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End-of-the-Year Contest 2014

Congratulations to the winners of our 2014 End-of-the-Year Contest! One Grand Prize winner received all 32 of Carol Fitzgerald's Bookreporter.com Bets On picks from 2014, while 32 others won a copy of one of these titles. You can see all the winners below, along with 2014's Bets On selections.

Nadia Hashimi, author of The Pearl that Broke Its Shell

In Kabul, 2007, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age. A century earlier, her great-aunt, Shekiba, saved herself and built a new life the same way. Crisscrossing in time, THE PEARL THAT BROKE ITS SHELL interweaves the tales of these two women separated by a century who share similar destinies.

Week of January 5, 2015

Releases for the week of January 5th include MR. MERCEDES, Stephen King's bestseller that finds three unlikely heroes trying to stop a lone killer from blowing up thousands; THE ACCIDENT by Chris Pavone, in which the lives of a veteran CIA operative, a literary agent and an author collide as the latter's book begins its dangerous march toward publication; THE PEARL THAT BROKE ITS SHELL, Nadia Hashimi's debut novel that interweaves the tales of two women separated by a century who share similar destinies; and JFK IN THE SENATE: Pathway to the Presidency, the first book to deal exclusively with John F. Kennedy's Senate years, as author John T. Shaw looks at how the young Senator was able to catapult himself on the national stage.

The Pearl that Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi

May 2014

While I read a lot, a book like THE PEARL THAT BROKE ITS SHELL by Nadia Hashimi is one that will stay with me and also made me feel grateful for where I live. It opens in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2007, where Rahima lives with her mother, sisters and opium-addicted father. The only way that she can leave the house is by adopting the bacha posh custom of dressing like a boy, which she can do until her body matures. In this way, she attends school and moves freely around their village. But eventually she must become a girl again. At that point, she and her two sisters are married off to give the family some much-needed money, as well as a pipeline to opium for their father. What happens to Rahima is not new to her family. A century before, her great-aunt Shekiba, who was orphaned, also adopted a disguise as a man to survive. Their stories are intertwined, and it makes for a very compelling read.

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