AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Paula Spencer

Roddy Doyle · 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
❤️

Anybody Out There?

Marian Keyes · 592 pages

Life is perfect for Anna Walsh. She has the "Best Job in the World" as a PR exec for a top-selling urban beauty brand, a lovely apartment in New York, and a perfect husband - the love of her life, Aidan Maddox. Until the morning she wakes up in her mammy's living room in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, and completely smashed-up hands - and no memory of how she got there. While

IrelandRecovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-Driven
❤️

Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

Recovery JourneyWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseCharacter-Driven
❤️

Brooklyn

Colm Toibin · 262 pages

In Ireland in the early 1950s, Eilis Lacey is one of many who cannot find work at home. Thus when a job is offered in America, it is clear to everyone that she must go. Leaving behind her family and country, Eilis heads for unfamiliar Brooklyn, and to a crowded boarding house where the landlady's intense scrutiny and the small jealousies of her fellow residents only deepen her isolation. Slowly, t

IrelandWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
❤️

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenDomestic Abuse
❤️

Blame

Michelle Huneven · 291 pages

Patsy MacLemoore, a history professor in her late twenties with a brand-new Ph.D. from Berkeley and a wild streak, wakes up in jail--yet again--after another epic alcoholic blackout. However, this time two people are dead, and Patsy had been driving with a revoked license. She will spend the rest of her life in prison, getting sober, finding a new community and husband, and trying to atone for thi

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenDomestic Abuse
🙂

All Fall Down

Jennifer Weiner · 441 pages

"Allison Weiss has a great job ... a handsome husband ... an adorable daughter ... and a secret. Allison Weiss is a typical working mother, trying to balance a business, aging parents, a demanding daughter, and a marriage. But when the website she develops takes off, she finds herself challenged to the point of being completely overwhelmed. Her husband's becoming distant, her daughter's acting spo

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenHopeful
🙂

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

IrelandWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSubstance Abuse
🙂

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith · 443 pages

The beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchant

Working-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Lit

Mary Karr

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenHopeful
🙂

Faithful Place

Tana French · 448 pages

Back in 1985, Frank Mackey was a nineteen-year-old kid with a dream of escaping hisi family’s cramped flat on Faithful Place and running away to London with his girl, Rosie Daly. But on the night they were supposed to leave, Rosie didn’t show. Frank took it for granted that she’d dumped him-probably because of his alcoholic father, nutcase mother, and generally dysfunctional family. He never went

IrelandWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSubstance Abuse
🙂

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.

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenSubstance AbuseDomestic Abuse
🙂

The Glorious Heresies

Lisa McInerney · 378 pages

One messy murder affects the lives of five misfits who exist on the fringes of Ireland's post-crash society. Ryan is a fifteen-year-old drug dealer desperate not to turn out like his alcoholic father Tony, whose obsession with his unhinged next-door neighbour threatens to ruin him and his family. Georgie is a prostitute whose willingness to feign a religious conversion has dangerous repercussions,

IrelandWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
🙂

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

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Delicious Foods

James Hannaham · 371 pages

"Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promi

Substance AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Brian Moore · 230 pages

IrelandSubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Long Bright River

Liz Moore · 473 pages

A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?

Working-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

IrelandWorking-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseLiterary Fiction
🙂

Some Hope

Edward St. Aubyn · 167 pages

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

Sabrina & Corina

Kali Fajardo-Anstine · 212 pages

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionSubstance Abuse
🙂

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Working-Class ProtagonistCharacter-DrivenLiterary FictionDomestic Abuse
🙂

Drinking

Caroline Knapp · 286 pages

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenFemale Lead
🙂

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

Working-Class ProtagonistSubstance AbuseCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
🙂

This Is Me: A Reckoning

Hayden Panettiere · 320 pages

Hayden Panettiere’s career in entertainment began before she was old enough to walk. From early commercials to film and television roles in hits like *Remember the Titans*, her career unfolded in the public eye, resulting in tremendous success by her early teens. She had become a fixture of early-2000s pop culture, earning acclaim for performances in *Heroes, Nashville* (which earned her two Golde

Recovery JourneySubstance AbuseDomestic AbuseFemale Lead

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.