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🧲 Books like this

A Child of a Crackhead

Shameek Speight · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

White Lines

Tracy Brown · 512 pages

Fleeing her home to escape the abuse of her mother's boyfriend, Jada seeks refuge with Born, the neighborhood kingpin, but her new life is threatened by crack addiction, prostitution, a struggle to rebuild her life, and a stormy romance with a street hustler.

Substance AbuseAddictionChild AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
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Resolution

Denise Mina · 421 pages

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year"Resolution can stand alone, battered and proud, as a class-conscious crime novel that dares to tell the ugly truth." -New York Times Book ReviewJust as Maureen O'Donnell is struggling to give up drinking, she faces her most formidable challenges yet: testifying against her boyfriend's murderer and the return of her abusive father. Irresistibly blending

AddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseChild Abuse
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

AddictionSubstance AbuseChild AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
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False Witness

Karin Slaughter · 448 pages

AddictionSubstance AbuseChild AbuseCrime
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Where 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"--

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistAddictionCrime
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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

Child AbuseSubstance AbuseAddictionWorking-Class Protagonist
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

AddictionSubstance AbuseChild AbuseCrime
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A Piece of Cake

Cupcake Brown · 480 pages

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The heart-wrenching, uplifting tale about a woman named Cupcake “[Cupcake] Brown’s confessional . . . memoir is one you can’t easily put down. Her life is nothing short of a miracle.”—Chicago Sun-Times There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-dea

Substance AbuseAddictionChild AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
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Ham on Rye

Charles Bukowski · 288 pages

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of

AddictionSubstance AbuseChild AbuseWorking-Class Protagonist
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The Glorious Heresies

Lisa McInerney · 378 pages

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions,

Substance AbuseAddictionCrimeWorking-Class Protagonist
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Long Bright River

Liz Moore · 473 pages

A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?

Substance AbuseAddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
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Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn · 297 pages

WICKED above her hipbone, GIRL across her heart Words are like a road map to reporter Camille Preaker's troubled past. Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, Camille's first assignment from the second-rate daily paper where she works brings her reluctantly back to her hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.NASTY on her kneecap, BABYDOLL on her legSince she left town eight years a

Substance AbuseAddictionCrimeChild Abuse
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Devil's Peak

Deon Meyer · 420 pages

Bennie Griessel may be losing his battle with alcohol but he still knows enough to head up the police team tracking 'Artemis', a vigilante killer who targets child murderers. The killer is in fact Thobela Mpayipheli, a former freedom fighter robbed of everything by the murder of his son. And when Griessel's daughter is kidnapped, his world and Thobela's converge towards a devastating climax. A bri

AddictionChild AbuseSubstance AbuseCrime
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Ordinary Beauty

Laura Wiess · 290 pages

After suffering years of neglect, Sayre Bellavia wonders if her addict mother, who is now lying near death in a hospital, ever loved her.

AddictionSubstance AbuseChild AbuseDark
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Glass

Ellen Hopkins · 696 pages

"one little hit, my heart revs high, then settles into quick step-mode. How i've missed that race and pound. How i've missed the lack of control." crank, glass, ice, crystal, whatever you call it, it's all the same. a monster. kristina thinks she can control it. Now with a baby to care for, she's determined to be the one deciding when and how much. the one calling the shots, but the monster is

AddictionChild AbuseSubstance AbuseDark
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver · 159 pages

In his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

Substance AbuseAddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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On the Savage Side

Tiffany McDaniel · 464 pages

Substance AbuseAddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistDark
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The Killing Of The Tinkers

Ken Bruen · 254 pages

Back in Galway and back to his old drinking habits, Jack Taylor agrees to assist a gypsy in an investigation into the deaths of a number of members of the gypsy clan, deaths that the Guards, the Irish police, are reluctant to investigate.

AddictionSubstance AbuseCrimeDark
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Doctor Sleep

Stephen King · 532 pages

The now middle-aged Dan Torrance (the boy protagonist of The Shining) must save a very special twelve-year-old girl from a tribe of murderous paranormals. On highways across America, a tribe of people called The True Knot travel in search of sustenance. They look harmless; mostly old, lots of polyester, and married to their RVs. But as Dan Torrance knows, and spunky twelve-year-old Abra Stone

Substance AbuseAddictionChild AbuseDark
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Before I Let You Go

Kelly Rimmer · 384 pages

Substance AbuseChild AbuseAddictionDark
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Affliction

Russell Banks · 355 pages

Wade Whitehouse is an unlikely protagonist of a tragedy. Wade looms in one's mind as a bluecollar American Everyman afflicted by the dark secret of the macho tradition, his tale told by his articulate, equally-scarred younger brother. "Part thriller, part psychological study, part indictment of the American way of violence." Wade Whitehouse is an improbable protagonist for a tragedy. A well-digger

Child AbuseSubstance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCrime
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The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling · 512 pages

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no

AddictionChild AbuseSubstance AbuseDark
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Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 126 pages

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

Child AbuseAddictionWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance Abuse
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The Bat

Jo Nesbo · 369 pages

Follows Harry Hole's efforts to solve the murder of a television celebrity whose demise is linked to a string of serial killings. Inspector Harry Hole of the Oslo Crime Squad is dispatched to Sydney to observe a murder case. Harry is free to offer assistance, but he has firm instructions to stay out of trouble. The victim is a Norwegian woman who is a minor celebrity back home. Harry befriends

AddictionSubstance AbuseCrimeDark

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