Transformative books for transformative trips. Here are 10 books to take on a spiritual retreat.
1. The Nightingale: A Novel by Kristin Hannah
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“With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war.”
2. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
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“From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the beautiful, stunningly ambitious instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.”
3. War Cries: Unheard Voices, Unmarked Graves by Kerry Arquette
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“The devastation caused by World War II is described by historians in terms of military strategies and battles, the toll on economics, and the numbers of dead. But only the stories of those whose lives were changed or lost, can convey the true horror of the war. These were people very much like ourselves—men, women, children, siblings, poets, soldiers, students, professionals, laborers, givers, takers, jokers, dancers, lovers, dreamers, cowards and brave. Each is the hero of his own tale. Each tale underscores the uniqueness of human perception based upon personality and circumstances.
“By listening to the voices of those with stories to tell, we can grow in our appreciation of what it means to be human.
“WAR CRIES: UNHEARD STORIES, UNMARKED GRAVES provides a stage for the voices—many inspired by people present in Europe during World War II—to speak their truths.
“The characters behind the poems come from different religions, different professions, and different ideologies.Like all of us, they want to be heard. They want to be understood. Most of all…they want to be remembered.
“As long as I reside in their minds and hearts, I will never truly be gone.“
4. Sensible Shoes: A Story About the Spiritual Journey by Sharon Garlough Brown
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“Sharon Garlough Brown tells the moving story of four strangers as they embark together on a journey of spiritual formation: Hannah, a pastor who doesn’t realize how exhausted she is. Meg, a widow and recent empty-nester who is haunted by her past. Mara, a woman who has experienced a lifetime of rejection and is now trying to navigate a difficult marriage. Charissa, a hard-working graduate student who wants to get things right.”
5. Silence: A Novel by Shusaku Endo
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“Seventeenth-century Japan: Two Portuguese Jesuit priests travel to a country hostile to their religion, where feudal lords force the faithful to publicly renounce their beliefs. Eventually captured and forced to watch their Japanese Christian brothers lay down their lives for their faith, the priests bear witness to unimaginable cruelties that test their own beliefs. Shusaku Endo is one of the most celebrated and well-known Japanese fiction writers of the twentieth century, and Silence is widely considered to be his great masterpiece.”
6. Waking Maya: What if Global Transformation Started Within the Human Mind? by Warren Goldie
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“When 22-year-old Maya Burke digs up an old journal written by her father, a man she has never met, what she finds is a plan for a spiritual journey created specifically for her. As she explores its teachings, she is catapulted onto a cross-country adventure, and is swept up into a world of visions, vortexes, secret government spying programs, and a spiritual underground that has revived an ancient meditation practice that may literally change the world. Waking Maya is a thrilling, wisdom-packed quest to understand the deepest principles of our reality.”
7. What Lies Beyond the Stars by Michael Goorjhan
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“Words that ring painfully true for Adam Sheppard, a San Francisco programmer who has spent the vast majority of his 30-something years lost in the dim glow of a computer screen. On the verge of a psychotic break, Adam begins to have a recurring dream of his early childhood and the hauntingly rustic town of Mendocino, California, where he grew up. Convinced he has left something behind there, something vital to his present sanity, Adam walks away from his current life to figure out what that is.”
8. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
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“Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, THE LUMINARIES is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.”
9. The Shack: Where Tragedy Confronts Eternity by William P. Young
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“Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.”
10. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert
“Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love touched the world and changed countless lives, inspiring and empowering millions of readers to search for their own best selves.”
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