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All Us Saints

Katherine Packert Burke · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

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.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionTrauma Recovery
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family
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Dear Life: Stories

Alice Munro · 336 pages

In story after story in this brilliant collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ri

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionBittersweet
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Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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Kitchens of the Great Midwest

J. Ryan Stradal · 312 pages

When Lars Thorvald's wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine -- and a dashing sommelier -- he's left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He's determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter -- starting with puréed pork shoulder. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. From Scandinavian lutefisk to hydroponic chocolate habaneros, each ingredi

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family
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A Different Blue

Amy Harmon · 320 pages

Character-DrivenContemporary FictionEstranged FamilyLiterary Fiction
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The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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The Hotel New Hampshire

John Irving · 432 pages

The Hotel New Hampshire follows the Berry family across two continents and through three hotels. Family members attract friends who substitute lust, violence, laughter and tears for the standard bourgeois components.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionBittersweet
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We Are Water

Wally Lamb · 564 pages

Anna Oh, a middle-age wife, mother and artist, divorces her husband after 27 years of marriage to marry Vivica, the Manhattan art dealer who orchestrated her professional success.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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State of Wonder

Ann Patchett · 353 pages

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she jour

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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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

Character-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary FictionSelf-Discovery
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The One & Only

Emily Giffin · 582 pages

Centering her life on the successful Walker family, into which she plans to marry, Shea struggles to end her affair with a less-than-stellar boyfriend only to have her entire existence placed in question by the death of the family's mother.

Character-DrivenContemporary FictionSelf-DiscoveryEstranged Family
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Aftertaste

Daria Lavelle · 400 pages

Character-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary FictionSelf-Discovery
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White Oleander

Janet Fitch · 390 pages

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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Black Swan Green

David Mitchell · 344 pages

A novel. From hardcover: "Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen l

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
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The Silver Star

Jeannette Walls · 304 pages

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

Character-DrivenContemporary FictionLiterary FictionSelf-Discovery
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The Lightkeeper's Wife

Karen Viggers · 393 pages

A woman at the end of her life. A man unable to restart his. A history of guilty secrets and things left unsaid. A powerful, moving novel that will steal your heart.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionBittersweet
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Bee Season

Myla Goldberg · 288 pages

"Eliza Naumann, a seemingly unremarkable nine-year-old, expects never to fit into her gifted family: her autodidact father, Saul, absorbed in his study of Jewish mysticism; her brother, Aaron, the vessel of his father's spiritual ambitions; and her brilliant but distant lawyer-mom, Miriam. But when Eliza sweeps her school and district spelling bees in quick succession, Saul takes it as a sign that

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family
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Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family
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Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel · 352 pages

One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of "King Lear." Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur's chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a te

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionBittersweet
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Plainsong

Kent Haruf · 301 pages

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionEstranged Family

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