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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life
Jasmin Darznik · 330 pages
The author relates a wrenching hidden story of her family's true origins in Iran: her mother's troubled history of abuse and neglect, and a daughter, Sara, whom she was forced to abandon in order to escape that life.
She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me
Emma Brockes · 298 pages
When Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings.
Sarah's Key
Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages
Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot · 381 pages
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards · 408 pages
Kim Edwards's stunning family drama evokes the spirit of Sue Miller and Alice Sebold, articulating every mother's silent fear: what would happen if you lost your child and she grew up without you? In 1964, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins, he immediately recognizes that one of them has Down Syndrome and makes a split-second decision that will haunt all their lives fo
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel · 236 pages
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox
Maggie O'Farrell · 256 pages
In Edinburgh in the 1930s, the Lennox family is having trouble with its youngest daughter. Esme is outspoken, unconventional and repeatedly embarrasses them in polite society. Something will have to be done. Years later, a young woman named Iris Lockhart receives a letter informing her that she has a great-aunt in a psychiatric unit who is about to be released. Iris has never heard of Esme Lennox.
Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter
Kate Clifford Larson · 319 pages
The revelatory, poignant story of Rosemary Kennedy, the eldest and eventually secreted-away Kennedy daughter, and how her life transformed her family, its women especially, and an entire nation.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know
Heather Sellers · 356 pages
An unusual and uncommonly moving family memoir, with a twist that give new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness. The author is face blind--that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, a
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer · 207 pages
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, his decomposed body was found by a moose
What She Left Behind
Ellen Marie Wiseman · 368 pages
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee: A Mother, Her Son and a 50 Year Search
Martin Sixsmith · 442 pages
"When she became pregnant as a teenager in Ireland in 1952, Philomena Lee was sent to a convent to be looked after as a "fallen woman." Then the nuns took her baby from her and sold him, like thousands of others, to America for adoption. Fifty years later, Philomena decided to find him. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Philomena's son was trying to find her. Renamed Michael Hess, he h
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
Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
Laura M. Flynn
When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their moth
Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Debra Gwartney · 224 pages
"Live Through This"--as emotionally wrenching and ultimately redemptive as David Sheff 's "Beautiful Boy"--follows Gwartney's frantic effort to recover her beautiful, intelligent daughters from their lives on the street.
This Is Not a Love Story
Judy Brown · 347 pages
The third of six children in a family that harks back to a gloried Hassidic dynasty, Judy Brown grew up with the legacy of centuries of religious teaching, and the faith and lore that sustained her people for generations. But her carefully constructed world begins to crumble when her "crazy" brother Nachum returns home after a year in Israel living with relatives. Though supposedly "cured," he is
A Wolf at the Table
Augusten Burroughs · 242 pages
PREQUEL TO THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER RUNNING WITH SCISSORSFrom the author: 'My father doesn't feature much in Running with Scissors. And one of the reasons for this is because he didn't feature much in my life. But there's another reason, too: Our relationship was so complicated, so dark, so confusing and so big, that to tell the story would require a book. So finally, upon the death of my fath
Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Gabrielle Hamilton · 291 pages
What My Bones Know
Stephanie Foo · 352 pages
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life“Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to SomeoneONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The
Night Watch
Jayne Anne Phillips · 276 pages
Who Do You Think You Are?: A Memoir
Alyse Myers · 256 pages
This personal portrait of a mother and daughter explores the profound and poignant revelations that so often can come to light only after a parent has died.