two stories - Afghanistan in the early 1900's and Afghanistan today - both tales of women who must make difficult decisions to survive.  Rahima is the second of five daughters in a contemporary Afghan family.  To make it possible for someone in this family of women to move freely in town, she becomes Rahim - a bacha posh - a girl who will be treated as a male in society. The entire community joins in the deceit.  She is free to go to school, shop in the market, play soccer with the boys - all freedoms she relishes.  But one of her favorite things is listening to her aunt Khala Shaima tell the story of Bibi Shekiba, her great, great grandmother who risked a great deal to survive in the early twentieth century.  As Rahim's father falls prey to the affects of opium and the family descends into poverty, she must become Ramina again so that she and her two sisters can be married off.  She is 15.  Her younger sister is 13.  The results are tragic. It is Shaima's story that provides Rahima the courage to escape a hopelessly restricted life and a brutal marriage.  It makes one ponder the difference between superficial change and fundamental change - certainly in this culture and just a surely in our own.

Camino Island by John Grisham

I am not a Grisham reader but Kirk suggested I might like this because it is a book about the black market buying and selling of rare books.  Five rare F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts disappear from the Princeton University Library.  The thieves and just about everyone else loose track of the books as they pass through various sketchy hands with big money.  The unnamed company hoping to return the books to the library approach a young novelist with serious writers block to help.  Mercer Mann has serious debt and a family connection to the small town on Camino Island.   The company believes Bruce Cable, quirky but successful owner of Bay Books, has the books.  They offer to payoff Mercer's debt in addition to a significant salary if she will use all her "skills" to get close to Bruce and find a way through his security systems to the books.  It was a relatively bloodless romp and a great ending - not the kind of serious thriller I imagine from Grisham.  You kind of wonder if he wasn't reading a good book while vacationing in a place like Camino Island and just got inspired.

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists reads like a lot of related stories which center on a dying English language newspaper being published in Rome.  The paper was begun in the 1950's by wealthy American, Cyrus Ott for reasons not revealed until the end. By 2004 it is in the hands of his disinterested grandson Oliver.  Each chapter centers around one individual employed by the paper at one time or another.  As the reader, I found myself often wanting to go back to previous stories to see if I was connecting the dots properly.  It is about the world of journalism, the stories journalists tell and secrets they keep - many about their own lives.   I liked The Rise and Fall of Great Powers better.

The Address by Fiona Davis

Another title for NYC lovers.  The address referenced is the Dakota - one of the most identifiable buildings in New York City.  In 1884, young Sara Smythe leaves England to be the new manager of a new apartment building being designed by Theo Camden.  Over the top in every way, he hopes to draw the rich and famous into what is then almost considered countryside.  In 1985, Bailey Camden has just completed a stint in rehab.  When the design company she had worked for refuses to rehire her, she takes a job coordinating the renovation of her cousin Melinda's apartment in the Dakota.  And so the stories weave back and forth.  There is an inheritance at stake and a murder to solve and so much history.  Great escapist stuff while isolating with COVID-19.

The woman of No Importance by Sonia Purnell

American Virginia Hall was brought up to marry well and behave. Not likely.  A lover of adventure and great with languages, she aspired to a job in the state department in Europe.  An accident while on holiday in Turkey resulted in the loss of her leg below the knee and she soon found her career offers limited to secretarial positions.  But Europe was in the midst of WW11 and she was not going to safely sit at a desk and watch.  Refusing to accept any limitation from her prosthetic leg (who she names Cuthbert ), her language skills lead the British espionage agency to place her in France and eventually as an organizer for the resistance.  At some points this seemed a very journalistic impersonal telling of the events of the war when it was England alone against Nazi Germany.  When she is the center of the story, when it is her amazing story being examined, it reads much better.  Add it to Hidden Figures, The Woman who Smashed Codes and all the other stories now being told of the contributions that women have made and for some reason just never seem to be part of the bigger history we have learned.

Syria's Secret Library by Mike Thomson

The city of Daraya, Syria was bombed endlessly in the years around 2011.  Feared to be a rebel stronghold, residents lived under a government controlled siege until 2014 when anyone who remained in the city was rounded up, forced unto green buses and moved into refugee camps in the northern part of the country.  During those years of destruction and hunger, a group of young people searched the bombed and abandoned buildings for books.  In a secret underground room they created a library.  The "head librarian" was fourteen.
Why?  In various ways, those young people who risked both the gathering and the reading of books were saying, "You can destroy my home. You can starve my body.  But you cannot own my mind.  You cannot limit my thoughts. You cannot keep me from being the most of me I can be."  The war in Syria has been a travesty against humanity.  The evil that makes war happen always is.  But just as certain are the heroic few who push back against that evil - sometimes with powerful protests and sometime with hidden libraries.
Thomson is a journalist for the BBC who covered the war in Syria and personally knew the individuals and the war in this story.  It deserved telling.

The Ragged Edge of Night by Olivia Hawker

It is the final years of WW11, and Anton, forced to give up his friars frock, retreats to a small village outside of Stuttgart to atone for a past wrong.  He has answered an ad from a widow left with three children who is looking for a man to care for all of them in wartime.  Elizabeth is clear that she is not interested in another husband although they must be married for proprieties sake.  Anton sees caring for this one family as a way to assuage his guilt.  He long ago committed to celibacy so the arrangement works just fine.  But the evil that is Nazi Germany finds its way to their village and Anton and Elizabeth feel compelled to respond in anyway they can.  Anton risks his life as a messenger for the Red Orchestra resistance.  Elizabeth takes a stand against the man in the village assigned to guarantee the village loyalty to Hitler.  As their involvement becomes more and more complicated, I was prepared to hate the probable ending.  But this is a real story - part of the author's family history - so the ending was brave and good and right after all.