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The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb

Melanie Benjamin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Final Confession of Mabel Stark

Robert Hough · 430 pages

Traveling CircusCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Out of the Dust

Karen Hesse · 235 pages

"Dust piles up like snow across the prairie. . . ." A terrible accident has transformed Billie Jo's life, scarring her inside and out. Her mother is gone. Her father can't talk about it. And the one thing that might make her feel better -- playing the piano -- is impossible with her wounded hands. To make matters worse, dust storms are devastating the family farm and all the farms nearby. Wh

Disabled ProtagonistHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorCharacter-Driven
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The War I Finally Won

Kimberly Brubaker Bradley · 400 pages

When Ada's clubfoot is surgically fixed at last, she knows for certain that she's not what her mother said she was--damaged, deranged, crippled mentally as well as physically. She's not a daughter anymore, either. What is she? World War II continues, and Ada and her brother, Jamie, are living with their loving legal guardian, Susan, in a borrowed cottage on the estate of the formidable Lady Thorto

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Water for Elephants

Sara Gruen · 352 pages

As a young man, Jacob Jankowski was tossed by fate onto a rickety train that was home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. It was the early part of the great Depression, and for Jacob, now ninety, the circus world he remembers was both his salvation and a living hell. A veterinary student just shy of a degree, he was put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It was there

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Left Neglected

Lisa Genova · 416 pages

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Little Stars

Jacqueline Wilson · 512 pages

Hetty Feather has begun a new chapter in her life story. Escaping from Tanglefield’s Travelling Circus with her dearest friend Diamond, Hetty is determined to find them positions as glamorous music hall artistes. Hetty and Diamond quickly become the Little Stars of Mrs Ruby’s show, alongside many colourful acts – including an old friend from Hetty’s past, Flirty Bertie. But the Cavalcade proves

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The King's General

Daphne du Maurier · 371 pages

As civil war rages across England, the weak prove their courage and the privileged become traitors In this sweeping, bittersweet saga, spellbinding author Daphne du Maurier recreates a most memorable and true love story. Honor Harris was glorious and vivacious. Sir Richard Grenville was a dashing colonel and a knight. They meet on the evening of her eighteenth birthday at the Duke of Buckingham

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Miss Jane

Brad Watson · 284 pages

"Astonishing prose brings to life a forgotten woman and a lost world in a strange and bittersweet Southern pastoral. Since his award-winning debut collection of stories, Last Days of the Dog- Men, Brad Watson has been expanding the literary traditions of the South, in work as melancholy, witty, strange, and lovely as any in America. Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, he explores the

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Summer Guest

Alison Anderson · 385 pages

To keep herself occupied after recently losing her sight, Zinaida begins a diary in the summer of 1888. When a family rents a guesthouse on her family's estate, Zinaida meets and befriends Anton, the middle son, who is a doctor and a writer. As the summer progresses, Zinaida's diary becomes an intimate, introspective narrative of her singular relationship with Anton. More than a century later, Kat

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionBittersweet
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Homer & Langley

E.L. Doctorow · 208 pages

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World's Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work.Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers--the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perha

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorHistorical Fiction
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The Magician's Lie

Greer Macallister · 320 pages

The Amazing Arden is the most famous female illusionist of her day, renowned for her notorious trick of sawing a man in half on stage. One night in Waterloo, Iowa, with young policeman Virgil Holt watching from the audience, she swaps her trademark saw for a fire ax. Is it a new version of the illusion, or an all-too-real murder? When Arden's husband is found lifeless beneath the stage later that

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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The Fault in Our Stars

John Green · 318 pages

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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Me Before You

Jojo Moyes · 451 pages

Louisa Clark is an ordinary young woman living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cann

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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Peace Like a River

Leif Enger · 313 pages

"Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it's up to us to "make of it what we will." Reuben was born with no air in his lungs, and it was only when his father, Jeremiah, picked him up and commanded him to breathe that his lungs filled. Reuben struggles with debilitating asthma from then on, making him a boy

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenHistorical Fiction
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionCharacter-Driven
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Orphans of the Carnival

Carol Birch · 380 pages

From the Booker short-listed author of Jamrach's Menagerie comes the extraordinary, moving, and unsettling tale of a woman, branded a freak from birth, who becomes an international sensation but longs for genuine human connection London had the best freaks, always had. The Egyptian Hall, the Promenade of Wonders, the Siamese twins, pinheads, midgets, cannibals, giants, living skeletons, the fat, t

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionFemale LeadBittersweet
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What Is Visible

Kimberly Elkins · 321 pages

Presents a fictionalized account of the life and challenges of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf and blind woman to learn language, and those who helped her, including the founder of the Perkins Institute, with whom she was in love, and her beloved teacher.

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Giant's House

Elizabeth McCracken · 290 pages

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
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The Things We Cannot Say

Kelly Rimmer · 448 pages

Character-DrivenHistorical FictionFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Jewel

Bret Lott · 368 pages

Disabled ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenFirst Person NarratorFemale Lead
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Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster · 293 pages

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder

Traveling CircusFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionBittersweet
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Grace Williams Says It Loud

Emma Henderson · 327 pages

On her first day at the Briar Mental Institute, Grace meets Daniel. He sees a different Grace: someone to share secrets and canoodle with, someone to fight for. Debonair Daniel, who can type with his feet, fills Grace's head with tales from Paris and the world beyond. This is Grace's story: her life, its betrayals and triumphs, disappointment and loss, the taste of freedom; roses, music and tiny s

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Broken Kingdoms

N.K. Jemisin · 407 pages

"In the city of Shadow, beneath the World Tree, alleyways shimmer with magic and godlings live hidden among mortalkind. Oree Shoth, a blind artist, takes in a strange homeless man on an impulse. This act of kindness ebgulfs Oree in a nightmarish conspiracy. Someone, somehow, is murdering godlings, leaving their desecrated bodies all over the city. And Oree's guest is at the heart of it..."

Disabled ProtagonistFirst Person NarratorCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead

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