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🧲 Books like this

The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Notebook

Agota Kristof · 160 pages

Loss of InnocenceChild NarratorWorld War IIBleak
❤️

Brother

Ania Ahlborn · 329 pages

"Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it's served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don't knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what's buried in the Morrows' backyard. But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn't like the rest of his family. He doesn't take pl

Loss of InnocenceBleakAnimal CrueltyTorture
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Night

Elie Wiesel · 126 pages

Loss of InnocenceTortureBleakWorld War II
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The Girl Next Door

Jack Ketchum · 370 pages

Loss of InnocenceChild AbuseBleakTorture
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The Book of Aron

Jim Shepard · 272 pages

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar young boy whose family is driven from the countryside into the Warsaw Ghetto. As his family is slowly stripped away from him, Aron and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives, smuggling and trading things through the "quarantine walls" to keep their people alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police (not t

Loss of InnocenceChild NarratorWorld War IIBleak
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TortureWorld War IIBleakSurvival Story
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Gerald's Game

Stephen King · 400 pages

An erotic game with handcuffs between husband and wife. One of them won't make it through the night. For the survivor, death would have been a blessing.

Child AbuseSurvival StoryTortureBleak
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Schindler's List

Thomas Keneally · 429 pages

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer

TortureWorld War IIBleakSurvival Story
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The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 416 pages

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a youn

TortureBleakSurvival StorySexual Assault Content
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Beasts of No Nation

Uzodinma Iweala · 180 pages

In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father's own death at the hands of militants, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander. While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the con

Child NarratorLoss of InnocenceChild AbuseSexual Assault Content
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The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison · 181 pages

Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her fath

Loss of InnocenceChild AbuseBleakSexual Assault Content
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Room

Emma Donoghue · 322 pages

To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world.... Told in the inventive, funny, and poignant voice of Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience—and a powerful story of a mother and son whose love lets them survive the impossible. To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At n

Child NarratorLoss of InnocenceChild AbuseSurvival Story
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Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum · 496 pages

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by

World War IISurvival StorySexual Assault ContentHolocaust
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The Summer I Died

Ryan C. Thomas · 216 pages

Animal CrueltyTortureBleakSurvival Story
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American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis · 399 pages

TortureAnimal CrueltySexual Assault ContentBleak
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

Child AbuseBleakSexual Assault ContentTorture
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The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings

Marquis de Sade · 799 pages

Child AbuseBleakTortureDark
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Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids

Kenzaburo Oe · 189 pages

Loss of InnocenceWorld War IIBleakSurvival Story
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Let's Go Play At The Adams'

Mendal W. Johnson · 282 pages

Child AbuseBleakTortureSexual Assault Content
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Blindness

Jose Saramago · 327 pages

A city is struck by an epidemic of "white blindness." The first man to succumb sits in his car, waiting for the light to change. He is taken to an eye doctor, who does not know what to make of the phenomenon - and soon goes blind himself. The blindness spreads, sparing no one. Authorities confine the blind to a vacant mental hospital secured by armed guards under instructions to shoot anyone tryi

BleakSurvival StorySexual Assault ContentDark
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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

Child AbuseBleakAnimal CrueltySexual Assault Content
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The Walking Dead, Compendium 1

Robert Kirkman · 1,088 pages

BleakSurvival StoryTortureSexual Assault Content
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Daddy Love

Joyce Carol Oates · 279 pages

Part-time preacher Chester Cash calls himself Daddy Love. He has abducted, tortured, and raped several young boys into being his lover and his 'son'. Kidnapping Robbie from his mother at a mall, he confines the child in a small box and gradually brainwashes him over subsequent years into believing that they are father and son. Dinah, the boy's mother, who was savagely injured during the abduction,

Child AbuseBleakSexual Assault ContentDark
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Wartime Lies

Louis Begley · 203 pages

World War IILoss of InnocenceSurvival StoryChild Narrator

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