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Vinegar Hill

A. Manette Ansay · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Burnt Sugar

Avni Doshi · 240 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenEmotional Abuse
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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante · 480 pages

In 2012, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker’s James Wood described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” F

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Everything I Never Told You

Celeste Ng · 300 pages

"Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unabl

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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When She Was Good

Philip Roth · 306 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Harvesting the Heart

Jodi Picoult · 453 pages

Jodi Picoult earned rave notices for her debut novel, Songs of the Humpback Whale. Now this gifted young writer turns her considerable literary talents to the story of a young woman overcome by the demands of having a family. Written with astonishing clarity and evocative detail, convincing in its depiction of emotional pain, love, and vulnerability, Harvesting the Heart recalls the writing of Ali

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenEmotional Abuse
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Bee Season

Myla Goldberg · 288 pages

"Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSlow-Paced
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The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Thorn Birds

Colleen McCullough · 573 pages

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Of Bees and Mist

Erick Setiawan · 407 pages

From high in the house that stands on the hill, young Meridia watches her stern father Gabriel, disappear off into a mist each night and her proud mother speaking to her pots and pans in strange language ... A haunting and mythical debut from a major new literary talent.

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 400 pages

Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love, and destined for greatness. A decade later, their marriage is still the env

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Witch's Kind

Louisa Morgan · 440 pages

Marriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenDomestic AbuseLiterary Fiction
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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.

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenEmotional AbuseLiterary Fiction
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Three Strong Women

Marie NDiaye · 277 pages

Forty-year-old Norah leaves Paris, her family and her career as a lawyer to visit her father in Dakar. It is an uncomfortable reunion - she is asked to use her skills as a lawyer to get her brother out of prison - and ultimately the trip endangers her marriage and her relationship with her own daughter, and drives her to the very edge of madness. Fanta, on the other hand, leaves Dakar to follow he

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Tennessee Williams · 158 pages

Members of a neurotic Southern family gather to face the impending death of their patriarch, Big Daddy, and battle over the inheritance of his vast estate.

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Taste of Salt

Martha Southgate · 281 pages

"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Burden

Agatha Christie · 224 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Death of Ivan Ilych

Leo Tolstoy · 76 pages

Ivan Ilych, a peaceful public official in the Russian provinces, has his life permanently changed by a serious illness which no doctor can accurately diagnose.

Marriage in TroubleToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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.

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenEmotional AbuseLiterary Fiction
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East of Eden

John Steinbeck · 602 pages

Steinbeck considered East of Eden to be his masterpiece. In his journal, Journal of a Novel (often read as a companion to the novel) he notes that “this is the book I have always wanted and have worked and prayed to be able to write.” Set primarily in the Salinas Valley in the early twentieth century, the novel traces three generations of two families – the Trasks and the Hamiltons – as they grapp

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenMarriage in TroubleLiterary Fiction
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Cold Spring Harbor

Richard Yates · 192 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMarriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Bronte · 416 pages

**Librarian note: Alternate cover editions for this ISBN are: "Woman in white dress" (with the title on white and black background), "Woman at the easel" on a black and blue background, and "Furniture, easel and window".** ***Anne Brontë's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction.

Marriage in TroubleCharacter-DrivenEmotional AbuseLiterary Fiction

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