Summer Challenge 2026: Recommended By An Author You Admire

Looking for help completing your Summer Challenge Bingo Card? Here are some books recommended by well-known authors.

Updated June 27, 2026
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Words without music : a memoir
Glass, Philip
Paper Book
The long-awaited memoir by "the most prolific and popular of all contemporary composers" (New York Times). A world-renowned composer of symphonies, operas, and film scores, Philip Glass has, almost single-handedly, crafted the dominant sound of late-twentieth-century classical...

Recommended by George Saunders.

My brilliant friend. Book one, childhood, adolescence
Ferrante, Elena.
Paper Book
#1 BEST BOOK OF THE CENTURY - NEW YORK TIMES Now an HBO series: the first volume in the New York Times-bestselling "enduring masterpiece" about a lifelong friendship between two women from Naples (The Atlantic). Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the...

Recommended by Esi Edugyan.

In praise of blood : the crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front
Rever, Judi
Paper Book
A FINALIST FOR THE HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE: A stunning work of investigative reporting by a Canadian journalist who has risked her own life to bring us a deeply disturbing history of the Rwandan genocide that takes the true measure of Rwandan head of state Paul Kagame. ...

Recommended by Esi Edugyan.

Nîtisânak
Nixon, Lindsay
Paper Book
Lindsay Nixon's nitisanak honours blood and chosen kin with equal care. A groundbreaking memoir spanning nations, prairie punk scenes, and queer love stories, it is woven around grief over the loss of their mother. It also explores despair and healing through community and family, and being torn...

Recommended by Billy-Ray Belcourt.

Empire of wild
Dimaline, Cherie
Paper Book
INDIGO'S #1 BEST BOOK OF 2019 NATIONAL BESTSELLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE MARROW THIEVES, THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER, MULTI-AWARD WINNER AND CANADA READS FINALIST "Wildly entertaining and profound and essential." --Tommy Orange, The New York Times<...

Recommended by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

Sula. -
Morrison, Toni.
Paper Book
Toni Morrison's first novel,The Bluest Eye(1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written--as John Leonard said inThe New York Times--in a prose "so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry." Sulahas the same power, the same...

Recommended by John Green.

Kamouraska
Hébert, Anne
Paper Book
A classic of Canadian literature by the great Quebecoise writer, Kamouraska is based on a real nineteenth-century love-triangle in rural Quebec. It paints a poetic and terrifying tableau of the life of Elisabeth d'Aulnieres: her marriage to Antoine Tassy, squire of Kamouraska; his violent murder;...

Recommended by Margaret Atwood.

The remains of the day
Ishiguro, Kazuo
Paper Book
A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Recommended by R.F. Kuang.

Piranesi
Clarke, Susanna
Paper Book
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling fantasy sensation that Madeline Miller called, "a miraculous and luminous feat of storytelling," Piranesi is an intoxicating, hypnotic novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.<...

Recommended by R.F. Kuang.

Kokkyō no minami, taiyō no nishi
Murakami, Haruki
Paper Book

Recommended by Kazuo Ishiguro.


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