10 best books of September 2016, according to Amazon's editors

With a chill in the air, it's the perfect time to head back into the house and curl up under a blanket with a good book. Looking for a captivating novel? Intriguing nonfiction? You're sure to find something that suits your interests on this list of the 10 best books to be released this month, compiled by Amazon editors. Amazon senior editor Chris Schluep also offers his thoughts on various titles.

1. 'Mischling,' by Affinity Konar

This new novel by Konar (author of "The Illustrated Version of Things") tells the story of Stasha and Pearl, twins who are sent to Auschwitz and become subjects of experiments by Josef Mengele. While the book obviously has some very troubling themes, it "also manages to be uplifting at the same time," Schluep says. "...She's a beautiful, precise writer."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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