Famine Ships, Silk Road Stories, and a Flood of Poetry: An Odd Week for Action & Adventure

by Betta Ferrendelli

A young prosecutor walks away from a promising career to fight forced sterilization on behalf of a mentally challenged woman, and she has to face her own demons along the way. The fight here is in the courtroom, not on a battlefield. At 4.16 with over 400 ratings, it's the lowest of the fiction picks, but that's a big pool of readers, and legal drama fans should give it a look.

by Wes Snowden

This is the closest thing to a true adventure this week. It follows the Great Irish famine out to the rough shores of the New World, with love, ambition and revenge piled on top. It sits at 4.55 with just over 200 ratings, and the blurb brags about 15,000 downloads, which I'd take with a grain of salt. Still, if you like sweeping historical sagas with a lot of melodrama, this is the one to grab first.

by Xuemo

Not an adventure at all, and I'd rather say so than pretend. This is a reflective novel about trauma, forgiveness and loving again after loss. A reader says it helped them let go of inner turmoil and stop fretting over trivial gains and losses. It's at 4.74 from fewer than 60 ratings, so the score is very high but the sample is small. It's best for quiet, emotionally heavy reading, and the translation from Chinese is part of the appeal.

“This book helped me let go of much of my inner turmoil. We often dwell on trivial things, worry about gains and losses, and feel confused about the unknown, filling our ordinary days with restlessness. Yet in the face of life and death, all trivial troubles and regrets seem insignificant. The...”

by Tejas Desai

This is book two of The Human Tragedy, and it's billed as the Great American Pandemic Novel. Reviewers describe an ambitious mix of satire and short stories. The blurb's claim of 35 literary honors is a lot of hype, but a 4.67 from 60 ratings suggests it lands for people who like big, weird, experimental fiction. I'd skip it if you want a straightforward plot, and you may want to start with book one.

“This book was entered in The Wishing Shelf Book Awards. This is what our readers thought: Title: Bad Americans: Part 1 Author: Tejas Desai Star Rating: 5 Stars Number of Readers: 15 Stats Editing: 10/10 Writing Style: 9/10 Content: 9/10 Cover: 5/5 Of the 15 readers: 15 would read another book by thi”

by Xuemo

These stories are set along the ancient Silk Road and deal with love, faith and hope. The blurb highlights 'Old Man Xinjiang,' which The Guardian named among the finest short stories, and that alone makes it worth the download. It has a 4.63 from around 50 ratings and no written reviews yet. The setting gives it the strongest feel of travel and distance on this list, so it's a decent pick for armchair wanderers.

by Dana Lockhart

A poetry collection built around floods and storms, organized into five seas of emotion that include sorrow, wrath, fear and love. It has the lowest score of the week at 3.79 from 33 ratings, so it won't be for everyone. Readers do say several poems carry real wisdom and resonate, and the couple of reviews I saw were warm. Poetry readers who like weather as a metaphor should be happy, and it's free.

“So many good poems in this collection. So many with deep or powerful meanings. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the different poems. My top 2 faves were "Friend" and "Undead" but I enjoyed so many of them I can't list them all. I won this from a Goodreads giveaway. All of the statements above are my...”