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New Mercies

Sandra Dallas · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Iron Lace

Emilie Richards · 466 pages

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Southern Ruby

Belinda Alexandra · 521 pages

Forbidden love. Family secrets. A twist of fate. The stunning new generational saga from Belinda Alexandra, bestselling author of Tuscan Rose and White Gardenia. In New Orleans - the city of genteel old houses and ancient oak trees covered in Spanish moss, of seductive night life, of Creole culture, voodoo and jazz - two women separated by time and tragedy will find each other at last. Amanda, orp

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Penumbra

Carolyn Haines · 280 pages

The daughter of a white mother and black father, beautician and undertaker's assistant Jade Dupree comes to the aid of her white half-sister, Marlena, when the woman is found badly beaten and her young daughter kidnapped.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Dollbaby

Laura Lane McNeal · 336 pages

"When Ibby Bell's father dies in a tragic accident in the summer of 1964, her mother unceremoniously deposits Ibby with her eccentric grandmother, Fannie, and throws in her father's urn for good measure. Fannie's Victorian house is like no place Ibby has ever been--and Fannie, who has a tendency to end up in the local asylum every once in a while--is like no one she has ever met. Fortunately, her

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Stolen Marriage

Diane Chamberlain · 416 pages

"In 1944, twenty-three-year-old Tess DeMello abruptly ends her engagement to the love of her life when she marries a mysterious stranger and moves to Hickory, North Carolina, a small town struggling with racial tension and the hardships imposed by World War II. Tess's new husband, Henry Kraft, is a secretive man who often stays out all night, hides money from his new wife, and shows no interest in

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Secret Life of Bees

Sue Monk Kidd · 311 pages

Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racis

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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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.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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Wolf by the Ears

Ann Rinaldi · 252 pages

Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing her--to escape from the velvet cage that is Monticello, or to stay, and thus remain a slave.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Kitchen House

Kathleen Grissom · 368 pages

"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Wedding Gift

Marlen Suyapa Bodden · 336 pages

When wealthy plantation owner Cornelius Allen marries off his daughter Clarissa, he presents her with a wedding gift: a young slave woman called Sarah. It just so happens that Sarah is Allen's daughter as well, the product of a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband rejects her newborn son as illegitimate and sends Clarissa and Sarah back to the Allens, thei

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Seven Daughters of Dupree

Nikesha Elise Williams · 336 pages

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionRacism
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Let Me Die in His Footsteps

Lori Roy · 352 pages

On a dark Kentucky night in 1952 halfway between her fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays, Annie Holleran runs through the lavender fields to the well on the Baines' place. Hollerans don't go near Baines since Joseph Carl was buried two decades ago. At the stroke of midnight, she gazes into the water in search of her future. When the body she sees there in the moonlight is discovered come morning, An

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee · 288 pages

Maycomb, Alabama. Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch -- "Scout" -- returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming turns bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her. Memori

Family SecretsAmerican SouthHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Calling Me Home

Julie Kibler · 336 pages

A debut novel interweaving the story of a heartbreaking, forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship. Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis: drop everything and drive from Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. Tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own, agrees. It's a journey that changes both their lives,

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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Scarlett

Alexandra Ripley · 832 pages

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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One More River

Mary Glickman · 258 pages

Bernard Levy, always a mystery to his community of Guilford, Mississippi, was even more of a mystery to his son Mickey Moe, who was just four years old when his father died in World War II. Now in 1962, Mickey Moe sets out into backwoods Mississippi and Tennessee to uncover his father's murky past during the Great Flood of 1927.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Maid's Version

Daniel Woodrell · 176 pages

"Alma DeGeer Dunahew, the mother of three young boys, works as the maid for a prominent citizen and his family in West Table, Missouri. Her husband is mostly absent, and, in 1929, her scandalous, beloved younger sister is one of the 42 killed in an explosion at the local dance hall. Who is to blame? Mobsters from St. Louis? The embittered local gypsies? The preacher who railed against the loose mo

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Storycatcher

Ann Hite · 348 pages

After Faith, a pastor's daughter, is haunted by a ghost who threatens to reveal her father's sins, she turn to Shelley, a young servant who sees the dead, and they journey through the South together looking for answers.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Beach Trees

Karen White · 403 pages

From the time she was twelve, Julie Holt knew what a random tragedy can do to a family. At that tender age, her little sister disappeared-never to be found. It was a loss that slowly eroded the family bonds she once relied on. As an adult with a prestigious job in the arts, Julie meets a struggling artist who reminds her so much of her sister, she can't help feeling protective. It is a friendship

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The German Wife

Kelly Rimmer · 464 pages

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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The Bourbon Thief

Tiffany Reisz · 379 pages

Betrayal, revenge and a family scandal that bore a 150-year-old mystery. When Cooper McQueen wakes up from a night with a beautiful stranger, it's to discover he's been robbed. The only item stolen--a million-dollar bottle of bourbon. The thief, a mysterious woman named Paris, claims the bottle is rightfully hers. After all, the label itself says it's property of the Maddox family who owned and op

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionRacism
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Cane River

Lalita Tademy · 418 pages

The "New York Times" bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick--the unique and deeply moving epic of four generations of African-American women based on one family's ancestral past.

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead
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The Second Mrs. Hockaday

Susan Rivers · 264 pages

"The Civil War South comes to vivid life in this electrifying story of a woman's plight and a legacy of deceit that echoes for generations. When Major Gryffth Hockaday is called to the front lines of the Civil War, his new bride is left to care for her husband's three-hundred-acre farm and infant son. Placidia, a mere teenager herself living far from her family and completely unprepared to run a f

American SouthFamily SecretsHistorical FictionFemale Lead

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