What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWhere All Light Tends to Go
David Joy · 289 pages
"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--
South of Heaven
Jim Thompson · 229 pages
Thompson's classic novel describes the underworld of desperate men that inhabited the part of Texas known as "South of Heaven" in the 1920's. Laying a gas pipeline with a motley work crew of hoboes, alcoholics, jail-birds and petty criminals, Tommy Burwell knows that he isn't doing himself any favors. But he cannot extricate himself from the cycle of violence and ruthlessness that ties him to th
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages
"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi
Razorblade Tears
S. A. Cosby · 247 pages
*INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* One of Barack Obama's Recommended Reads for Summer • New York Times Notable Book • NPR’s Best Books of 2021 • Washington Post’s Best Thriller and Mystery Books of the Year • TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2021 • New York Public Library’s Best Books of the Year • Goodreads Choice Award Nominee • Book of the Month’s Book of the Year Finalist “Provocative,
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward · 274 pages
They heard it on the radio. A hurricane is coming, threatening the town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Esch's hard-drinking father can feel it in his bones. Esch and her brothers are trying to help prepare, but there are other worries too. Skeetah is watching his prized pit bull, helpless as her new litter dies one by one. Randall, when not preoccupied with basketball, is busy looking after the you
Bastard Out of Carolina
Dorothy Allison · 309 pages
Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.
Darkness, Take My Hand
Dennis Lehane · 480 pages
The master of the new noir, Dennis Lehane magnificently evokes the dignity and savagery of working-class Boston in this terrifying tale of darkness and redemption. Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's latest client is a prominent Boston psychiatrist running scared from a vengeful Irish mob. The private investigators know something about cold-blooded retribution. Born and bred on the mean streets of
The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga · 304 pages
Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.
Pulp
Charles Bukowski · 192 pages
Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was twenty-four, and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California, on M
King of Ashes
S.A. Cosby · 352 pages
When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family business—together. Neveah and their father, who run the Carruthers Crematorium in the run-down central Virginia town of Jefferson Run, see death up close every day. But mortali
What Came Before He Shot Her
Elizabeth George · 736 pages
The brutal, inexplicable death of Inspector Thomas Lynley's wife has left Scotland Yard shocked and searching for answers. Even more horrifying is that the trigger was apparently pulled by a twelve-year-old boy. Who is he? Where did he come from? And what were the circumstances that led to his final act of desperation?That story begins on the other side of London, in rough North Kensington, where
Starling House
Alix E. Harrow · 347 pages
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK “This book has everything you could possibly want this fall...a cursed town, a haunted house, a vivid & eerie setting—plus, characters willing to risk everything.” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club October ’23 Pick) Starling House is a gorgeous, modern gothic fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of Jan
Native Son
Richard Wright · 398 pages
Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: [Early Works](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL506449W)
The Light Ages
Ian R. MacLeod · 489 pages
The Paperboy
Pete Dexter · 313 pages
Ward James is a reclusive, obsessed young reporter, half of a famous investigative team in Miami, the son of a newspaper family. His younger brother, Jack, recently expelled from the University of Florida's swimming team, and then from the university itself, drives a delivery truck for their father's paper in northern Florida. The brothers are brought together when Ward returns home to investigat
A Walk on the Wild Side
Nelson Algren · 346 pages
With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern
When We Were Silent
Fiona McPhillips · 320 pages
No Beast So Fierce
Edward Bunker · 301 pages
Devil in a Blue Dress
Walter Mosley · 219 pages
In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet.
The Postman Always Rings Twice
James M. Cain · 128 pages
Frank Chambers, un trotamundos sin empleo, narra en primera persona la atracción que siente por Cora Papadakis, la esposa de un emigrante de origen griego propietario de una taberna en California, y cómo se vuelven amantes unidos por el ardor y la ambición. Pero no será tan fácil librarse del viejo marido. Y habrá que contar, además, con el inescrutable destino: ese cartero que siempre llama dos v
Whoreson
Donald Goines · 319 pages
Whoreson Jones, the novel's hero, is the son of a beautiful black prostitute and an unknown white john. By the age of sixteen, he is a full-fledged pimp, cold-blooded and ruthless.
The Long Home
William Gay · 257 pages
"He lay on a tabled shelf of limestone and watched the slow, majestic roll of the fall constellations. He realized with something akin to regret that he had no names to affix to them though he'd known them all his life. The stars looked bright and close and earlier an orange harvest moon had cradled up out of the pines so huge he felt he could reach up and touch it. By its light the Mormon Springs