Books
The big ideas from popular books, without giving the whole thing away. Get the GIST, then decide if you want the REST.
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Pick as many as you like: any of them matches within a group.
24 summaries
A Very Typical Family
Fifteen years after her actions sent her siblings to prison, Natalie Walker must return to Santa Cruz and reunite with them to inherit their late mother's house, in a darkly funny, tender debut about guilt, forgiveness and second chances.
Broken Country
On a Dorset sheep farm in 1968, a grieving wife's first love comes home with his young son, and a love triangle slides toward a killing and a murder trial.
Confronting Christianity
Rebecca McLaughlin takes twelve of the hardest objections to Christianity, from science and slavery to suffering and hell, and argues each one points toward faith.
Dear Edward
A twelve-year-old boy is the only survivor of a plane crash that kills his family, and must learn, slowly and with one fierce friend beside him, how to live afterward.
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to the mountains of Virginia, where a red-haired boy nobody wants narrates his way through foster care, football glory and the opioid epidemic.
Desiring God
John Piper's case for Christian Hedonism: that chasing your deepest joy in God is not selfish but the very thing that honors Him most.
Everything I Never Told You
In 1977 Ohio, the favorite daughter of a Chinese American family is found drowned in the town lake, and her parents and siblings discover how little they knew her or each other.
Gentle and Lowly
Dane Ortlund draws on Jesus's own self-description and the Puritans to argue that Christ's deepest heart toward weary sinners and sufferers is tender, eager, unwavering love.
God and the Gay Christian
Matthew Vines argues, passage by passage, that Christians who hold the Bible as fully authoritative can also bless committed same-sex relationships.
God Has a Name
John Mark Comer walks line by line through Exodus 34:6-7, where God names himself, to show how the God you picture shapes the person you become.
God's Not Dead
A campus pastor's brisk, confident tour of the scientific, philosophical and historical case for God, written for seekers, believers and skeptics alike.
Life of Pi
A sixteen-year-old Indian boy survives a shipwreck and drifts across the Pacific in a lifeboat he must share with a Bengal tiger.
Little Fires Everywhere
A wandering artist and her daughter rent a house in rule-loving Shaker Heights, and a custody fight over a baby sets two mothers, and two ways of living, against each other.
Man, Myth, Messiah
Rice Broocks argues from history that Jesus was no myth and no mere man, which leaves only one answer: the Messiah.
Never Let Me Go
Three friends from an idyllic English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for, in Kazuo Ishiguro's quiet, devastating novel about love, memory and mortality.
People to Be Loved
A New Testament scholar keeps the traditional Christian view of sex and marriage while telling the church its treatment of gay people has to change.
Sex, Jesus, and the Conversations the Church Forgot
A former LSU goalkeeper tells her own sexual story to argue that the church's silence about sex has failed a generation, and that sex is God's idea.
Tactics
Greg Koukl's friendly playbook for talking about Christian convictions by asking good questions, spotting weak arguments, and leaving a 'stone in someone's shoe' instead of starting a fight.
The Book of Enoch
The ancient Jewish apocalypse that tells of the fallen Watchers, the giants, Enoch's journeys through heaven and the coming judgment by the Son of Man.
The Electric
In the late summer of 1985, a fifteen-year-old finds an abandoned cinema that screens films made by ghosts, for ghosts, in a bittersweet coming-of-age story about loss and the magic of movies.
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
A Dead Sea Scrolls scholar argues Christianity began as a mushroom-eating fertility cult, and pays for it with his career.
The Shack
A grieving father is invited back to the cabin where his daughter was murdered and spends a weekend there talking with God in three unexpected forms.
When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chödrön's Buddhist advice for hard times: stop running from pain and uncertainty, move toward them with curiosity and kindness, and find peace right there.
Where the Crawdads Sing
Abandoned as a child in the North Carolina marsh, Kya raises herself among the gulls and tides, until the town's golden boy turns up dead and she is the one accused.