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The Mother's Recompense

Edith Wharton · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Where We Belong

Emily Giffin · 384 pages

Her carefully constructed life thrown into turmoil by the appearance of an eighteen-year-old girl with ties to her past, New York television producer Marian Caldwell is swept up in a maelstrom of personal discovery that changes both of their perceptions about family.

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenBittersweet
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The Shell Seekers

Rosamunde Pilcher · 582 pages

The Shell Seekers is a novel of connection: of one family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The Shell Seekers is filled with real people--mothers and daughters, husband and lovers--inspired with real values. The Shell Seekers centers on Penelope Keeling--a woman you'll always remember in world you'll never forget. The Shell Seekers is a magical

Secret PastMother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Great Gatsby

F. Scott Fitzgerald · 182 pages

Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to

Secret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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Middlemarch

George Eliot · 795 pages

Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.

Secret PastLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenClassics
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Sons and Lovers

D.H. Lawrence · 447 pages

Sons and Lovers, a story of working-class England, is D. H. Lawrence’s third novel. It went through various drafts, and was titled “Paul Morel” until the final draft, before being published and met with an indifferent reaction from contemporary critics. Modern critics now consider it to be D. H. Lawrence’s masterpiece, with the Modern Library placing it ninth in its “100 Best English-Language Nove

Mother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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The Personal Librarian

Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray · 352 pages

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture in New York City society and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world, known for her impeccable taste and shrewd negotiating for critical works as she helps create a world-class collectio

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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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

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Missing Mom

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

"Nikki Eaton, single, thirty-one, sexually liberated, and economically self-supporting, has never particularly thought of herself as a daughter. Yet, following the unexpected loss of her mother, she undergoes a remarkable transformation during a tumultuous year that brings stunning horror, sorrow, illumination, wisdom, and even--from an unexpected source--a nurturing love." --Dust Cover.

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Night Watch

Jayne Anne Phillips · 276 pages

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Eugénie Grandet

Honore de Balzac · 236 pages

Published in 1833 Part of Balzac's "Comédie Humaine"

Mother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · 416 pages

After 103 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and with four million copies of The Kite Runner shipped, Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an

Mother and DaughterLiterary FictionCharacter-DrivenForbidden Love
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The Chaperone

Laura Moriarty · 419 pages

"A novel about the friendship between an adolescent, pre-movie-star Louise Brooks, and the 36-year-old woman who chaperones her to New York City for a summer, in 1922, and how it changes both their lives"--

Secret PastMother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Bee Sting

Paul Murray · 645 pages

Secret PastMother and DaughterCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Pilot's Wife

Anita Shreve · 304 pages

Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time. As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote · 160 pages

Published with three short stories this novella cemented Capote’s position at the forefront of American literature. It is the story of a friendship between New York neighbours, good time girl Holly Golightly and the unnamed male narrator.

Secret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

Mother and DaughterSecret PastLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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My Name Is Venus Black

Heather Lloyd · 368 pages

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Jane Eyre

Charlotte Bronte · 474 pages

The novel is set somewhere in the north of England. Jane's childhood at Gateshead Hall, where she is emotionally and physically abused by her aunt and cousins; her education at Lowood School, where she acquires friends and role models but also suffers privations and oppression; her time as the governess of Thornfield Hall, where she falls in love with her Byronic employer, Edward Rochester; her ti

Secret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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שריפות קטנות בכל מקום

Celeste Ng, Sami Duanias · 375 pages

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James · 592 pages

The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James’s “early” period, and among the finest novels of his entire career. When the eccentric Mrs. Touchett “takes up” her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristo

Literary FictionSecret PastCharacter-DrivenClassics
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Everyday Use

Alice Walker · 229 pages

Alice Walker's early story, "Everyday Use," has remained a cornerstone of her work. Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we define art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipate

Mother and DaughterLiterary FictionClassicsClassism
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Black and Blue

Anna Quindlen · 288 pages

Mother and DaughterSecret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Up at the Villa

W. Somerset Maugham · 140 pages

A novella, first published in 1941, about a young widow who becomes involved, against her better judgement, with three men. When one of the men kills himself at the villa in Florence where she is staying she decides to dispose of the body rather than call the police.

Secret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionClassics
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The Blind Assassin

Margaret Atwood · 638 pages

More than fifty years on, Iris Chase is remembering Laura's mysterious death. And so begins an extraordinary and compelling story of two sisters and their secrets. Set against a panoramic backdrop of twentieth-century history, The Blind Assassin is an epic tale of memory, intrigue and betrayal...

Secret PastCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionForbidden Love
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