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The Fifth Season

N.K. Jemisin · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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

Grief Over a ChildDeath of a ChildChild Death DepictedBleak
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The Sword of Kaigen

M.L. Wang · 651 pages

Grief Over a ChildDeath of a ChildChild Death DepictedMagic System
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Human Acts

Han Kang · 221 pages

In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed. The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho’s best friend who meets his own fateful end to an editor struggling against censorship; to a pri

Second Person NarrativeDeath of a ChildGrief Over a ChildNonlinear Narrative
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We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver · 424 pages

The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry. "Eva never really wanted to be a mother -- and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with mar

Death of a ChildGrief Over a ChildChild Death DepictedTwisty
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Parable of the Talents

Octavia E. Butler · 420 pages

Environmental devastation and economic chaos have turned America into a land of depravity. Taking advantage of the situation, a zealous bigot wins his way into the White House. Lauren Olamina leads a new faith group directly opposed to the new government. This is the story of the group's struggle to preserve its vision. As the government turns a blind eye to the violent bigots who consider a bl

Environmental CollapsePost-ApocalypticSlavery DepictedBleak
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How High We Go in the Dark

Sequoia Nagamatsu · 296 pages

Grief Over a ChildDeath of a ChildChild Death DepictedEnvironmental Collapse
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The Husband's Secret

Liane Moriarty · 432 pages

**At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read** **My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died...** Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as

Death of a ChildGrief Over a ChildChild Death DepictedNonlinear Narrative
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Hunger

Michael Grant

It's been three months since everyone under the age of fifteen became trapped in the bubble known as the FAYZ.Three months since all the adults disappeared.Gone. Food ran out weeks ago. Everyone is starving, but no one wants to figure out a solution. And each day, more and more kids are evolving, developing supernatural abilities that set them apart from the kids without powers.Tension rises and

Child Death DepictedEnvironmental CollapseFreedom vs ControlBleak
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The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson · 552 pages

For a thousand years ashes have fallen from the sky. For a thousand years nothing has flourished. For a thousand years the skaa have been enslaved and live in misery, mired in inevitable fear. For a thousand years the Lord Ruler has reigned with absolute power, ruling thanks to terror, his powers and his immortality, aided by "benders" and "inquisitors", along with the powerful magic of Alloman

Freedom vs ControlMagic SystemSlavery DepictedTwisty
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Saga, Vol. 1

Brian K. Vaughan · 160 pages

From New York Times bestselling writer BRIAN K.VAUGHAN (Y: THE LAST MAN, EX MACHINA) and critically acclaimed artist FIONA STAPLES (MYSTERY SOCIETY, NORTH 40), SAGA is the sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the worlds. When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous o

Child Death DepictedSlavery DepictedMagic SystemFreedom vs Control
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Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell · 536 pages

From David Mitchell, the Booker Prize nominee, award-winning writer and one of the featured authors in Granta’s “Best of Young British Novelists 2003” issue, comes his highly anticipated third novel, a work of mind-bending imagination and scope. A reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; an ambitious jo

Environmental CollapseFreedom vs ControlSlavery DepictedNonlinear Narrative
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Suffer the Children

Craig DiLouie · 352 pages

Suffer the Children presents a terrifying tale of apocalyptic fiction, as readers are introduced to Herod's Syndrome, a devastating illness that suddenly and swiftly kills all young children across the globe. Soon, they return from the grave…and ask for blood. And with blood, they stop being dead. They continue to remain the children they once were...but only for a short time, as they need more bl

Grief Over a ChildChild Death DepictedDeath of a ChildPost-Apocalyptic
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The Pearl

John Steinbeck · 118 pages

Based on a Mexican folktale, this is the story of a great pearl found by a poor fisherman, the sorrow it brought to his family, and how it was lost again.

Grief Over a ChildDeath of a ChildChild Death DepictedBleak
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The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · 352 pages

Environmental CollapseNonlinear NarrativeBleakSlavery Depicted
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House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

Death of a ChildRacismChild Death DepictedBleak
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The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 416 pages

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a youn

Freedom vs ControlBleakRacismSlavery Depicted
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Perdido Street Station

China Mieville · 710 pages

Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory

Magic SystemFreedom vs ControlBleakRacism
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Wool

Hugh Howey · 536 pages

They live beneath the earth in a prison of their own making. There is a view of the outside world, a spoiled and rotten world, their forefathers left behind. But this view fades over time, ruined by the toxic airs that kill any who brave them. So they leave it to the criminals, those who break the rules, and who are sent to cleaning. Why do they do it, these people condemned to death? Sheriff H

Environmental CollapseFreedom vs ControlTwistyPost-Apocalyptic
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Harrow the Ninth

Tamsyn Muir · 512 pages

Second Person NarrativeNonlinear NarrativeTwistyDark
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I Let You Go

Clare Mackintosh · 384 pages

Devastated by a hit-and-run accident that has ended the life of her young son, Jenna moves to the remote Welsh coast to search for healing while two dedicated policemen try to get to the bottom of the case.

Grief Over a ChildChild Death DepictedDeath of a ChildTwisty
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

Grief Over a ChildDeath of a ChildRacismMultiple POV
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Sarah's Key

Tatiana de Rosnay · 342 pages

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode. Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking th

Child Death DepictedDeath of a ChildNonlinear NarrativeRacism
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A Map of the World

Jane Hamilton · 402 pages

In the tradition of The Good Mother by Sue Miller and Before and After by Rosellen Brown, A Map of the World is the riveting story of how a single mistake can forever change the lives of everyone involved - in ways that are beyond imagination. One unremarkable June morning, Alice Goodwin is, as usual, trying to keep in check both her temper and her tendency to blame herself for her family's sho

Child Death DepictedDeath of a ChildGrief Over a ChildEmotional
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The Invention of Sound

Chuck Palahniuk · 240 pages

Grief Over a ChildBleakTwistyNonlinear Narrative

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