Books with category 🔆 Empowerment
Displaying 6 books

Simply More

2025

by Cynthia Erivo

In this vulnerable and enlightening book of life lessons, globally renowned performer Cynthia Erivo draws from her singular experience to show us how to embrace being “too much” and to live up to the fullest iteration of ourselves.


It is never too late to build the life you’re seeking.


Cynthia Erivo learned the music to Wicked a decade before she needed it, not knowing those same lyrics would change her life. Now she has performed those songs on the world stage, showing us there is always time to keep discovering ourselves. And to illustrate that it’s often the parts of ourselves we are told to bury that make us shine.


In a series of powerful, personal vignettes, Cynthia reflects on the ways she has grown as an actor and human and the practices she’s learned over years of performing and reminds us all we are capable of so much more than we think.


We all have hopes and dreams that we want to bring across the finish line. We all falter and take missteps. In this book, Cynthia draws from her experiences running marathons, both real and metaphorical, onstage and onscreen, to show how each challenge can help us. She urges readers to lean into the wisdom of their bodies, to understand and strive for a physical and mental balance. Because when we chase our deepest desires, each small step leads us closer to where we want to go.

All the Way to the River

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare? An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the #1 bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic.

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love inspired millions of readers to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery. A decade later, Big Magic empowered countless others to live their most creative lives. Now comes another landmark book—about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.

In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: The two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if the love of your life—and the person you most trusted in the world—became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance, or craving—and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.

Full of Myself

In this vulnerable exploration of personal identity, the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Still Here chronicles her efforts to live as her full self in a society that wants women—and Black women in particular—to do anything but that.

At the height of her success as an antiracism educator and writer, Austin Channing Brown reached a crossroads. “I love my work,” she writes, “and I am tired. Tired of protesting. Tired of ‘saving democracy.' Tired of expending all the energy it takes to bust out of America’s tiny boxes.” She began to ask, “What do I deserve, not just as a citizen but as a human?”

Full of Myself is her answer to that question. Weaving personal narrative with perceptive social commentary, she offers a look at the mechanisms that limit who Black women are allowed to be—at work, at home, in community—and the defining moments when she decided that all the women within her should be free. From skinny dipping in the ocean to becoming a mom, she delves into the drama of life and invites women to begin defining themselves not by the tiny boxes handed to us, but as a people born free—free in spirit, free in hope, free in joy.

For women seeking to understand the true roots of their burnout, or anyone wondering what it means to live joyfully in a hostile world, Full of Myself is a breath of fresh air and an invitation to full humanity.

Maggie; or, A Man and A Woman Walk Into a Bar

2025

by Katie Yee

A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel that grapples with grief, motherhood, and myths—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart.

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie. A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.

Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.

In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.

Ten Incarnations of Rebellion

2025

by Vaishnavi Patel

From the New York Times bestselling author of Kaikeyi comes an epic and daring novel that imagines an alternate version of 1960s India that was never liberated from the British, and a young woman’s struggle to change the tides of history.

Kalki Divekar grows up a daughter of Kingston—a city the British built on the ashes of Bombay. The older generation, including her father, have been lost to the brutal hunt for rebels. Young men are drafted to fight wars they will never return from. And the people of her city are more interested in fighting one another than facing their true oppressors.

When tragedy strikes close to home, Kalki begins to play a dangerous game with small acts of resistance, tempered by cautious, level-headed Yashu and fortified by Fauzia, whose dreams of the future awaken Kalki’s heart. Together, they found Kingston’s new independence movement, obtaining jobs working for the British while secretly planning to destroy the empire from the inside out. But one wrong move means certain death, and when facing threats from all quarters, Kalki must decide whether it’s more important to be a hero or to survive.

Set over the course of a decade and told as ten moments from Kalki’s life that mirror the Dashavatara, the ten avatars of Vishnu, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion is a sweeping, deeply felt speculative novel of empowerment, friendship, self-determination, and the true meaning of freedom.

My Name is Emilia del Valle

In this spellbinding historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

In San Francisco 1866, an Irish nun, left pregnant and abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia Del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.


To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of sixteen, she begins to publish pulp fiction under a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can't contain her sense of adventure any longer, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at the San Francisco Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.


As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, along with Eric, and while there, begins to uncover the truth about her father and the country that represents her roots. But as the war escalates, Emilia finds herself in danger and at a crossroads, questioning both her identity and her destiny.


A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.

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