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Desperation Road

Michael Farris Smith · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Turnaround

George P. Pelecanos · 294 pages

This novel takes us on a journey from the rock-and-soul streets of the 1970s to the changing neighbourhoods of Washington DC today. It is a story about fathers and sons, wives and husbands, loss, victory and ultimately violent redemption.

Second ChancesRedemption ArcCrimeLiterary Fiction
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We Begin at the End

Chris Whitaker · 400 pages

There are two kinds of families: the ones we are born into and the ones we create. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. Now, thirty years later, Vincent is being released. Duchess is a

Second ChancesSingle MotherCrimeAtmospheric
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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"--

American SouthBleakCrimeAtmospheric
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Reminders of Him

Colleen Hoover · 417 pages

After serving five years in prison for a tragic mistake, Kenna Rowan returns to the town where it all went wrong, hoping to reunite with her four-year-old daughter. But the bridges Kenna burned are proving impossible to rebuild. Everyone in her daughter’s life is determined to shut Kenna out, no matter how hard she works to prove herself. The only person who hasn’t closed the door on her comple

Second ChancesRedemption ArcSingle MotherSurvivor's Guilt
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One Summer in Savannah

Terah Shelton Harris · 464 pages

Second ChancesAmerican SouthSingle MotherRedemption Arc
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The Scarlet Letter

Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages

Redemption ArcBleakSingle MotherAtmospheric
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Les Misérables

Victor Hugo · 747 pages

In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Second ChancesRedemption ArcSingle MotherLiterary Fiction
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The River Is Waiting

Wally Lamb · 451 pages

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that's before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness

Second ChancesRedemption ArcLiterary FictionSurvivor's Guilt
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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

BleakAmerican SouthAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
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Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned

Walter Mosley · 208 pages

Socrates Fortlow is Walter Mosley's most compelling character since Easy Rawlins, a tough, brooding ex-convict and is set to be a bold and original new hero.

Second ChancesRedemption ArcCrimeLiterary Fiction
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Third Life Of Grange Copeland

Alice Walker · 302 pages

"Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third and final cha

Redemption ArcAmerican SouthBleakLiterary Fiction
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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

Mitch Albom · 196 pages

The Five People You Meet In Heaven is a 2003 novel by Mitch Albom. It follows the life and death of a ride mechanic named Eddie who is killed in an amusement park accident and sent to heaven, where he encounters five people who had a significant impact on him while he was alive. It was published by Hyperion and remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 95 weeks.

Redemption ArcSecond ChancesSurvivor's GuiltLiterary Fiction
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Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

BleakSingle MotherAmerican SouthSurvivor's Guilt
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The Christmas Sweater

Glenn Beck · 284 pages

From the back cover of the hardcover edition... **If You Could Change Your Life by Reversing Your Biggest Regrets, Sorrows and Mistakes...Would You?** *We weren't wealthy, we weren't poor -- we just were. We never wanted for anything, except maybe more time together....* When Eddie was twelve years old, all he wanted for Christmas was a bike. Although his life had gotten harder -- and mon

Second ChancesRedemption ArcSingle MotherMale Lead
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Nights in Rodanthe

Nicholas Sparks · 217 pages

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Nicholas Sparks comes a tender story of hope and joy; of sacrifice and forgiveness -- a moving reminder that love is possible at any age, at any time, and often comes when we least expect it. At forty-five, Adrienne Willis must rethink her entire life when her husband abandons her for a younger woman. Reeling with heartache and in search of a respite,

Second ChancesAmerican SouthSingle MotherAtmospheric
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March

Geraldine Brooks · 304 pages

American SouthRedemption ArcSurvivor's GuiltLiterary Fiction
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How to Read a Book

Monica Wood · 280 pages

Redemption ArcSecond ChancesSurvivor's GuiltLiterary Fiction
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The Lost Get-Back Boogie

James Lee Burke · 256 pages

Iry Paret's done his time -- two years for manslaughter in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary. Now the war vet and blues singer is headed to Montana, where he hopes to live clean working on a ranch owned by the father of his prison pal, Buddy Riordan. In prison, Iry tinkered with a song -- "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" -- that never came out quite right. Now, the Riordan family's problems hand him

Redemption ArcAmerican SouthCrimeLiterary Fiction
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The Chamber

John Grisham · 644 pages

John Grisham's bestselling backlist newly repackaged with fantastic new coversAdam Hill is 26 years old and in his first year at a top Chicago law firm. He voluntees for the toughest assignment any lawyer could ask for. His prospective client does'nt want Adam or his law firm. He is an unrepentent and outspoken racist with a violent past. He is on Death Row for the murder of two Jewish children in

Redemption ArcAmerican SouthCrimeMale Lead
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The Darkest Child

Delores Phillips · 392 pages

Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve an

American SouthSingle MotherBleakLiterary Fiction
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A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess · 188 pages

A Clockwork Orange is a dystopian satirical black comedy novel by English writer Anthony Burgess, published in 1962. It is set in a near-future society that has a youth subculture of extreme violence. The teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him. The book is partially written in a Russian-influenced argot called "Na

Redemption ArcBleakCrimeLiterary Fiction
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Mystic River

Dennis Lehane · 487 pages

When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to

BleakCrimeAtmosphericLiterary 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.

American SouthSingle MotherBleakLiterary Fiction
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Waking Up in Dixie

Haywood Smith · 372 pages

Cruel, small-town banker Howell Whittington has a stroke sitting up in church, and when he wakes up, he's transformed and wants nothing more than to be a real husband, which scares his proper, repressed wife Elizabeth to death. Setting out to right past wrongs, he blackmails the town's baddies into doing the right thing by threatening to foreclose on their mortgages. A hilarious story of marriage

Second ChancesRedemption ArcAmerican South

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